less submarine warfare adopted now without disguise by the Imperial German Government, and it has therefore not been possible for this Government to receive Count Tarnowski, the ambassador recently accredited to this Government by the Imperial and Royal Government of Austro-Hungary; but that Government has not actually engaged in warfare against citizens of the United States on the seas, and I take the liberty, for the present at least, of postponing a discussion of our relations with the authorities at Vienna.

We enter this war only where we are clearly forced into it because there are no other means of defending our rights.

It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness because we act without animus, not in enmity toward a people or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible Government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of right and is running amuck.

We are, let me say again, the sincere friends of the German people, and shall desire nothing so much as the early reestablishment of intimate relations of mutual advantage between us, however hard it may be for them, for the time being, to believe that this is spoken from our hearts. We have borne with their present Government through all these bitter months because of that friendship,-exercising a patience and forbearance which would otherwise have been impossible.

We shall, happily, still have an opportunity to prove that friendship in our daily attitude and actions towards the millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us and share our life, and we shall be proud to prove it toward all who are, in fact, loyal to their neighbors and to the Government in the hour of test. They are, most of them, as true and loyal Americans as if they had never known any other fealty or allegiance. They will be prompt to stand with us in rebuking and restraining the few who may be of a different mind and purpose. If there should be disloyalty it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression, but, if it lifts its head

at all, it will lift it only here and there and without countenance except from a lawless and malignant few.

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, gentlemen of the Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing you. There are, it may be, many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great, peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts-for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

THE HERITAGE OF LIBERTY1

CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY

[Charles Mills Gayley (1858- -) is professor of English in the University of California. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he studied in Germany, and on his return to this country, occupied positions in the University of Michigan until 1889 when he went to California. The selection here given is from a book, Shakspere and the Founders of Liberty in America, which Professor Gayley published in 1917 to remind Americans how essentially at one with Englishmen they had always been in institutions, love of liberty, and democratic ideals.]

The political freedom that, between 1609 and 1640, our English ancestors of Virginia and New England put into form and practice is the political freedom for which our grand-uncles of old England fought from 1642 to 1649, nay, to 1689, Bradford, and Brewster, Winthrop and Endicott, John Cotton and Roger Williams, Harvard and Thomas Hooker, of New England, Alexander Whitaker, Clayborne, Bennett, and Nathaniel Bacon, of Virginia, belong to the history of English ideals no less than to that of America. And Hampden, Pym, Cromwell, Milton, Bunyan, and the Seven Bishops who defied the second James, were but brothers to our English sires in New England. Brothers of the same blood and ultimate ideal were also the royalists of Virginia. Their conservatism and devotion to a lost cause rendered them none the less certain "in the free air of the New World to develop into uncompromising democrats and fierce defenders of their own privileges."

Of all these Englishmen of the seventeenth century, whether of the Old World or the New, there was a heritage in common.

1From Shaks pere and the Founders of Liberty in America (copyright, 1917; The Macmillan Company). Reprinted by permission.

One language welded of the Old English, Scandinavian, Gallic, and Latin: manly, direct, sober, and natively consistent; unfettered, experimental, acquisitive; from emergency to emergency shaped according to the need, incomparable in riches ever cumulative. One race, one nation, one blood infused of many strains and diverse characteristics: of the Anglo-Saxon, the personal independence and native conservatism; of the Norman, the martial genius, equity, political vision, masterful and unifying authority-and of the Norman, the chivalry, the romance and culture, too; of the Celt, intermingling with these in the centuries that flowed into Shakspere, a current of aspiration, poignant passion, poetic imagination-stirring the blood but not intoxicating the Anglo-Norman reason. One custom, of spiritual ideal but of tried experience practical rather than speculative, distrustful of veering sentiment, slowly crystallizing into the stability of a national consciousness: a custom of individual prerogative and of obedience to the authority that conserves the prerogative; of fair play and equality of opportunity, of fearless speech for the right, and simple for the common weal; a custom making for popular sovereignty, for allegiance, for national honor in national fair dealing, for the might that is right; one custom, mother of the law. One common law: the progressive expression "of a free people's needs and standards of justice;" the outgrowth of social conditions, deriving its authority not from enactment of sovereign monarch or sovereign legislature but from the aggregate social will-the law of precedent and of the righteous independence of the courts.

Long before Magna Charta features of this law, this conservatively expanding charter of liberties and duties, are distinguishable in the procedure of our forefathers in England. From the days of Ethelbert to those of Alfred, and from Alfred to Edward the Confessor, for four and a half centuries before the Conquest, this law, hardly if at all affected by foreign corpus or code, had been "gathering itself together out of the custom of" the independently developing Anglo-Saxon. This sanction "the Conqueror, who claimed the crown by virtue of English law and professed to rule by English law," repeatedly bound himself to

observe, "and he handed down the tradition to all who came after him." This law of national precedent, further developed under Henry II and systematically expounded by Glanvil, or by some clerk under his direction, grew into the Great Charter of King John with its equal distribution of civil rights to all classes of freemen, and its restriction of monarchical prerogative. "The king," writes Bracton in the days of John's successor, Henry III, "must not be subject to any man but to God and the law; for the law makes him king. Let the king therefore give to the law what the law gives to him, dominion and power; for there is no king where will, and not law, bears rule." The relation of this English law of custom to the general nature of law as set forth in the civil code of the Roman system, Bracton expounds; but from that system the peculiar English law is not derived. Expanding through Fortescue and Littleton, this English law is the common law of Coke; and by the Virginia charter of 1606, probably drafted by Coke, the rights of the common law were conferred upon the colonists of the New World.

For these Englishmen of the "sceptered isle" and of the untilled wilderness of the West there had been one spirit energizing toward freedom-civil and religious; one charter of rights and obligations. Of political development there had been a continuous history for eleven hundred years before England was planted in America. There had also been one literature, as ancient and as noble, stirring in embers of racial tradition—a tradition of service and heroism and generous acceptance of fate; kindling to mirth and pity, humanity and reverence; leaping to flame in imagination and power; and, in the decades when first the English peopled "worlds in the yet unformed Occident," attaining full glory in the zenith of Shakspere.

Not with those eleven hundred years ceased the oneness of the English heritage. For a period longer than that which has elapsed since the American branch of the Anglo-Saxon race has been a separate nation, the heritage was one. One hundred and forty years have succeeded our Declaration of Independence. Through the hundred and seventy which preceded, the history of Britain was the continuing property of our forefathers of Vir