two
years to learn that Europe was not, after all, three thousand miles
away when it came to the vital moral issues of live international
policies. Before Congress declared war I found many Americans
criticising President Wilson for not declaring war two years ago.
While I do not know what the situation was during my absence still the
impression which Americans abroad had, even American officials, was
that President Wilson would not have had the support of a united people
which he has to-day had he entered the war before all question of doubt
regarding the moral issues had disappeared.

[Illustration: THE AUTHOR'S CARD OF ADMISSION TO THE REICHSTAG ON APRIL
5TH, 1916.]

In the issue of April 14th of this year the _New Republic_, of New
York, in an editorial on "Who willed American participation?" cast an
interesting light upon the reasons for our intervention in the Great
War.

"Pacifist agitators who have been so courageously opposing, against
such heavy odds, American participation in the war have been the
victims of one natural but considerable mistake," says _The New
Republic_. "They have insisted that the chief beneficiaries of
American participation would be the munition-makers, bankers and in
general the capitalist class, that the chief sufferers would be the
petty business men and the wage-earners. They have consequently
considered the former classes to be conspiring in favour of war, and
now that war has come, they condemn it as the work of a small but
powerful group of profiteers. Senator Norris had some such meaning in
his head when he asserted that a declaration of war would be equivalent
to stamping the dollar mark on the American flag.

"This explanation of the great decision is an absurd mistake, but the
pacifists have had some excuses for making it. They have seen a great
democratic nation gradually forced into war, in spite of the manifest
indifference or reluctance of the majority of its population; and they
have rightly attributed the successful pressure to the ability of a
small but influential minority to impose its will on the rest of the
country. But the numerically insignificant class whose influence has
been successfully exerted in favour of American participation does not
consist of the bankers and the capitalists. Neither will they be the
chief beneficiaries of American participation. The bankers and the
capitalists have favoured war, but they have favoured it without
realisin