America,
during those early months of the war, preached to unheeding Europe.
Throughout runs a note of subdued self-exaltation. We, the Americans,
so ran the boast, are not ruled by Kaiser or Czar, and cannot be
stampeded into war against our will. We do not extend our national
territory by force. Of all nations we are the one that has best
compounded economic differences and best dissolved racial hatreds. We
live in amity with all the world, and with piety preach our lessons to
the war-mad races. How fundamentally insolent, though
well-intentioned, was this message of one of our leading citizens to
Germany. "The American people cry with one voice to the German people,
like Ezekiel to the house of Israel: 'Turn ye, turn ye, from your evil
ways; for why will ye die?'"

Even in our churches we made the same unconscious boast. On Sunday,
October 4, 1914, at the request of the President of the United States,
millions of Americans went down on their knees, and prayed God no
longer to scourge the peoples of Europe. It was a sincere prayer,
evoked by real compassion. Yet nothing could more clearly have
revealed our moral detachment, our obliviousness to the fact that the
passions which brought forth this war were human, not European
passions. We, the virtuous, interceded for the vicious; our prayer was
"deliver them from evil." With malice toward none, with charity
towards all, envying no nation its treasures, content to enjoy in peace
what God had given us, America folded its hands in prayer.

To a sceptical European, accustomed to the cant of international
protestations, this boasted peacefulness of ours seems suspicious.
"Have you," he might ask, "always been peaceful? Did you not fight
England, Mexico and Spain? Have you not taken advantage of your
neighbours' necessities?" Such a European might not regard {34}
Americans as a nation, divinely appointed to bring peace to a world
rent by war. He might not acknowledge that we are more law-abiding
than other peoples, freer from race hatreds, gentler towards the
unfortunates of our own race. He might point to our lynchings and
riots; to our unpunished murders of Chinese, Italians and Mexicans; to
the system of repression, by which the Southern whites terrorized the
freedmen after the Civil War. If Europe did not solve the Balkan
problem in peace, did Americans end slavery without resort to arms?

We may not like these imputations, but it would be hard to den