sinking of the Lusitania, he was
the universally trusted leader of the people; and to a considerable
extent the unity of the nation at the entrance into war could be traced
back to the very policies of delay which had been so sharply
criticised. The people who had been on the side of the Allies from the
first and who had seen through German pretenses long before were now
solidly behind the President, for he had at last come over to their
views. But other and important elements which might have been hostile
two years before were now convinced of the necessity for fighting the
Germans.

And the President's call to a crusade for democracy won the support,
permanent or temporary, of many of those liberals who otherwise, in
America and the allied countries, were inclined during the whole war to
see in the Kaiser and Ludendorff the natural allies of liberalism.
There was a feeling of great ideas stirring the world in the Spring of
1917. The Russian revolution had just overthrown the most reactionary
and apparently the most firmly established of autocratic Governments,
and no one in Western Europe or America doubted that Russia would jump
in six months as far as England, France and America had painfully
toiled in two centuries, and become and remain a free democracy. If
Russia had had a revolution, might not Germany have a revolution, too?
Would not the German people, whose injuries at the hands of their own
rulers the President had so well pointed out, rise up and overthrow
those rulers and bring about a just and lasting peace? Many people in
the Spring of 1917 expected exactly that; the millennium was just
around the corner.

Moreover, it seemed that perhaps the Allies would win the war in the
field before America could get into it. A British offensive in Artois
had important initial successes, and Nivelle's bloody failure on the
Aisne was for a long time represented to the world as a brilliant
victory. War, for America, might involve a little expenditure of money,
but hardly any serious effort, according to the view widely current
among the population in the Spring of 1917; it was more than anything
else an opportunity for the display of commendable moral sentiments,
and for enthusiastic acclamations to the famous allied leaders who
presently began to come to the United States on special missions. It is
hardly too much to say that most of the American people went into this
war in the triumphant mood usually reserved for t