PRESIDENT WILSON AND THE LESSONS OF HISTORY.
T ORD CROMER in his letter to Wednesday's Times has done President Wilson and the American Govern- ment a great service by his plain speaking on the President's recent speech at the banquet of the League to Enforce Peace." Lord Cromer, as is shown by his letter on his American eiperiences in the " sixties " published in our issue of to-day, is not only a present-day and a fair-weather supporter of America, but has always been, and always will be; a whole-hearted • friend of the Republic. The Spectator may also appeal to its own past history, not only during the Civil War, but especially in the last fifteen years, proving it anxious above all things to create and preserve good feeling between the two branches of the English-speaking race. It is our boast, a boast well founded, that we have never thought or spoken of America as a " foreign " country. That fact gives us a special claim to endorse Lord Cromer's grave statement that the President and those associated with him ought to be left in no doubt as to the views held by the friends of America in this country. There is, however, no need to emphasize this point. All fair-minded Americans, whether they agree with us or not as to the facts, will, we are sure, admit that we have not only a right but a duty to say frankly and fairly what we believe to be the truth about the President's policy of intervention or of quasi-intervention as sketched in his last speech. • To let movements, however well intentioned, which may imperil the good understanding between' Britain and America develop without challenge, merely for fear that to do so may cause displeasure at Washing- ton, would not only be both foolish and servile, but wanting in true respect for the President. To suggest that free criticism could ever be regarded as a crime by Mr. Wilson would be to treat him, not as the reasonable and fair-minded man he is, but as some jealous Oriental tyrant. 'President Wilson is a deeply read historian, who has studied in detail and with a philosophic mind the development of his own country. Yet, strange as it may seem to those who to not realize that in the region of human affairs zeal in great causes often obliterates all other considerations, he ignores two cardinal facts in American history, one fifty and the other nearly a hundred years old. We will begin with the later fact. President Wilson, we are sure, will be the first man to admit that you cannot make a friendly intervention unless both the disputants whom you desire to help are in sympathy with your action and anxious to endorse it. The capital historical example is the attempt made towards the close of the Civil War to induce President Lincoln and his Government to kiss and be friends with the South, and not, as the would-be interveners put- it, crush the rebels and so ruthlessly prolong the agony of the war. It could, they urged, serve no good purpose to force every man, woman, and child in the South to offer a resistanee so determined and so bitter that the North itself must be irretrievably ruined by the effort to overcome them. Our Government, we are glad to think, would have nothing to do with the passionate effort made by the Southern States through secret negotiators to bring about intervention. With the restless, subtle, and, in a dreamy and abstract sense, humanitarian Emperor of the French they made much more headway, and it is well known that Napoleon III. strongly desired to intervene in arms to save the South, or, as he would have said, to pre- vent further bloodshed. Happily, the British Govern- ment, though urged on by the commercial classes here, who desired peace at any price, and also by the senti- mental sympathizers with the South, refused absolutely to countenance any intervention which was not directly asked for by the North. But no such request for intervention came or could have come from Washington. Mr. Lincoln loved peace if ever man loved it, but he know that there were things more important than peace—truth, justice, and liberty, and security that these things should prevail upon the earth. Therefore he stood like a rock against any suggestion of premature peace. Anxious as he was to put an end to strife, he fearlessly condemned the notion that the North and South could shake hands like a couple of pugilists after a heavy bout of fighting and express their unimpaired goodwill towards each other. Though without a trace of vindictiveness in his nature, he knew that the war could not end in that way, but must be fought to a point which would not leave open the possibility of a new civil war being launched by the Southerners after a respite. He refused to destroy all security for the future peace of the-American `Continent. Here 'is one of the lessons of history which should surely appeal to • the greatest of all neutral Powers at the present moment. When, then, President Wilson longs—and it is in itself a noble longing—to be the herald of peace, let him think of what Lincoln would have said, and indeed did say, when similar proposals to those which are now in men's minds were sug- gested by Napoleon III. Let him remember also that, though this is not a civil war, it is a war in many ways analogous to that between the North and South. Emphatically it is not a war of what we may call the old eighteenth-century pattern, where any one could step in and say, as if speaking to a couple of duellists : You have had a good honest fight. Honour is satisfied. Now don't you think the sensible and the humane plan would be to shake hands and try to forget all about your unfortunate quarrel ? " There is nothing whatever of that -nature about the present struggle. The peoples of Europe are not arrayed upon what used to be called the field of honour, but engaged in a death-struggle in which one side is fighting for domination, and the other for security that peace, justice, and national independence shall continue on the earth.
When we say this it will be urged, no doubt, that every man in a quarrel thinks himself wholly in the right and his opponent wholly in the wrong ; that it is the duty of the mediator to point out that there are faults on both sides ; and that the best way to get peace is to acknowledge those faults frankly and reciprocally, and so on. Our answer is that this is not a case in which there is something of right on both sides. By this we do not mean to claim that the Allied Powers have a monopoly of virtue. But we do say that in this particular instance there is no room for a mediator till German militarism and German aggres- sion have been finally beaten to the ground. To have made the sacrifices that the Allies have made in fighting the Central Powers, and then to break off the encounter and re-establish those Powers on a firmer basis than ever, would be an act of moral cowardice and folly without parallel in the history of the world. But that in principle, though of course unconsciously, is what the mediators at this stage are asking us to do. Strangely enough, the fact is written plain in the ideal which Mr. Wilson put before his hearers of the " League to Enforce Peace." He tells us that in the dealings of nations with one another arbitrary force must be rejected. That thought, he goes on, constitutes the chief part of the passionate conviction of America. " We believe," he continues, " three fundamental things "—things, remember, which no Briton, no Frenchman, no Italian, no Russian, no Belgian, and no Serbian has ever wanted to deny. Here are " the three fundamentals " :— " (1) That every people has the right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live like other nations. (2) That the small States of the world have the right to enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty and for their territorial integrity that the great and powerful nations expect and insist upon. (3) That the world has the right to be free from every disturbance to its peace that has its origin in aggression and the disregard of the rights of peoples and nations."
What man of reason, of humane feeling, or with any sense of liberty and justice could possibly deny these fundamentals 1 They are the very things for which we and our Allies are fighting. It was because we hold these things so dear that we were forced to enter upon the war and make the sacrifices we have made. When we say this we are not making any covert suggestion that if the American Govern- ment entertain them they should be in the war and not out of it. We are as much persuaded as can be any American that America had no ground for taking part in the war, and that she obeyed a wise instinct and tradition in keeping out of it—though we hold that she might have enormously increased and strengthened the sanctions of international right had she protested against their violation, and also against the inhumanity with which the Germans have treated the peoples of Belgium, of Northern France, of Serbia, and of Poland.
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