e countries, and that it is
inconceivable we should devise an organization which looks above and
beyond those interests. We ask you, are you willing, then, to abandon
the heritage of our fathers to the foreigner?'

"That the downtrodden peoples in Austria and Germany have been
emancipated is a moral triumph. But why has the beneficent principle
that is said to have inspired the deed been restricted in its
application? Why has the experiment been tried only in the enemies'
countries? Or are things quite in order everywhere else? Is there no
injustice in other quarters of the globe? Are there no complaints? If
there be, why are they ignored? Is it because all acts of oppression are
to be perpetuated which do not take place in the enemy's land? What
about Ireland and about a dozen other countries and peoples? Are they
skeletons not to be touched?

"By debarring the masses from participation in a grandiose scheme, the
success of which depends upon their assent, the governments are
indirectly but surely encouraging secret combined opposition, and in
some cases Bolshevism. The masses resent being treated as children after
having been appealed to as arbiters and rescuers. For four and a half
years it was they who bore the brunt of the war, they who sacrificed
their sons and their substance. In the future it is they to whom the
states will look for the further sacrifices in blood and treasure which
will be necessary in the struggles which they evidently anticipate.
Well, some of them refuse these sacrifices in advance. They challenge
the right of the governments to retain the power of making war and
peace. That power they are working to get into their own hands and to
wield in their own way, or at any rate to have a say in its exercise.
And in order to secure it, some sections of the peoples are making
common cause with the socialist revolutionaries, while others have gone
the length of Bolshevism. And that is a serious danger. The agitation
now going on among the people, therefore, starts with a grievance. The
masses have many other grievances besides the one just sketched--the
survivals of the feudal age, the privileges of class, the inequality of
opportunity. And the kernel formed by these is the element of truth and
equity which imparts force to all those underground movements, and
enables them to subsist and extend. Error is never dangerous by itself;
it is only when it has an admixture of truth that it becomes powerful