eous war, but
can only produce postponements of war, or short truces. Free
institutions, like those of the United States, take the public into
confidence, because all important movements of the Government must rest
on popular desires, needs, and volitions. Autocratic institutions have
no such necessity for publicity. This Government secrecy as to motives,
plans, and purposes must often be maintained by disregarding truth, fair
dealing, and honorable obligations, in order that, when the appeal to
force comes, one Government may secure the advantage of taking the other
by surprise. Duplicity during peace and the breaking of treaties during
war come to be regarded as obvious military necessities.

The second great evil under which certain large nations of
Europe--notably Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary--have long suffered
and still suffer is the permanent national Executive, independent of
popular control through representative bodies, holding strong views
about rights of birth and religious sanctions of its authority, and
really controlling the national forces through some small council and a
strong bureaucracy. So long as Executives of this sort endure, so long
will civilization be liable to such explosions as have taken place this
August, though not always on so vast a scale.

Americans now see these things more clearly than European lovers of
liberty, because Americans are detached from the actual conflicts by the
Atlantic, and because Americans have had no real contact with the feudal
or the imperial system for nearly 300 years. Pilgrim and Puritan,
Covenanter and Quaker, Lutheran and Catholic alike left the feudal
system and autocratic government behind them when they crossed the
Atlantic. Americans, therefore, cannot help hoping that two results of
the present war will be: (1) The abolition of secret diplomacy and
secret understandings, and the substitution therefor of treaties
publicly discussed and sanctioned, and (2) the creation of national
Executives--Emperors, Sultans, Kings, or Presidents--which cannot use
the national forces in fight until a thoroughly informed national
assembly, acting with deliberation, has agreed to that use.

Opposite Tendencies.

The American student of history since the middle of the seventeenth
century sees clearly two strong though apparently opposite tendencies in
Europe: First, the tendency to the creation and maintenance of small
States such as those which the Peace of