blood. For a century
democracies and Liberal governments have kept themselves too much
isolated, trusting prematurely and too simply to international law
and treaties and Hague conventions. These things have never been
respected, except as springs to catch woodcock, where the Divine
Right held sway. The outgrowing or the overthrow of the Divine
Right is a condition precedent to the effectiveness of
international law and treaties.

It has seemed to me, looking at the subject only with reference to
our country's duty and safety, that somehow and at some early time
our championship of democracy must lead us to redeclare our faith
and to show that we believe in our historic creed. Then we may
escape falling away from the Liberal forces of the Old World and
escape the suspicion of indifference to the great scheme of
government which was set up by our fathers' giving their blood for
it. I see no other way for us to take the best and biggest
opportunity that has ever come to prove true to our faith as well
as to secure our own safety and the safety of the world. Only some
sort of active and open identification with the Allies can put us
in effective protest against the assassins of the Armenians and the
assassins of Belgium, Poland, and Serbia, and in a friendly
attitude to the German people themselves, as distinguished from
their military rulers. This is the attitude surely that our fathers
would have wished us to take--and would have expected us to
take--and that our children will be proud of us for taking; for it
is our proper historic attitude, whether looked at from the past or
looked back at from the future. There can be no historic approval
of neutrality for years, while the world is bleeding to death.

The complete severance of relations, diplomatic at first and later
possibly economic as well, with the Turks and the Germans, would
probably not cost us a man in battle nor any considerable treasure;
for the moral effect of withdrawing even our formal approval of
their conduct--at least our passive acquiescence--would be--that
the Germans would see that practically all the Liberal world stands
against their system, and the war would end before we should need
to or could put an army in the field. The Liberal Germans are
themselves beginning to