rial aspirations of Louis XIV, and of Napoleon before it realized
the natural fact and moral principle which underlay these overthrows,
and which finally so successfully asserted themselves as to unify
Italy and cast off the Austrian dominion, to liberate Greece,
Bulgaria, Roumania and the other Balkan States from the Turk, to unify
and create contemporary Germany. The last quarter of the nineteenth
century saw the renaissance, often in the face of overwhelming
suppression, of the language and cultures of Czechs, Bohemians, Poles,
Irish and Jews. It saw the rise of nationalism in the Oriental
dependencies of Great Britain. It saw the beginning of an
acknowledgment of the full rights of nationalities by both Austria and
Great Britain, the grant of local autonomy to the various
nationalities in the Austrian Empire, of progressive home rule to
India and South Africa and Ireland. The twentieth century seemed to be
moving peacefully toward the fulness of democracy--when came the war.

_The Present War: Nationality vs. Imperialism_

Let no one be deceived into believing that this war is a struggle for
the economic domination of the world, springing from commercial
rivalry and industrial intrigue. No. Nothing is so international as
economic life--we in America know that now to our own cost also--and
if commercial interests and capitalistic counsels had had their say,
there would have been no war. England was Germany's best customer,
France her great creditor, Russia supplied her with unskilled labor.
The socialist international was against war, the peace party was
against it, the intelligence of the world was against it. When it
came, it shattered all these international organizations into national
units, it smashed the solidarity of even science and art, which are
the most international enterprises in the world. And why? Because its
cause was something deeper than economic interest or the other
secondary interests. Here is the question that the war is to decide:
Is the whole of mankind to be dominated in body and in spirit, without
its consent, by a portion of it, and to be compelled "to elaborate and
express the idea" of the portion? or is the whole of mankind to be
self-governed, in a cooeperative commonwealth, each part of which, by
elaborating and expressing its own idea, contributes its best to the
whole?

This is the issue between the warring powers and each claims that it
is defending itself against the aggression