coupled with
the entry of America and the war speeches of President Wilson, seemed to
revive the flagging idealism of the Allies and lift it to a more
universal and exalted level than ever before. On the other hand, the
publication of the Secret Treaties and the many incomplete revelations
that followed thereon, laid bare the fact that quite another act of
motives were also at work among our leaders; that territorial greed and
diplomatic hypocrisy were enemies to be fought in our own midst as well
as on the battlefield. The issues of the war assumed a grander and a
more terrible aspect. More than ever before perhaps in the history of
the world--and we do not overlook the period of the so-called religious
wars--religion and politics fused. To us, at any rate, the calm
aloofness suggested by the quotation above became impossible. A cry
seemed to have gone forth, "Who is on the Lord's side? Who?" A great
gulf opened up between those who only a year before had believed
themselves to be for the time at any rate in one political camp. On one
side of that gulf we found ourselves, and on the other most of our
colleagues. It was not that we differed from them as to the necessity of
winning the war, and of putting forward every possible military effort
for that end. But everything depends on the uses to which the victory is
put, and the spirit in which it is approached, and there the differences
were profound.

And thus the _Politics Class_ became a school of liberalism.[1] It was
no intolerant liberalism, for intolerant liberalism is not liberalism at
all. From first to last we stood for the examination of all points of
view. We were for reading the views of those we disagreed with, not for
abusing them unheard or burning their books unread. In so far as some of
our pupils carried liberalism to the point of intolerance, they lost the
spirit of the movement they professed to support. There were not many
against whom this charge could be brought. One of our most ardent
democrats, I remember, sent me during the time of his military training a
careful and painstaking examination of Mr. Mallock's latest big book.
The excuse of those that fell into intolerance must be, I suppose, that
they were young, and that they found themselves confronted by an
astonishing spectacle of intolerance in some of their "conservative"
masters.

When this change was taking place, we sought to redress the balance by
taking into partners