ting trouble halfway.

Such was the temper of the nation. The President carefully conformed to
it, while at the same time guiding and enlightening it. For nearly two
years he kept his country out of the war. The task was no easy one. He
was assailed at home at once by the German propagandists, who wanted
him, in defiance of International Law, to forbid the sale of arms and
munitions to the Allies, and by Colonel Roosevelt, who wished America to
declare herself definitely on the Allied side. Moreover, Prussia could
understand no argument but force, and took every sign of the pacific
disposition of the Government at Washington as an indication of
cowardice or incapacity to fight. But he was excellently served in
Berlin by Mr. Gerard, and he held to his course. The _Lusitania_ was
sunk and many American citizens were drowned as a part of the Prussian
campaign of indiscriminate murder on the high seas; and the volume of
feeling in favour of intervention increased. But the President still
resisted the pressure put upon him, as Lincoln had so long resisted the
pressure of those who wished him to use his power to declare the slaves
free. He succeeded in obtaining from Germany some mitigation of her
piratical policy, and with that he was for a time content. He probably
knew then, as Mr. Gerard certainly did, that war must come. But he also
knew that if he struck too early he would divide the nation. He waited
till the current of opinion had time to develop, carefully though
unobtrusively directing it in such a fashion as to prepare it for
eventualities. So well did he succeed that when in the spring of 1917
Prussia proclaimed a revival of her policy of unmitigated murder
directed not only against belligerents but avowedly against neutrals
also, he felt the full tide of the general will below him. And when at
last he declared war it was with a united America at his back.

Such is, in brief, the diplomatic history of the intervention of the
United States in the Great War. Yet there is another angle from which it
can be viewed, whereby it seems not only inevitable but strangely
symbolic. The same century that saw across the Atlantic the birth of the
young Republic, saw in the very centre of Europe the rise of another new
Power. Remote as the two were, and unlikely as it must have seemed at
the time that they could ever cross each other's paths, they were in a
strange fashion at once parallel and antipodean. Neither has grown in
t