by the friendly patronage of the world at large; and she has now prostituted all the results of that progress to the vilest of purposes, namely, the conquest of the nations which have befriended her, and the subversion of the free and humane civilization of the world to the savage despotism of the hateful thing which she calls "Kultur." After such misuse it would be unreasonable to expect the world to give her another opportunity for a repetition of the same misuse. It would be entirely reasonable and equitable for the world to insist, and to decree through the common agreement and action of civilized Powers, that until through the slow processes of time the German people shall have become chastened and civilized, so that they will no longer turn the resources of civilization against civilization itself, they shall be barred from the normal commercial and social intercourse of nations.

The possibility that such action will be taken is said to cause much concern in Germany, and on the strength of reports to that effect some men in this country are speculating upon the practicability of using threats to that effect as a means of compelling Germany to sue for peace. It has even been intimated that the threat of commercial discrimination against her will be used as a club, and that an offer to refrain from such discrimination will be used as a bribe, to prevail upon Germany to stop the war. Of which speculations, intimations and what not, we must entirely and most earnestly disapprove.

We should of course not object to Germany's being frightened into suing for peace by the prospect of commercial outlawry. We should heartily rejoice thereat. But we can conceive nothing more foolish than it would be to depend upon or in any degree to look to any such thing as a means of ending the war. Germany may be frightened; or she may be merely pretending to be frightened so as to delude us into relaxing our war efforts and into being willing to enter another Brest-Litovsk conference and let the Jeremy Diddlers of Berlin dupe us as they duped the Bolsheviki. Her fright is nothing to us. It should not, even if it were indubitably genuine, induce us for one moment to relax our aggressiveness against her by so much as the hundred millionth part of a degree. On the contrary, if we knew that the reports were true and that the whole German nation was mortally frightened at the forecast of what may happen to them after the war, we should say that that was one of the strongest

reasons for pressing on the more remorselessly and inexorably, to kill Huns with all our might and main. Panicstricken men are the easiest of all to slaughter, and our chief duty before God and man is to KILL HUNS.

It would be a foolish and indeed a most discreditable

thing to propose a commercial "boycott as a means of exerting pressure for peace upon Germany, and it would be nothing short of infamous to offer resumption and maintenance of economic equality as a bribe for quitting the war. All the reasons for treating Germany as a commercial outlaw exist now, in full force, and they would not be destroyed nor diminished in power by the mere making of peace. It will not matter whether the war is ended by the unconditional surrender of Germany, or by our fighting her to a standstill and crushing her to her knees. The economic alliance against her must be effective in either case. It will be a feature of the peace, just as the military alliance is a feature of the war.

We must indeed regard it as quite futile to expect any apprehension or fear which Germany may suffer to have a chastening effect upon her or to cause her to surrender her arms. It is possible that the fear or the risk of suffering economic outlawry might have had a deterrent effect before the war, if it had been clearly presented to some German minds. At any rate, it would have been taken into consideration, as one of the potential contingencies of the war, and as one of the penalties which might be incurred in case of defeat. We do not say that it would have proved or could have been made to prove effectively deterrent. We think not.

The question of generosity may also be dismissed. It is not pertinent. Generosity is not to be taken into consideration in dealing with the nation which in 1870 deliberately, through lies and forgery, provoked a war with France for the premeditated purpose of robbing her of her coal and iron mines and "bleeding her white" by the exaction of an indemnity which it was thought would be beyond her power to pay; with the nation which for forty-odd years thereafter was the most arrogant, ungenerous and dishonest of all in the world in its commercial transactions; with the nation which in this war has conducted such an orgy of public and private loot, and of such wanton and wholesale destruction of the economic resources and peaceful industries of other lands, as the world never before witnessed. It is not harsh,

it is not ungenerous, to make the plunderer disgorge his plunder, or to make the wanton marauder pay some penalty for his crimes.

Nor can we for a moment admit the objection of illegality, under the principles of international law which Germany herself repudiates but which are still cherished and revered by the civilized nations of the world. Law is partly a matter of equity, and partly of precedent. With the equitable view we have already concerned ourselves. Upon that ground our title to the proposed policy is clear and indefeasible. Upon that of precedent, even of precedent sanctioned by Germany herself, it is no less strong. From time immemorial civilized nations have maintained and have practised the right to control, for the general good, the affairs of those which are their inferiors in morals and civilization. Thus traffic in firearms and intoxicants with African tribes has been prohibited; the slave trade has been interfered with; international supervision was established over the chaotic finances of Turkey; the tariff laws of China have for many years been subject to foreign dictation. These and other similar things have been participated in by Germany, and have received the sanction of undisputed precedent. Who shall challenge the right of the world-nay, the imperative duty of the civilized Powers of the world-to apply at least some small measure of the same principle to a nation which has shown itself more lawless, more barbaric, more unfit to exercise the prerogatives of national sovereignty and the international peerage, than any African tribe or Oriental horde?

THE NEW FOURTH OF JULY

Ir is not a customary thing for the President to issue a proclamation or any public utterance concerning the Fourth of July. For several generations that anniversary has been so well established a date in the patriotic calendar as to need no reminder and no exhortation for its general and befitting observance. At the present time, however, we must be grateful to the President for what he recently said concerning it, by way of calling attention not to the day itself nor yet to its long-prevalent and conventional significance, but rather to some certain new significations and new duties which have been given to it by the extraordinary events of the last year.

Perhaps these significations and duties are not altogether new. Indeed, we must regard them as having existed from the beginning. But they have been latent, or have been ignored, and it has required the tremendous stress of our implication in the world war to reveal them to us and to emphasize upon our minds their transcendent importance.

There is first of all, perhaps, the eternal union between power and responsibility, between right and duty. For nearly a century and a half we have been recognizing, boasting, glorifying and practising our independence. That has been right and fitting and commendable. But the trouble has been that we have stopped right there with that word "independence," as though it were the be-all and end-all and do-all. We have not even recognized as we should its inseparable consequence, that, as an independent nation, we have, in Jefferson's own too often forgotten words, "full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States of right do." It will be a blessed good thing for us to get that conception of independence into our heads a good deal more clearly and convincingly than we have hitherto had it.

That, however, is only a part, and perhaps not the major part, of the significance of independence which this Fourth of July, Nineteen Hundred and Eighteen, should bring to us. The other part is what we have already referred to, the reciprocal relationship between power and responsibility, or, to put it more explicitly in the present case, between national independence and national obligation. You cannot separate the two, any more than you can dissolve the sequence of night and day, or have a balance hanging true and level with a weight in only one scale. It was well, it was everlastingly right, to proclaim a hundred and forty-two years ago that we had a right to do all things which independent states may of right do, and we are ready to maintain that right with our last ounce of strength and drop of blood. But it is equally true that we are under obligation to do all things which independent states must of duty do.

That is the everlasting fact which we have been too much ignoring, either thoughtlessly or purposely. Just as surely as we are unwilling to forego our rights, so surely should we be ready to fulfill our duties. From that there is no escape; save through stultification, disaster and shame. It means

that while we require other nations to respect us and to keep their treaties with us, we must equally respect them and keep our treaties with them. It means that we owe a duty to the commonwealth of nations, to bear our part in maintaining, even with force in war, the validity of international law and treaties. It means that if, as we insist, we have a right to declare war and make alliances, we are under obligation to do so whenever it is required by the welfare of the world. That is a conception of America's place among the nations of the world which it will be profitable for us to consider on this Fourth of July.

To be still more specific and direct in the application of the principle: If we had a right to enter into treaties for the safeguarding of neutral rights and for the prohibition of barbarous practises in war, we incurred the equal duty to stand for the enforcement of those treaties. From another angle: If our citizens had a right to travel on the high seas in merchant vessels, our Government had an equal duty to protect them in that right, and to avenge for them its violation. Those are some of the considerations which on this national anniversary abundantly justify our participation in the war; or subject that participation to censure only because it was so long postponed.

There comes, too, a new conception of the rights and duties of the individual citizen, as well as of the nation as a whole. For the union between rights and duties is as strong and as inevitable in the one case as in the other. The President in his felicitous exhortation for the Fourth of July addressed particularly citizens of alien origin. Let us begin with them our application of this principle. If they enjoy the right to become American citizens by naturalization, they bear the equal duty to renounce utterly the old citizenship and to cherish no dual nor divided allegiance. Happily, very few have sought to evade that duty, save a certain proportion of Germans, who come from the only land on earth that has had the insolent effrontery to proclaim and to seek to legitimize dual allegiance-which in its case meant unimpaired allegiance to the old country and a mere hypocritical pretence of it to the country of naturalization. This nation fought a long battle, through many years, to vindicate the right of expatriation, and finally succeeded. It has a right to require in return that its naturalized citizens shall be completely expatriated from the old country, in political sympathy as well