Our Part in the Great War

ts ... will have fifty millions of people within fifty years, if not prevented by any political folly or mistake. It contains more than one-third of the country owned by the United States-c

age to Congress

hier life. There is better balance between industry and agriculture, more recognition of the value of social equality, more open-mindedness to new ideas, greater readiness to put them into practice. The East has been slow to recognize this moral leadership of the newer countr

d to a distinguished

outh. It would not be impossible now to s

ter of foreign policy, it is wiser than the Middle West, but in order to make its ideas prevail it will have to work by sympathetic co?pera

sterners, hard-working and humanitarian. The Middle West has not given money, and it is warm-hearted. It has not taken sides, and it is honest. This neutrality is in part the result of the Allied methods of conducting the war. In England and France, there has been an unconscious disregard of neutral opinion, an indifference in the treatment of its representatives, an unwillingness to use the methods of a d

of the Allies. For that foreign policy has been a failure in its effect on

The

he Al

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spoken of as a minor matter of giving "penny-a-liner" journalists "interviews." England has steered her way through diplomatic difficulties with neutral governments. But that is only one-half the actual problem of a foreign policy. The other half is to win the public opinion of the neutral people, because there is no such thing finally as neutrality.[2] Public opinion turns either Pro or Anti, in the end. At present about thirty per cent of American public

the American Field Ambulance Service Harvard has 98 men, Princeton, 28, Yale 27, Columbia 9, Dartmouth 8. These are Eastern institutions. From the Middle West, with the exception of the University of Michigan, which has sent several, there is occasionally one man from a college. The officia

t Toms, General Manager of the Marion Water Works, one is Dr. Cogswell, a successful physician, one is Verne Marshall, Editor of the Cedar Rapids

ail in a modern democracy-namely, the use of public opinion, publicity, and the periodicals,-by granting facilities for information to the representatives of a democracy

our people kn

German General Staff has shown an understanding of American psychology, a flexibility in handling public opinion. The best "stories" have often come out of Germany, given to American correspondents. Their public men and their officers, including Generals, have unbent, and stated their case. An American writer, going to Germany, has received every aid in gathering his material. A writer, with the Allies, is constantly harassed. This is a novel experience to any American journalist whose status a

policy of the United States is created by public opinion. Negotiation with the State Department leaves the people, who are the creators of policy, cold and neutral, or heated and hostile, because uninformed. If the Allied Governments had released facts to the representatives of American publi

(and this is the excuse which officials give) that the military will not tolerate propaganda, then the Allies are more dominated by their military t

niversity of Wisconsin) thinks, has become State law. The Middle West has put into execution commission government in over 200 of its cities, the first great move in the overthrow of municipal graft. It practices city-planning. Many of its towns are models. Our sane radical movements in the direction of equality are Middle-Western movements. To curse this section as money-grubbing, uninspired, and to praise the Harvard-Boston Brahmins, the Princeton-Philadelphia Tories, and the Yale-New York financial barons, as the hope of our country, is to twist values. Both elements are excellent and necessary. Out of their chemical compound

left his inner life emptied of the old retrospects, cut off from the ancestral roots. That vacancy the new man in the new world filled with formula, with vague pieces of idealism about brotherhood. He believed his experiment had cleared human nature of its hates. He believed that ideals no longer had to be fought for. Phrases became a substitute for the ancient warfare against the enemies of the race. And all t

s bickerings he feels none. So to-day he refuses to see a right and a wrong in the European War. He confuses the criminal and t

must be willing to speak to them through the voices they know-not alone through "Voix Americaines" of James Beck, and Elihu Root and Whitney Warren and President Lowell and Mr. Choate. England must speak to them through Collier's Weekly and the Saturday Evening Post and the newspaper syndicates. There is only one way of reaching American public opinion-the newspapers and periodicals. No other agency avails. England must recognize the functi

an methods from first-hand witness, is regarded by the Allies as partly a nuisance and partly misguided. If any public criticism is ever made of my country's attitude by the French or English, we, that have sought to serve the Allies, will be o