As Professor Sumner, my former master in Political Economy, used to say, this world is ruled by "mores" or customs of society. Now these customs of society are going to suffer a great change after the war. The whole future of society will tremble in the balance. If the war does not lead to better ideals of marriage it will probably lead to worse ideals. If it should, the future is dark indeed. For war itself is a cause of degeneracy. It is slaughtering the best men. Very few people realize that the greatest cost of the war is not in ammunition, not in money, nor even in numbers of men. It is in their manhood-in men reckoned in quality, not quantity. The world is losing now the men who should be the fathers of future generations. The Napoleonic wars are believed to have shortened the stature of Frenchmen and reduced the strength of that strong race in other ways. The tall and virile were cut down and left few of their blood to continue their kind. The war may damage the race irreparably unless we react against the peril. Is marriage going to degenerate after this war? Is this world going to be a world of syphilitics? Are we going to lose what health ideals we have? Are we going to be alcoholized and demoralized generally? That is one horn of the dilemma. Or are we going to lift humanity out of the mire, to practise hygiene in general and race hygiene in particular? It will be for all educated young men and women who are now graduating from this and other institutions to decide which horn of the dilemma we shall choose. These are some of the great questions ahead of us. The world is influenced by two great forces, tradition and reason. The work before us is to make reason rule and thru it to reconstruct tradition. Why has Japan's progress in civilization in recent years been more rapid than that of any other nation?-because the late Mikado resolved and publicly stated that the institutions of Japan must not remain tied to old traditions, but must be based on reason. In the general uprooting now taking place as a result of the great war lies the world's opportunity to reorganize its customs and place them on a thoroly scientific footing. Everything from henceforth will be changed whether we wish it so or not, and it behooves those of us who are awake to the possibilities, to see that the new usages of society are scientifically tested, are based on the very best knowledge available. When we have so placed reason above tradition, we may expect the world to leap forward in a manner and with a rapidity heretofore unknown. The Background of the Great War ORIN GRANT LIBBY, Professor of History, University of North Dakota At the opening of the present conflict there were few who would have agreed with General Kitchener that the world was facing a three years' war. Economists, statisticians, and financiers conclusively proved to their own satisfaction from their tables of production and distribution and their computations as to the available wealth of the world that six months was the extreme limit of the war. Beyond that time they held that it was absolutely impossible for the war to be waged. Reason. self interest, financial prudence, and all the deductions from statistics clearly forbade a longer war. This attitude of European thinkers reminds one of a parallel case in the struggles flowing from the French Revolution. The statesmen and diplomats of Europe were completely at fault in their view of the probable outcome. When France declared war upon Austria and precipitated that long European conflict of one hundred years ago, the premises and conclusions of these leaders were quite as convincing as those we listened to a short time since. Unfortunately for these facile prophecies regarding this earlier war, two prime factors entered into the problem that in conjunction tended irresistibly to lengthen the struggle and to make it the most costly war that had so far been waged in modern times. These two factors were the political revolution in France, along with its accompaniments of economic and social upheaval, and the appearance of Napoleon with his genius for organization and his medieval conception of the place of a ruler in the life of a national state. In this greatest of the world's modern wars the analysis of the political and social background will reveal, in quite a similar fashion, the presence of powerful and far-reaching forces that from the beginning have been steadily at work extending the area of the war and multiplying and intensifying its destructive effects. The complete discussion of these underlying causes of the prolongation of the war must necessarily be postponed until after the evidence is all assembled and the details of the struggle have retired somewhat from the foreground. It is possible, however, to present some of the more obvious phases of the question and to indicate as far as possible why the course of the conflict has so far outrun the forecast of everyday prudence and has apparently gone counter to all the ordinary conventions of diplomacy and the counsels of statesmanship. It is no longer necessary to enter into a formal argument to show that Germany was the aggressor in the present war and that for a long time she had been fully prepared and awaited only a favorable moment to strike. From the evidence now at hand we can be certain that the campaign of frightfulness in Belgium, France, and Poland, the unspeakable Turkish atrocities in Armenia, the bombing of unprotected towns and hospitals, the dropping of poisoned candy from aeroplanes, to say nothing of the ghastly features of under-sea warfare, that all these methods of winning the war were worked out in advance by her military and naval experts as carefully and coolly as a laboratory expert prepares his material for a series of experiments. Recent revelations have shown, also, how her diplomats, cooperating with the chancellor, spread a net of spies over every land, and, using the governmental curtesies accorded to their representatives, plotted against the very governments to which they were accredited. Pledges, treaties, and agreements became waste paper in the hands of the Kaiser and his satellites. And when this universal campaign of treachery just fell short of that success which was to be its ultimate justification, the world stood aghast at the revelation of what had been meant by these magic words, Kultur, Der Tag, and Deutschland uber Alles. For those who had known only the university life of Germany and had spent years in the scholarly atmosphere of Berlin, Leipsic, or Göttingen, this display of calculated savagery on such a scale seemed unthinkable. To those who had visited the charming old castles on the Rhine and had admired and loved the classic Germany of music and drama, the ruthless Germany that had burned Louvain and ravaged the countryside of peaceful Belgium was a veritable nightmare. In considering the background for so remarkable a phenomenon as the present war it is necessary to bear in mind that outside of a small clique in Germany no one anywhere in the world wanted or anticipated such a war as we are at present fighting. Moreover, the most singular feature of the whole affair is that the ruling class in Germany has seemed to be willing to risk inevitable extinction in case of failure. From this angle the whole conflict has the appearance of being the last throw of a desperate gambler. Yet no one has appeared to be aware of any political or diplomatic crisis in the Kaiser's domain that would justify his consent to a plan, which has brought upon his people the greatest of calamities, and has made. German kultur a term of almost universal scorn and detestation thruout the civilized world. The first difficulty to be encountered, therefore, in ascertaining the historical causes for the course pursued by the German government is the apparent lack of adequate reason for a declaration of war. Since the establishment of the German state in 1871, one looks in vain for that well-ordered line of policy that should enable the German people to take their part in the European world with the least amount of friction and offer the fullest opportunity for national evolution along normal lines. The growth of Germany, on the contrary, has been artificial, unbalanced, and materialistic, and has displayed an astonishing lack of originality, especially in the field of politics. In every form of activity German development shows only too plainly the Hohenzollern forcing process that has been applied, now here and now there, always with success and never failing to produce the same stereotyped result. A brief survey of Germany's historic past will serve to show a few of the salient features of her actual development. The German people emerged from the Middle Ages without having achieved that political unity under a single ruler which was to give France, England, and Spain the advantage over the loosely confederated states of the Holy Roman Empire. The growth of Austria and the extension of her authority did not cure these divisions. Austria's development during the entire period from the Renascence to the present day has been imperial rather than national, and whatever power she has held has been at the expense of some people whose national life she has hindered or destroyed. In the Austrian empire are included parts of the perished state of Poland, subjected Bohemia, and fragments of Roumania, as well as of several Czech states. Modern history has been the story of the rise of national states to power, a political evolution greatly accelerated by the results of the French Revolution. In the midst of this birth and growth of national states, Austria has remained a political anachronism, unable to take part in the course of events and becoming more and more opposed to the trend of those dynamic forces that were transforming European political life. After the revolution of 1848 Austria lost her leadership and by her crooked diplomacy during the course of the Crimean war she forfeited the friendship of Russia, whose ally she had been since the days of Frederick the Great. The subsequent rise of Italy to unity and independence under Cavour and Austria's defeat at the hands of the new Prussian state drove Austria more and more to expand down the Danube Valley toward Turkey. This inevitable territorial expansion of Austria brought her into speedy clash with Russia whose ambition for an open port made Constantinople the national goal. The subsequent rise of the small Balkan states to The Background of the Great War 27 virtual independence and Russia's championship of their rights against the threats of Austria and Turkey sufficiently explains this last phase of the Balkan situation up to the recent entrance of Germany into the affairs of the near East. The progress of the German people to political self consciousness has never been aided in the slightest degree by Austria's dominant position previous to 1848. It lay, rather, in the leadership which Prussia was able to attain after Austria's blunders during the Crimean war. Up to the adjournment of the National Assembly of 1850 the Germans outside of Austria had been moving steadily toward unity and self government. In this evolution they were following in the wake of the other European states that had already achieved nationality. England, Holland, Spain, Portugal, the Scandinavian States, France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, had all succeeded in bringing their own people together and in freeing them from imperial or non-national control. This nationalizing movement among the people of Europe had been opposed at various times by the imperial ambitions of certain Spanish and French rulers such as Charles V., Louis XIV., and Napoleon. The irresistible tendency toward nation. forming was not to be checked by any counter influence however well led. It was the force of national aspiration that broke down even Napoleon's empire and freed Europe from the curse of his irresponsible tyranny. The rise of Prussia is in full harmony with the modern tendencies in the direction of national unity. The work of the greatest of her kings, Frederick II., is a fair type of the nationalizing process going on among the Germans. This ruler was more successful than his predecessors but he was at all times thoroly national and anti-imperial. The long contest with Austria culminating in the Seven Years' War was of his own choosing. He first seized Silesia in order to get strength to oppose Austria, his imperial opponent. He next broke with France and allied with England in order to escape the inevitable transfer of German land to satisfy the French desire for Rhine territory. In the partition of Poland he allowed the bulk of the territory to go to Russia and Austria in order to avoid further addition of non-national people to his Germanic state. The initial impulse he gave to German unity and patriotism was not wholly lost even in the days of Napoleon's greatest triumph. The rise of Prussia to a high place in Germany was the result of the revival of the national ideals that had been the strength of their people during the dark days of the Seven Years War. The German people lost their greatest opportunity in history when their National Assembly of 1850 was dissolved without bring |