hich a Battle is Raging.]

In 1913 Germans traveled in Russia and Englishmen traveled in Germany
freely and safely. Germans were glad to trade with intercourse
Russians, and happy to have Englishmen spend their money in Germany.
France and Austria exchanged goods and their inhabitants traveled
within each other's boundaries. A Frenchman might go anywhere through
Germany and be welcomed. There was nothing to make the average German
hate the average Englishman or Belgian. The citizen of Austria and the
citizen of Russia could meet and find plenty of ground for friendship.

We cannot explain this war, then, on the grounds of race hatred. One
can imagine that two men living side by side and seeing each other
every day might have trouble and grow to hate each other, but in this
great war soldiers were shooting down other soldiers whom they had
never seen before, with whom they had never exchanged a word, and it
would not profit them if they killed a whole army of their opponents.
In many cases, the soldiers did not see the men whom they were
killing. An officer with a telescope watched where the shells from the
cannon were falling and telephoned to the captain in charge to change
the aim a trifle for his next shots. The men put in the projectile,
closed and fired the gun. Once in a while, a shell from the invisible
enemy, two, three, or four miles away, fell among them, killing and
wounding. When a regiment of Austrians were ordered to charge the
Russian trenches, they shot and bayoneted the Russians because they
were told to do so by their officers, and the Russian soldiers shot
the Austrians because their captains so ordered them. The officers on
each side were only obeying orders received from their generals. The
generals were only obeying orders from the government.

In the end, then, we come back to the governments, and we wonder what
has caused these nations to fly at each other's throats. The question
arises as to what makes up a government or why a government has the
right to rule its people.

In the United States, the government officials are simply the servants
of the people. Practically every man in our country, unless he is a
citizen of some foreign nation, has a right to vote, and in many of
the states women, too, have a voice in the government. We, the people
of the United States, can choose our own lawmakers, can instruct them
how to vote and, in some states, can vote out of existence any law
that they the