President Wilson has assumed in these ill-informed quarters to be a timid academic person, so different from that magnificent tub thumper, Roosevelt, who would have been at war with Mexico in a trice, and would, it was believed, have plunged into the European struggle with or without an excuse.
If there was misunderstanding here on this subject, we cannot be surprised that the Kaiser blundered so badly. He, too, believed in the schoolmaster view of Woodrow Wilson. A man who had refused such a golden opportunity of annexing Mexico must be a timid, invertebrate person, who had only to be bullied in order to do what he was told. Moreover, was there not a great German population to serve as a whip for the Presidential blank and see that he did not send the polite, the gracious, the supple Prince von Bülow to Washington?
That courtly gentleman was dispatched to Italy to charm the Italian Nation into quiescence. For the Americans he needed another style of diplomacy, and he sent thither the stout and rather stupid Dernburg to let President Wilson and the Americans know that Germany was a very rough customer and would stand no nonsense from anybody.
It was a fatal blunder, the blunder of a people who had been so blinded by materialism that they do not seem to have so much as the consciousness that there is such a thing as moral strength on earth. No one who had followed with intelligent understanding the career of President Wilson could have doubted that he had to deal with a man of iron, a man with a moral passion as fervid as that of his colleague Bryan, but with that passion informed by wide knowledge and controlled by a masterful will, a quiet, still man, who does not live with his ear to the ground and his eye on the weathercock, who refuses to buy popularity by infinite hand-shaking and robustous speech, but comes out to action from a sanctuary of his own thoughts, where principle and not expediency is his counselor.
It is because no man in a conspicuous position of the democratic world today is so entirely governed by principle and by moral sanctions that President Wilson is not merely the first citizen of the United States, but the first citizen of the world.
The Daily Chronicle says:
President Wilson's note gives Germany every opportunity of saving her face if she desires to do so. Not only is it phrased in the most friendly terms, but it invites a submission of further evidence regarding the Lusitania's alleged guns and even the resumption of negotiations with Great Britain through American intermediacy. Here are the vistas of a negotiation which might keep the diplomatists of Berlin and Washington happily employed till the war is over; only the President insists once more that the submarine outrages must stop while the negotiations are in progress. It is this last point, firmly submitted at the end of the note, which gives significance to the whole. Obviously, without it the note would be nothing but an abdication on the part of the United States, and it is because it is not that Mr. Bryan disapproves it.
We do not question the sincerity of Mr. Bryan's attachment to the cause of arbitration; but it is strange that he does not see what a disservice he does to arbitration by accepting and preaching a travesty of it. When there is litigation between individuals over an alleged wrong, the first condition is that the wrong shall stop for the interim—a result effected through an interim injunction between nations. There is no judge to grant such an injunction. It has to be obtained by mutual consent unless it is obtained by arbitration. It simply means a license to the wrongdoer to continue his wrongdoing for as long as he can make the arbitration last, which, where the time is important, will be all that he wants. To accept such a doctrine, as Mr. Bryan apparently does, is simply to put a premium on the wrongdoing and a very heavy discount on arbitration.
The Morning Post comments as follows:
Mr. Bryan resigned, according to his own explanation, because he thought President Wilson's note to Germany would endanger the cause of peace. It might, therefore, have been supposed that the American note was to be a departure from the previous American policy; but now that President Wilson's note is published we are puzzled to find the reason for Mr. Bryan's action. The note contains nothing new; it merely affirms in a friendly manner the position taken up by the United States—a position founded upon the generally accepted principles of international law. It testates the claim which America has always made, that a belligerent has no right to sink a presumably innocent merchantman and endanger the lives of its crew and passengers, but must first determine the character of its cargo and establish its contraband nature and must secure the safety of the people on board. This is obviously a stand in the cause of humanity. We might call it the irreducible minimum of the rights of neutrals; for it is clear that, if a Government allows its subjects to be slain in cold blood and its ships to be destroyed, it abandons the primary function of a Government.