of its opponents. Each
claims to be fighting for democracy. In the face of these claims,
history has the deciding voice. Now, historically, England, more than
any other power, has stood for the democratic and cooeperative idea.
Her colonies have autonomy, her more backward dependencies are
encouraged toward autonomy. Since the Boer war, when imperialism
passed away, she has moved toward the position of Switzerland. Even
Ireland has obtained home rule. "We are a great world-wide,
peace-loving partnership," said Mr. Asquith,[D] has reiterated again
and again the principle for which all the Allies are fighting:
believing that "the preservation of local and national ties, of the
genius of a people which has a history of its own, is not only not
hostile to or inconsistent with, but on the contrary, fosters and
strengthens and stimulates the spirit of a common purpose, of a
corporate brotherhood," the Allies seek to defend public right, to
find and to keep "room for the independent existence and free
development of the smaller nationalities, each with a corporate
consciousness of its own . . . and, perhaps, by a slow and gradual
process, the substitution for force, for the clash of competing
ambitions, for groupings and alliances and a precarious equipoise, of
a real European partnership, based on equal right and enforced by a
common will."[E]

It is hard to believe that Russia can be fighting for such an end.
Fear of Russian barbarism is what brought Germany into the lists, the
Germans declare, to defend western ideals and western democracy. Yet
Russian government is Prussian in its organization, and it is on the
side of the ideal of western democracy that she is explicitly aligned.
The contradiction is striking, and it is still more striking when we
recall that in her armies are over a quarter of a million of Jews, and
that in the other armies there are half as many more. For the Jews the
war is more than civil; it is fratricide. On the face of it they have
no inevitable personal or political stake in the war's fortune.
England has acknowledged their "corporate consciousness" and given
them maximal opportunity for "free self-development"; so has France.
Russia has oppressed and horribly exploited them; Germany, though
infinitely better than Russia, has set them conditions in which "free
development" is synonymous with complete Germanization. Austria and
Turkey have dealt with them somewhat after the manner of England and