ion of
any one of its members that is the victim of aggression. The
aid to be given for such an object should not be, in the case
of the United States, military but economic, by means of the
definite organization of non-intercourse against the
recalcitrant power. America's position of geographical and
historical remoteness from European quarrels places her in a
particularly favorable position to direct this world
organization, and the fact of undertaking it would give her in
some sense the moral leadership of the western world, and make
her the centre of the World State of the future.

(COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY.)

I.

In the discussion of America's relation to the rest of the world we
have always assumed almost as an axiom that America has nothing to do
with Europe, is only in the faintest degree concerned with its politics
and developments, that by happy circumstance of geography and history we
are isolated and self-sufficing, able to look with calm detachment upon
the antics of the distant Europeans. When a European landed on these
shores we were pretty certain that he left Europe behind him; only quite
recently, indeed, have we realized that we were affected by what he
brought with him in the way of morals and traditions, and only now are
we beginning dimly to realize that what goes on on the other side of the
world can be any affair of ours. The famous query of a certain American
statesmen, "What has America to do with abroad?" probably represented at
bottom the feelings of most of us.

In so far as we established commercial relations with Europe at all, we
felt and still feel probably that they were relations of hostility, that
we were one commercial unit, Europe another, and that the two were in
competition. In thinking thus, of course, we merely accepted the view of
international politics common in Europe itself, the view, namely, that
nations are necessarily trade rivals--the commercial rivalry of Britain
and Germany is presumed to be one of the factors explaining the outbreak
of the present war. The idea that nations do thus compete together for
the world's trade is one of the axioms of all discussion in the field of
international politics.

Well, both these assumptions in the form in which we make them involve
very grave fallacies, the realization of which will shortly become
essential to the wise direction of this country's policy.