ublic opinion about the European war
may be a little better understood abroad it seems worth while to
enumerate those German practices which do not conform to American
standards in the conduct of public affairs:

(a) Americans object to the committal of a nation to grave measures of
foreign policy by a permanent Executive--Czar, Kaiser, or King--advised
in secret by professional diplomatists who consider themselves the
personal representatives of their respective sovereigns. The American
people have no permanent Executive, and the profession of diplomacy
hardly exists among them. In the conduct of their national affairs they
utterly distrust secrecy, and are accustomed to demand and secure the
utmost publicity.

(b) They object to placing in any ruler's hands the power to order
mobilization or declare war in advance of deliberate consultation with a
representative assembly, and of co-operative action thereby. The fact
that German mobilization was ordered three days in advance of the
meeting of the Reichstag confounds all American ideas and practices
about the rights of the people and the proper limits of Executive
authority.

(c) The secrecy of European diplomatic intercourse and of international
understandings and terms of alliance in Europe is in the view of
ordinary Americans not only inexpedient, but dangerous and
unjustifiable. Under the Constitution of the United States no treaty
negotiated by the President and his Cabinet is valid until it has been
publicly discussed and ratified by the Senate. During this discussion
the people can make their voice heard through the press, the telegraph,
and the telephone.

(d) The reliance on military force as the foundation of true national
greatness seems to thinking Americans erroneous, and in the long run
degrading to a Christian nation. They conceive that the United States
may fairly be called a great nation; but that its greatness is due to
intellectual and moral forces acting through adequate material forces
and expressed in education, public health and order, agriculture,
manufacturing, and commerce, and the resulting general well-being of the
people. It has never in all its history organized what could be called a
standing or a conscripted army; and, until twenty years ago, its navy
was very small, considering the length of its sea coasts. There is
nothing in the history of the American people to make them believe that
the true greatness of nations depends on milit