of Europe.

"Europe, of course, is not without examples of the successful
application of the principle of federation within itself. It so happens
that the federated State next greatest to our own is the German Empire.
It is only forty-three years old, but their federation has been notably
successful. So the idea of federation is familiar to German publicists.

"It is familiar, also, to the English, and has lately been pressed there
as the probable final solution of the Irish question.

"It has insistently suggested itself as the solution of the Balkan
problem.

"In a lesser way it already is represented in the structure of
Austria-Hungary."

America's Great Work.

"This principle of nation building, of international building through
federation, certainly has in it the seeds of the world's next great
development--and we Americans are in a position both to expand the
theory and to illustrate the practice. It seems to me that this is the
greatest work which America will have to do at the end of this war.

"These are the things which I am writing to my European correspondents
in the several belligerent countries by every mail.

"The cataclysm is so awful that it is quite within the bounds of truth
to say that on July 31 the curtain went down upon a world which never
will be seen again.

"This conflict is the birth-throe of a new European order of things. The
man who attempts to judge the future by the old standards or to force
the future back to them will be found to be hopelessly out of date. The
world will have no use for him. The world has left behind forever the
international policies of Palmerston and of Beaconsfield and even those
of Bismarck, which were far more powerful.

"When the war ends conditions will be such that a new kind of
imagination and a new kind of statesmanship will be required. This war
will prove to be the most effective education of 500,000,000 people
which possibly could have been thought of, although it is the most
costly and most terrible means which could have been chosen. The results
of this education will be shown, I think, in the process of general
reconstruction which will follow.

"All the talk of which we hear so much about, the peril from the Slav or
from the Teuton or from the Celt, is unworthy of serious attention. It
would be quite as reasonable to discuss seriously the red-headed peril
or the six-footer peril.

"There is no peril to the world in the Slav, the Teuton