no one had suspected. The embassy had filled the country with German
poison gas, and backed the German campaign of wholesale arson. Germans
living here, many of them American born, were busily counteracting
public opinion as the evidences accumulated.

Democracies are always at a disadvantage in dealing with monarchies; in
the initial stages of war at least. We have seen it demonstrated that
a democracy must become autocratic if it is to carry on a war
successfully. But an American autocracy takes the shape of a temporary
delegation of unusual power in conditions that cannot wait for the slow
action of ordinary times; and those who exercise it are put in power
by the people themselves, to do the people's will. It was necessary to
consolidate not only the direction of the nation itself, but of our
military affairs abroad. We soon got the home situation in hand, and
then the President of the United States threw his influence, backed by
all the American people, toward bringing the allied armies and those of
the United States under one head in the person of General Foch as
Field Marshal. This was not accomplished until after the great Italian
disaster, when it looked as though the Austro-Hungarian armies would
crush Italy. The same may be said of the threatened disaster to the
British army early in 1918, when von Hindenburg began his great drive
toward Calais and Paris. Here were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and
Bulgaria, four monarchies dominated by the German government, fighting
nearly all the democracies of the world, not considering Russia, which
dropped out shortly before the United States effectively entered the
war.

We will not consider Japan's position as a nominal member of the
entente, except for her action at the beginning of the war in capturing
Kiauchau, China, the German fortified port and naval base in the Orient,
and sweeping Germany out of the Pacific by taking the Marshall islands.
Beyond this, Japan sent soldiers to Eastern Siberia to help in police
duty, and in guarding the great stores of supplies accumulated by the
Russians at Vladivostok. These stores had been bought largely upon the
credit extended to Russia by the United States.

With Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary gone as monarchies, Japan is
the greatest of the remaining imperial states. We have seen more than a
dozen kings, emperors, princes and grand dukes pass into the discard as
a result of a war which they themselves brought on