tances to adopt a Russian policy. The
government of the Czar had been overthrown by a liberal revolution,
which in turn had been succeeded by an extreme, communist
"dictatorship." The Bolsheviki, or majority faction of the socialists,
had obtained control of the national council of peasants, workingmen,
and soldiers, called the soviet, and inaugurated a radical regime. They
had made peace with Germany in March, 1918. Thereupon the United States
joined England, France, and Japan in an unofficial war upon them. After
the general settlement at Paris in 1919, our government, while
withdrawing troops from Siberia and Archangel, continued in its refusal
to recognize the Bolshevists or to permit unhampered trade with them.
President Wilson repeatedly denounced them as the enemies of
civilization and undertook to lay down for all countries the principles
which should govern intercourse with Russia.

Further international complications were created in connection with the
World War, wholly apart from the terms of peace or the League of
Nations. The United States had participated in a general European
conflict which changed the boundaries of countries, called into being
new nations, and reduced the power and territories of the vanquished.
Accordingly, it was bound to face the problem of how far it was prepared
to cooeperate with the victors in any settlement of Europe's
difficulties. By no conceivable process, therefore, could America be
disentangled from the web of world affairs. Isolation, if desirable, had
become impossible. Within three hundred years from the founding of the
tiny settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth, America, by virtue of its
institutions, its population, its wealth, and its commerce, had become
first among the nations of the earth. By moral obligations and by
practical interests its fate was thus linked with the destiny of all
mankind.

SUMMARY OF DEMOCRACY AND THE WORLD WAR

The astounding industrial progress that characterized the period
following the Civil War bequeathed to the new generation many perplexing
problems connected with the growth of trusts and railways, the
accumulation of great fortunes, the increase of poverty in the
industrial cities, the exhaustion of the free land, and the acquisition
of dominions in distant seas. As long as there was an abundance of land
in the West any able-bodied man with initiative and industry could
become an independent farmer. People from the cities and immig