that in neglecting these, you have only been precipitating your own ruin and despair."

The literature of France, especially since the French Revolution, is full of the ideals of the Allies. For France I will quote a few lines from the essay by Victor Giraud on French civilization, recently published in this country by the Department of Romance Languages of the University of Michigan:

"France has never been able to believe that force alone, the force of pride and brute strength, could be the last word in the affairs of this world. She has never admitted that science could have for its ultimate purpose to multiply the means of destruction and oppression, and it was one of her old writers, Rabelais, who pronounced these memorable words: 'Science without conscience is the ruin of the soul.' She has not been able to conceive that an ethnic group, a particular type of mind, should have the right to suppress others: instead of a rigid and mechanical uniformity of thought and life, the ideal to which she aspires is that of the free play, spontaneous development, and the living harmony of the nations of the world."

In the response of the South American states to the appeal of the cause of the Allies, deep has called unto deep. No novel circumstance, no momentary impulse, no revelation of yesterday has revealed to the Latin-American peoples their essential community of interest with France, with England, with the United States of the North. Through all temporary misunderstandings and estrangements, they have remembered that they are kindred offspring of one great emancipative idea, inheritors of a common political purpose, pilgrims to a common goal. Through the confusions of desperate wars Simon Bolívar, the Washington of their revolutions, led them a hundred years ago to the threshold of the new world of national independence, civic equality, liberty, popular sovereignty and justice. He, man of strife though he had to be, cherished lifelong his fond dream of a parliament of man, and in the evening of his life summoned on the Isthmus of Panama a congress of nations, which he intended should present a united front to imperial aggression, become the perpetual source and guarantor of public law, and establish concord

among all peace-loving peoples. From that day to this the statesmen of South America have been with increasing earnestness and effectiveness the friends of arbitral justice and the architects of international peace.

What shall I say of America but that the ideals for which the Allies are now every day more consciously fighting presided over her birth as a nation and have been her guiding stars in all the high moments of her history? I mean that the American nation, established at an epoch of intellectual expansion, was to a remarkable degree founded upon international principles by men of international outlook and sympathies. Our founders in general claimed nothing for Americans but what they were willing and anxious to concede to all men; so that it has ever been a splendid tradition of the American Government, when about to take a momentous step, frankly to state its case, and openly to invite the considerate judgment-not of Americans-but of mankind, thus checking the expansive principle of nationalism by the contractive principle of a supernational allegiance.

America, furthermore, has never established the worship of a tribal or national deity. The God invoked by the framers of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our Congress, our Courts, and by our great presidents, has quite obviously, I think, been approached as the Father of Mankind. The eighteenth century deists-men like Paine, Franklin, and Jefferson-had indeed thoroughly repudiated the idea of a warlike tribal Jehovah; the qualities which they habitually attributed to the deity were justice and benevolence; and these characteristics have remained, I believe, the leading ones in what we may call our national conceptions of divinity. And how has our national faith in a Father of all Mankind been reflected in our political conceptions? Well, Benjamin Franklin said in the midst of a great war: "Justice is as strictly due between neighbour Nations as between neighbour citizens and a Nation which makes an unjust war is only a great Gang." And our Declaration of Independence holds that the God of nature has made it self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and

the pursuit of happiness. Washington, in his "Farewell Address," expresses his faith that Providence has connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue; accordingly he urges his countrymen to forego temporary national advantages, and to try the novel experiment of always acting nationally on principles of "exalted justice and benevolence." Jefferson, in his first inaugural, felicitates his countrymen on the fact that religion in America, under all its various forms, inculcates "honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man.” Liberty, equality, justice, benevolence, truth-these are not tribal ideals.

All these ideals which our national fathers derived from the Father of all Nations, Lincoln received and cherished as a sacred heritage, and he added something precious to them. He took them into his great heart and quickened them with his own warm sense of human brotherhood, with his instinctive gentleness and compassion for all the children of men. "With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness for the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan-to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." Why do these words, uttered near the bitter end of a long war, touch us so deeply, and thrill us year after year? Because in them the finest morality of the individual American is identified at last with the morality of the nation. The words consecrate the loftiest of all American ideals, namely, that the conduct of the nation shall be inspired by a humanity so pure and exalted that the humanest citizen may realize his highest ideals in devotion to it.

That ideal still animates the American people. We are not sending out our young men today to fight for a state which acknowledges no duty but the extension of its own merciless power. We are sending them out to fight for a state which finds its highest duty in the defense and extension of justice and mercy. Our national purpose has been solemnly rededicated to the objects of the canonized Father and the Preserver of the Republic. We are not to break with our great traditional aspira

tion towards the expression in the state of the civility, morality, and responsibility of the humanest citizens. In the noble words of Mr. Wilson's recent address: "The hand of God is laid upon the nations. He will show them favor, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to the clear heights of his own justice and mercy.' So believe all just men.

Here then let us close our appeal to those who have drawn apart from this our war and have sought for their emotions a neutral place of refuge above the conflict. The cause of America and the Allies is the defense of the common culture of the family of civilized nations. It is the cause of the commor wealth of man. The ideals and principles which we wish to take hold of character and govern conduct are the best principles and ideals that men have. We need not fear the perils that beset the propagandist if we have once a clear vision of the object of our propaganda. We need not fear lest we become wily liars, for our very object is that central human truth which is the object of all knowledge. We need not fear lest we become venomous haters, for our very object is the inculcation of the sense of human brotherhood and human compassion. We need not fear lest we become besotted nationalists, for our very object is the inculcation of a sense for those common things which should be precious to all men, everywhere, at all times. We have drawn the sword to defend what Cicero beautifully called, "the country of all intelligent beings."

ETHICAL PROBLEMS OF THE WAR1

GILBERT MURRAY

[Gilbert Murray (1866– -) is regius professor of Greek, Oxford University. He was born in Sydney, New South Wales. After being graduated from St. John's College, Oxford, he was for a year Fellow of New College, Oxford, and then became professor of Greek in Glasgow University (18891899). While in his present position he has several times visited the United States to lecture on Greek literature. Since the beginning of the war, he has spoken and written in a very thoughtful way upon the problems of the war. Some of these have been brought together in book form under the title, Faith, War, and Policy. This selection was originally delivered as an address to the Congress of Free Churches, England, in October, 1915, and represents the reaction toward the war on the part of a representative Englishman.]

Curiously enough I remember speaking in this hall, I suppose about fifteen years ago, against the policy of the war in South Africa. I little imagined then that I should live to speak in favor of the policy of a much greater and more disastrous war, but that is what, on the whole, I shall do. But I want to begin by facing certain facts. Don't let us attempt to bind ourselves or be blinded by phrases into thinking that the war is anything but a disaster, and an appalling disaster. Don't let us be led away by views which have some gleam of truth in them into believing that this war will put an end to war—that it will convert Germany, and certainly convert Russia to liberal opinions, that it will establish natural frontiers throughout Europe or that it will work a moral regeneration in nations which were somehow sapped by too many years of easy living in peace. There is some truth, and very valuable truth, in all those considerations, but they do not alter the fact that the war is, as I said, an appalling disaster. We knew when we entered upon it that it was a disaster-we knew that we should suffer, and that all Europe would suffer.

Now let us run over very briefly the ways in which it is doing evil. Let us face the evil first. There is, first, the mere suffering, the leagues and leagues of human suffering, that is now spreading

1From The War of Democracy: the Allies' Statement, edited by James Bryce. (Copyright, 1917, Doubleday, Page & Company.) Reprinted by permission.