How is it, then, that, with all these strong American feelings tending to make them sympathize with the German people in good times or bad, in peace or in war, the whole weight of American opinion is on the side of the Allies in the present war? The reasons are to be found, of course, in the political and social history of the American people, and in its Governmental philosophy and practice today. These reasons have come out of the past, and are intrenched in all the present ideals and practices of the American Commonwealth. They inevitably lead Americans to object strongly and irrevocably to certain German national practices of great moment, practices which are outgrowths of Prussian theories, and experiences that have come to prevail in Germany during the past hundred years. In the hope that American public opinion about the European war may be a little better understood abroad it seems worth while to enumerate those German practices which do not conform to American standards in the conduct of public affairs:
(a) Americans object to the committal of a nation to grave measures of foreign policy by a permanent Executive—Czar, Kaiser, or King—advised in secret by professional diplomatists who consider themselves the personal representatives of their respective sovereigns. The American people have no permanent Executive, and the profession of diplomacy hardly exists among them. In the conduct of their national affairs they utterly distrust secrecy, and are accustomed to demand and secure the utmost publicity.
(b) They object to placing in any ruler's hands the power to order mobilization or declare war in advance of deliberate consultation with a representative assembly, and of co-operative action thereby. The fact that German mobilization was ordered three days in advance of the meeting of the Reichstag confounds all American ideas and practices about the rights of the people and the proper limits of Executive authority.
(c) The secrecy of European diplomatic intercourse and of international understandings and terms of alliance in Europe is in the view of ordinary Americans not only inexpedient, but dangerous and unjustifiable. Under the Constitution of the United States no treaty negotiated by the President and his Cabinet is valid until it has been publicly discussed and ratified by the Senate. During this discussion the people can make their voice heard through the press, the telegraph, and the telephone.
(d) The reliance on military force as the foundation of true national greatness seems to thinking Americans erroneous, and in the long run degrading to a Christian nation. They conceive that the United States may fairly be called a great nation; but that its greatness is due to intellectual and moral forces acting through adequate material forces and expressed in education, public health and order, agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce, and the resulting general well-being of the people. It has never in all its history organized what could be called a standing or a conscripted army; and, until twenty years ago, its navy was very small, considering the length of its sea coasts. There is nothing in the history of the American people to make them believe that the true greatness of nations depends on military power.
Object to Extension by Force.
(e) They object to the extension of national territory by force, contrary to the wishes of the population concerned. This objection is the inevitable result of democratic institutions; and the American people have been faithful to this democratic opinion under circumstances of considerable difficulty—as, for example, in withdrawing from Cuba, the rich island which had been occupied by American troops during the short war with Spain, (1898,) and in the refusing to intervene by force in Mexico for the protection of American investors, when that contiguous country was distracted by factional fighting. This objection applies to long-past acts of the German Government an well as to its proceedings in the present war—as, for example, to the taking of Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace-Lorraine, as well as to the projected occupation of Belgium.
(f) Americans object strenuously to the violation of treaties between nations on the allegation of military necessity or for any other reason whatever. They believe that the progress of civilization will depend in future on the general acceptance of the sanctity of contracts or solemn agreements between nations and on the development by common consent of international law. The neutralization treaties, the arbitration treaties, The Hague Conferences, and some of the serious attempts at mediation, although none of them go far enough, and many of them have been rudely violated on occasion, illustrate a strong tendency in the civilized parts of the world to prevent international wars by means of agreements deliberately made in time of peace. The United States has proposed and made more of these agreements than any other power, has adhered to them, and profited by them. Under one such agreement, made nearly a hundred years ago, Canada and the United States have avoided forts and armaments against each other, although they have had serious differences of opinion and clashes of interests, and the frontier is 3,000 miles long and for the most part without natural barriers. Cherishing the hope that the peace of Europe and the rights of its peoples may be secured through solemn compacts, (which should include the establishment of a permanent international judicial tribunal, supported by an international force,) Americans see, in the treatment by the German Government of the Belgian neutralization treaty as nothing but a piece of paper which might be torn up on the ground of military necessity, evidence of the adoption by Germany of a retrograde policy of the most alarming sort. That single act on the part of Germany—the violation of the neutral territory of Belgium—would have determined American opinion in favor of the Allies, if it had stood alone by itself—the reason being that American hopes for the peace and order of the world are based on the sanctity of treaties.
(g) American public opinion, however, has been greatly shocked in other ways by the German conduct of the war. The American common people see no justification for the dropping of bombs, to which no specific aim can be given, into cities and towns chiefly inhabited by non-combatants, the burning or blowing up of large portions of unfortified towns and cities, the destruction of precious monuments and treasuries of art, the strewing of floating mines through the North Sea, the exacting of ransoms from cities and towns under threat of destroying them, and the holding of unarmed citizens as hostages for the peaceable behavior of a large population under threat of summary execution of the hostages in case of any disorder. All these seem to Americans unnecessary, inexpedient, and unjustifiable methods of warfare, sure to breed hatred and contempt toward the nation that uses them, and therefore to make it difficult for future generations to maintain peace and order in Europe. They cannot help imagining the losses civilization would suffer if the Russians should ever carry into Western Europe the kind of war which the Germans are now waging in Belgium and France. They have supposed that war was to be waged in this century only against public, armed forces and their supplies and shelters.
These opinions and prepossessions on the part of the American people have obviously grown out of the ideals which the early English colonists carried with them to the American wilderness in the seventeenth century, out of the long fighting and public discussion which preceded the adoption of the Constitution of the United States in the eighteenth century, and out of the peculiar experiences of the free Commonwealths which make up the United States, as they have spread across the almost uninhabited continent during the past 125 years.