UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES LIBRARY THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA THE COLE LECTURES igib The Foundation of Modern Religion By Herbert B. Workman, D. D. Cloth Net 1.25 Winning the World for Christ By Bishop Walter R. Lambuth. Cloth net 1.15 igi4 Personal Christianity By Bishop Francis J. McConnell. Cloth net 1.25 '9'3 The God We Trust By G. A. Johnston Ross. Cloth net 1.25 igi2 What Does Christianity Mean ? By W. H. P. Faunce. Cloth net 1.25 igil Some Great Leaders in the World Movement By Robert E. Speer. Cloth net 1.25 igio In the School of Christ By Bishop William Fraser McDowell. Cloth, net 1.2s igog Jesus the Worker By Charles McTyeire Bishop, D. D. Cloth, net 1.2s igoS The Fact of Conversion By George Jackson, B. A. Cloth net 1.2s igoy God's Message to the Human Soul By John Watson (Ian Maclaren). The Cole [.Cihires prepared but nol delivertd. Cloth net 1.25 /go6 Christ and Science Fly Francis Henry Smith, University of Virginia. Cloth _ net 1.25 ^9"S The Universal Elements of the Christian Religion By Charles Cuthbert Mall. Cloth net 1.2s /goj The Religion of the Incarnation By Hishop hugcnc Ru";srll llondrix. Cloth. ..net 1.00 The Cole Lectures for jgiy ddi-vered before Vanderbih Uni'versity The North American Idea By JAMES A. MACDONALD, LL. D. New York Chicago Toronto Fleming H. Revell Company London and Edinburgh 102473 > > J J Copyright, 19 17, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY ■ ■ « « c • « < * * • • ' c * • • • t ■• "'. ••• « « « •%< « t « '■«. • « • * THE COLE LECTURES THE late Colonel E. W. Cole of Nashville, Ten- nessee, donated to Vanderbilt University the sum of five thousand dollars, afterwards increased by Mrs. E. W. Cole to ten thousand, the design and con- ditions of which gift are stated as follows : " The object of this fund is to establish a foundation for a perpetual Lectureship in connection with the Bib- lical Department of the University, to be restricted in its scope to a defense and advocacy of the Christian re- ligion. The lectures shall be delivered at such inter- vals, from time to time, as shall be deemed best by the Board of Trust ; and the particular theme and lecturer shall be determined by nomination of the Theological Faculty and confirmation of the College of Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Cliurch, .South. Said lecture shall always be reduced to writing in full, and the man- uscript of the same shall be the property of the Univer- sity, to be published or otherwise disposed of by the Bo.ird of Trust at its discretion, the net proceeds arising there- from to be added to the foundation fund, or otherwise used for the benefit of the Biblical Department." Kew York: is8 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street < V I A FOREWORD T was inevitable that the Cole Lectures rv I for 191 7 should carry the accent and the atmosphere of the Time of War. These Lectures were delivered under the '\^ auspices of the School of Religion of Vander- bilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, dur- ing the six days that closed April and opened I May. That was the historic week when the NO' British Mission and the French Mission, led by the Right Hon. Arthur Balfour and Mar- shall Joffre, were foregathering in Washing- ton with President Woodrow Wilson and his Cabinet, and were making history more memorable, more crammed with world events, than their three world nations ever knew before. During those very days, the undergradu- ates of Vanderbilt, all the men fit for war, were mustering on their campus and were marching away to their training-camps, their 5 6 A FOREWORD American hearts filled with a new emotion, and their eyes aflame with the strange light flashed back from the trenches in France and Flanders. The war accent was inevitable. More than that. (The war touch came nearer still.) The very title of this volume, " The North American Idea," was chosen for the Weil Lectures of 1916, in the University of North Carolina, and was first used for three Lectures on that Foundation, which I had the honour of delivering before that University in December of last year. It was planned that those lectures should be pub- lished at the time of their delivery. But war conditions made that impossible. Early in 191 7, with the generous consent of the au- thorities of both universities, I substituted "The North American Idea" for the title previously chosen for the Cole Lectures at Vanderbilt. Personally it would be to me very agree- able to have been associated with President Graham and his colleagues of North Carolina in the publication of those Lectures. But, now that events changed so suddenly and so A FOREWORD ^ completely the whole American situation, setting free the North American idea from the hesitations and the discords which the neutraHty of the United States had imposed on the free expression of the North American mind, most grateful am I that, even at the last moment, with the very opening of the Lectureship, the horizon line of " The North American Idea" was so widened that its view-point was put into complete harmony with the spirit of Canada and with the achievement of North America's interna- tionalism. The confusions of party politics, on both sides, sometimes made it seem as though there could be no supreme, dominant, and united North American idea. But those dif- ferences were only on the surface. Those discords were but for the moment. In the deepest note there is harmony. Two na- tions: in their expanding democracy the United States and Canada are true to one ideal. Two flags : the battle-fields of Europe are consecrated by the poured-out blood of their own people. Two records : in the long 8 A FOREWORD days yet to come, these two democracies, and all the free democracies whose prayers mingle on the great altar-stairs of the World War, will join together in writing one new record, the harmonious record of the World Idea. If these Lectures in their printed form meet with a tithe of the purposeful cordiality that greeted their spoken words, they will not miss their mark, nor leave the real pur- pose of their author unrewarded. J. A. Macdonald. " The Globed' Toronto. Contents LECTURE I The Law of the World's Good- Will . 1 1 What Makes the Apples Fall ? The Law of Human Society. Law is Law. Law is Not Broken. Good-Will Holds True. God is Not Mocked. The Organic Life of Society. " Not Coesar But Christ ! " The Voice of Tennyson. LECTURE II In the World Conflict of Ideas . . 43 The Supremacy of Ideas. Ideas in Conflict. Sources of America's Ideas. The Coming of Russia. America Follows the Gleam. An Internationalized World. The Prepared Mind. LECTURE III The North American Idea , • • 6y The Idea's Opportunity. Its World Reach. The Birth of the Idea. The Idea in Conflict. The Lesson of the Conflict. lO CONTENTS LECTURE IV The North American Idea in the Amer- ican Republic • • • • 95 America's Inheritance From Britain. The Voice of Chatham. Confusion in the Colonies. The Strain of the Celt. " Liberty Point." The Motive of the Scots. The Moral Reaction. Time's Revenges. The Significance of the Past. The Aftermath of Revolution. Pan-Germanism in America. Bernhardi's Secret Mission. Bernstorff s Treason to Honour. LECTURE V The North American Idea in the Cana- dian Dominion . . . .155 The Coming of Canada. American Questions About Canada's Politics. Canada's First Half-Century. Canada and the Britisli Commonwealth. Commonwealth — Not Imperium. Symbol of the People's Power. LECTURE VI The North American Idea in America's Internationalism . . . .183 North America's Internationalism. The Last Anglo-American War. The Reflex From Europe. A Hundred Years After. America : Vision, Message, Obligation. Lord Palmerston as a World-Projihet. World Democracy for World Liberty. The Faith ]5asis of International Reconstruction. North America iu the World's War. Service : the Key-Notfi of Democracy. Crowned for Service. LECTURE I THE LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL LECTURE I THE LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL SITTING at the window in my office at The Globe in Toronto one day, I was attracted by a man at work on the windows of the top story of the Dominion Bank building across the street. He was a window cleaner. He had a wide strap se- curely buckled around his waist, and firmly fastened to a girder inside. He moved about the window ledge with the utmost care. He took no chances, either for himself or for the passers-by on the pavement sixteen stories below. A newsboy came into my office with the evening papers. I asked him why the man at the window was so particular. " He can't afford to make any mistake, sir," said the boy. " A man made a mistake two or three years ago. His strap broke, and he was an awful mess on the sidewalk." 13 14 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA " But why should he fall downward ? " I asked. "Why not fall upward, or stay still?" " Things don't fall up, they fall down," said the boy ; and he began to recite something the teacher at the night school had taught about what he called " the law of gravita- tion." What Makes the Apples Fall There you have it. Things don't fall up. They fall down. They always do. They always did. The apples fell down and not up when Adam and Eve first saw apples in Eden. And when Isaac Newton sat in his orchard he saw the ground littered with fallen apples. •' What makes the apples fall ? " was the question with which Newton disturbed the scientific world two hundred and fifty years ago. And he pursued that question, and he pondered the phenomenon that things al- ways fall downward to the earth, and not upward to the sky, until he began to ap- preciate the fact and the force of universal LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 1 5 gravitation as a law in the physical world. He saw that it was not by accident or by chance that apples always fell downward and that water always runs down hill. What Prof. George Paxton Young used to de- scribe to his students of philosophy at the University of Toronto in my undergraduate days as " the occurrence and the persistent recurrence of phenomena in definite rela- tions," suggested to Sir Isaac Newton the presence and the operation of a natural law, a universal and eternal law of the physical world. He saw that every particle of matter is attracted by, or gravitates to, every other particle of matter. He discovered the key- stone of his " Principia," the principle of " Universal Gravitation." And he an- nounced to the world the law that makes the apples fall. It is the same law in ac- cordance with which the atoms float in the sunbeams, and the suns and systems are held in their courses through infinite space. It is the law of gravitation. And in accordance with that law of gravi- tation the whole material universe is held l6 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA together, and works together, part cooperat- ing with part and making what the poets called " the music of the spheres" : *' Forever singing as they shine The hand that made us is divine," And so, too, the window-cleaner on the sixteenth story, because he respects the law of gravitation, moves through his perilous task without damage to himself or hurt to the innocent people on the street below, the airman pursues his way 12,000 feet above the street, and the seaman burrows in the submarine far down below the surface, each confident and secure in willing obedience to the law of gravitation. Gravitation is the law of the material world, the inherent law of the nature of things. Obedience to that law means strength and service and peace for all who obey. Transgression of that law means dis- order, disaster, defeat. That law is no re- specter of persons. It is the same for the just and for the unjust, for the wise and for the foolish. If any man falls on that law he LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 1 7 will be broken. If that law falls on any man it will grind him to powder. The law of gravitation is the eternal law of the Nature of Things. The Law of Human Society There is another law in the universe, an inherent, essential, inexorable law, as abso- lute and as commanding in the social world of men as the law of gravitation is in the material world of things. It is the eternal law of the nature of men, the eternal social law by which human units, units of indi- viduals or units of nations, are held together in human society, unit holding with unit, part cooperating with part, the good of each making for the welfare of all, and lawless- ness in any one part anywhere working dis- aster and loss throughout the whole social order. That infinite and immutable law of the ordered life of human society is the law of the world's good-will. The law of good-will. It is a law ; not an opinion, which may be right or may be wrong ; not a maxim which may be ob- l8 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA served or may be neglected. It is the law oi the very nature of men as surely and as inescapably as gravitation is the law of the very nature of things. And that law of good-will was not made by man, not any more than the law of gravitation was made by things. Law is Law In a very real sense, in a very deep and profound sense, law never is made, never can be made. Law is. The law that made the apple fall was not made, neither by the apple, nor by the tree, nor by the ground. That law always was law, always is law, al- ways shall be law, always and everywhere in all the world of things throughout all the universe of matter. And the law of human society, the law of the world's good-will, was not made. It was not made by Kings in the days of their Di- vine Right: not by Parliament in the high days of the Aristocracy : not by Congress in the broad days of the Democracy : not by any Council of the People in our own free LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 1 9 and easy days of the Initiative, the Referen- dum and the Recall. The law of good-will always was law, everywhere is law, and forever shall be law. It is law for all men, savage and civilized. It is law for all angels, fallen or unfallen. It is imperative for all moral creatures, obliga- tory and inflexible, everywhere and forever- more, throughout all the moral universe. Law is Not Broken And the law of good-will is inviolable. It cannot be broken. It never is broken, not any more than the law of gravitation is broken. In our loose and heedless way of speaking we say the man broke the law, when he ignored it or defied it, stepped over the ledge of the sixteenth story window. But it was not the law that was broken. Gravitation remained inviolate, constant, se- rene. It was the man who was broken. He fell to the pavement below, a broken and lifeless mass. So, too, when any one of us sins against the law of good-will, against mercy and ^20 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA righteousness and love, when we are hateful in our spirit, or mean in our motive, or vengeful in our purpose, when we think the worst thing and plan the hurtful thing and speak the vindictive thing, when we cherish in our hearts bad- will against any other hu- man being, we sin not only against the ab- stract law of the social order without, but against the eternal law of our own moral in- tegrity, the inflexible law of our own soul's happiness within. And if we surrender to the motive of bad-will, if we persist in its way, something happens in our own moral nature, and happens at once. A moral pen- alty follows on the heels of a moral crime ; a penalty is demanded which must be paid in us and must be paid in full. Hate does not break the law. It breaks the man. The law of good-will was the social law for the first family of man, and its first trans- gression brought its first penalty. When Cain went up against Abel, and when he tried to justify himself with his utterly unso- cial challenge, "Am I my brother's keeper?" he repudiated the eternal social obligation, LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 21 and he sinned against the law of good-will which everywhere and for all races holds hu- man society together. Cain did not break the law. The law broke Cain, and sent him out broken, a fugitive and a vagabond for- ever. Ages before it was written in the Levitical code, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." That absolute command was the imperative of all human society everywhere. Sinai and its Ten Commandments did not make that law or make it authoritative. Sinai only gave emphasis to the law which it proclaimed, only made it plain that the law of good-will is inherent in the very na- ture of men, an essential and a universal element in the life of all the ordered human society. Nor did Jesus make the law of good-will. He declared the second commandment of the law to be, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," but He recognized that command as having been law from the beginning. His whole teaching and His whole life were, not to abolish that law, but to fulfill it. The su- 22 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA preme law of His eternal kingdom is the law of Love. The unmistakable maxim and mark of His world-wide discipleship is " love one another." And Paul was at once the profoundest student of the teachings of Jesus and their truest interpreter when he laid down this axiom and announced this con- sequent command : " Love is the fulfilling of the law ; therefore thou shaft love thine enemies." Good- Will Holds True And the eternal law of the social good-will cannot be kept in any other way or by any other process. The moral universe is so ordered that its supreme and inherent law cannot be kept, and its commands cannot be fulfilled, except in the true spirit of love and through the unselfish service love inspires. The authority of that law of good-will is absolute. It does not depend on any belief, or unbelief or disbelief of the individual, any more than the law of gravitation depends on the scientific beliefs or disbeliefs of the man at the sixteenth story window. A man may LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 23 be a Christian or he may be a pagan, but the law of good-will holds true. God or no God that law is supreme. Bible or no Bible, that law is supreme. Church or no Church, that law is supreme. And no man can keep the law of good-will except through the life of love inspired by the spirit of service. And if a man sins against the law of good-will his own moral life is broken, just as surely as his body is broken if he falls from the sixteenth story window. If a man cannot love, or will not love, or does not love, he pays the penalty of not loving, pays it in the barrenness and the bankruptcy of his own moral being. The two alternatives of the moral universe are fixed, unchangeable, immutable. They cannot be altered either by men or by God. They inhere in the very nature of all moral beings. On the one side is Love ; and Love is the fulfilling of the law of the social order. On the other side is Hate ; and Hate is the denial of the law of the social order. These two are not the same. Love and Hate do 24 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA not move in the same direction. Tliey can- not reach the same goal. One produces a personal character of good-will, which means heaven. The other produces a personal character of bad-will, which means hell. Law would not be Law, and God would not be God, if at any time, or for any person, or in any world, a life of service motived by good-will led to hell, or if a life of selfishness motived by bad-will led to heaven. Hell is the inevitable moral consummation and the eternal moral permanence of the spirit of hate and the life of selfishness. Heaven is the inevitable moral consummation and the eternal moral permanence of the spirit of love and the life of service. The law of the moral universe holds for good or for bad. It does not circle or stop short. It moves forth and straight on. Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. It must be so. And because it "must" be so, because of that inexorable "must" of the moral uni- verse, and because the eternal moral law said, and always must say, " Thou shalt love," the moral nature of man, perverted by LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 25 sin and destroyed by guilt, found it diffi- cult, indeed found it impossible, to keep that absolute and holy law of the moral universe. The theologians may argue about it as they will, the philosophers may dispute as they please, but the fact remains that " no mere man since the fall has been able perfectly to keep the commandments of God but doth daily break them in thought, word and deed." All history proves that moral inabil- ity. All experience bears it witness. Science and religion alike agree in the absolute im- perative of Jesus to Nicodemus : " Ye must be born again." In a world like this no man can keep the law of good-will unless and until he has been born into the new life of love and answers to the spirit of service. Nothing is more impossible in all the moral universe, with men or with angels, than for the spirit of hate to practice the ways of love, or for the character of selfish- ness to do the deeds of service, or for the un- righteous life to yield the fruits of holiness. It can't be done. Men do not gather grapes of thorns. The tree is known by its fruit 26 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA And that fruit is the vital outgrowth of the life, not the artificial attachment of a me- chanical scheme. What the theologians call " forensic righteousness," in itself is not enough — the righteousness, whether per- sonal or implied, that can stand the white light of a court of law. There is needed also what the theologians call " ethical righteous- ness" — the righteousness of practical life which in daily contact with every-day affairs meets and answers the ethical distinctions of right and wrong, and complies with the ethical obligations " you must do the right" and '* you must not do the wrong." The birth of Christ into the life of humanity — the incarnation of God in the world of men — was an absolute necessity, if humanity was to have a new start. The death of Christ, as a sacrifice in Love's infinite service, was an absolute necessity if out of the moral death of human sin there should arise a new life of love, working at a regenerated social order, into the new heaven and the new earth, with new impulses, new desires, new motives and new ideals. Paul is true to LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 27 science when he declares, " If any man is in Christ he is a new creation." And in that new creation for individuals in their social relations, and for nations in their inter- national life, the law of social good-will is the law of harmonious and peaceful life for the world. Browning is everlastingly true to eternal truth when in "Saul" he makes David say : ** I have gone the whole round of creation : I saw as I spoke. I spoke as I saw. I report as a man may of God's work — All's love, yet all's law." And all is law. The whole world of things and the whole world of men : " all's love, yet all's law." The law of gravitation permeates the measureless immensity of the material universe, and holds the minutest atom in its place. Ascend up into heaven, and that law is there. Descend into the grave and that law is there. Take the wings of the morn- ing and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, and there the law of gravitation is the sustaining power on every hand. The dark- 28 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA ness and the light are both aHke in a universe where all's law. And " all's love." In all parts of the moral universe, and for all beings that know the dif- ference between right and wrong, and for the eternal and uncreated God Himself — " all's love, yet all's law." The morning stars sang together in the perfect harmonies of perfect law. And all the sons of God shouted for joy in the conscious service of perfect love. And to-day the whole creation groans and travails in pain, waiting to be delivered from the bondage of lawlessness and discord and hate which man's first disobedience brought into the world. The law of good-will cannot be sinned against without its penalty being paid. Bad- will between man and man, between class and class, between nation and nation — bad- will is sin against the immutable law of the social order, and the soul that sinneth, the class that sinneth, the nation that sinneth, it shall die. The newsboy was right. " Things don't fall up : they fall down." The law holds : LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 29 the wages of sin is deatli. And it is law for the greatest empires as for the weakest in- dividuals. The whole world is at this very hour writhing in the tragedies of a world war, because, on a world scale, all nations are involved in sin against the eternal law of the world's good-will. The nations would not learn what all their experience tried to teach : that the law of good-will is law for the nations as it is law for individuals and for families ; and that the law of good-will will not be mocked. The law is not mocked. International good-will is not mocked. International law is not mocked. The obligations of peace and the ideals of service are not mocked. But what a mockery this world war is of all the cunning diplomacies of deceit ! What a mock- ery of the arrogant assurances of Brute Force 1 What a mockery of the selfish ambitions of despots and autocrats ! What a mockery of all the mad pretentions of Will to Power ! Caesar tried it in Christ's day, and the em- pire of the Caesars was broken. Alexander tried it, and nothing remains but a warning. 30 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA Napoleon tried it, and the France of to-day is a denial, a glorious denial of the despotism for which Napoleon stood. The Kaiser of Germany tried it, and General von Bernhardi, his war lord, made a world tour of Egypt and India and Japan and South America, and in 191 3 he secretly toured the United States to teach that " Law is a makeshift, that the only reality is Force ; Law is for weak men and for weak nations, but Force is for the strong, and that the State is above morality." And in 1914, in defiance of Law, in defiance of Justice, in ruthless defiance of solemn treaty obligations, the Kaiser and his war-lords put Bernhardi's teaching into execution, and the blood of defenseless Belgium, like the blood of the murdered Abel at history's early dawn, cried aloud and still cries for the vengeance of God on the most colossal crime of Cain. God is Not Mocked And once again in the terrible realities of these awful months God is not mocked : Law is not mocked : the Galilean is not mocked. The law of the world's good-will stands and LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 3 1 forever will stand, majestic and inviolate, when the haughty hosts of'the Prussian war- lords are put to confusion and when their in- famous lawbreaker, the disproved suicide of history, falls a broken and helpless wreck in the world's front street. But the imperious law of the world's good- will, whose transgression makes inevitable Germany's undoing, is law for Britain, too, and for France, and for Russia, and for all the allied warring nations of Europe. It is law for America also, law for Canada, scarred and still bleeding from the awful woundings of these years of the world's war, and law for the United States, set free at last from all moral hesitations and divided counsels, and standing up to be counted in the world's Armageddon on the side of righteousness and freedom and truth. The world's good-will is law for us all. What our nations sow our nations also shall reap. And the good-will which is the world's stern law is no soft and flabby temperament that shuts its eyes to all moral distinctions and refuses all moral obligations. In the 32 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA world's good-will " All's love," but justly, un- flinchingly, eternally, "all's law." There is no good-will anywhere, and there can be none, unless at the heart of it burns the white fire of a holy love, and glows the white light of a right- eous life. Righteousness is of the very essence of good-will. Righteousness is the twin sister of peace. There can be no good-will for indi- viduals or for nations unless and until " right- eousness and peace have kissed each other." And in a moral world, a world under the regnancy of moral law, there is no neutrality. There can be no neutrality in a world whose governing law is social good-will. Never again, so long as the history of the past three years stands, will any wise statesman in any great country even pretend that his nation is neutral, if anywhere in all this world despot- ism is given a free hand, if international trea- ties are mocked at as scraps of paper, and if the law of the world's good-will is scorned as a makeshift for weak nations. International good-will is the fulfilling of the supreme law of all nations. The nations, our nations, all the nations of the world, in LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 33 all their Parliaments, in all the secret places of their Chancelleries, throughout all their Armies and all their Navies — we all must learn what that supreme law of the world- neighbourhood means, what it requires and what it forbids : " Thou shalt love thy neigh- bour as thyself." For every nation the " Thou shalt " of that law is the categorical impera- tive that admits of neither condition nor al- ternative. The law of the world's good-will is the first law of every nation. The Organic Life of Society And for all nations on all the continents the organic law of the world's social order governs, without alternative, and without ex- ception. No nation sins alone or suffers alone. It is with the nation as it is with the window cleaner. If the man on the ledge of the sixteenth story transgresses the law of gravitation he pays the penalty, and not in himself alone and in his own broken and lifeless body on the pavement below : but the innocent passer-by on the street, smitten unawares or unprepared, he, too, must pay 34 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA the penalty of his unknown neighbour's trans- gression. No man liveth to himself. No man dieth to himself. The organic law of the social neighbourhood holds. The window cleaner falls to his own death, but in his fall death comes to his unsuspecting neighbour in the street, and sorrow worse than death comes to innocent wife and helpless children who are bound up with him in the organic life of family and friends. So is it with the nations in their organic life in the international neighbourhood. The nation that sins against international good- will sins also against its own soul. Slowly but very surely, and sometimes painfully and at great cost, are the nations learning that the country that frames a tariff of spite so as to damage the industry or the trade of a neighbour-people is whetting a two-edged sword that cuts both ways and wounds the smiter as well as the smitten. And so too in the fearful smiting of inter- national war. No nation can break through the restraints and restrictions of international good-will except it grasps the two-edged LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 35 sword, and stains with its own life-blood the weapon it forges against its neighbour. With the confidence of the strong and with the arrogance of the selfish, Germany mocked at the guaranteed neutrality of Belgium, and sinned against the eternal law of the world's peace. The guarantees of the nations were shattered into fragments, but the penalties of the law had to be paid and they are being paid in full, in the best blood of Germany's slaughtered millions on the pitiless pave- ments of the west front and of the east front. The law stands inviolate. " Not Ccesar But Christ ! " But not the sinning nation alone suffers. Every nation, on every continent, and under every flag, sooner or later, is caught in the dread catastrophe. Belgium was smitten, as by a great stone hurtled from some hand of hate from some dizzy height. France was smitten as by a footpad's shot from behind a broken wall. And presently Europe's front street was crowded by mobs of combatants, every man with a drawn sword and a loaded 36 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA gun. And now, not all the blood of the un- counted millions lined up in all these mur- derous years of war will make atonement for Germany's sin against the world's good- will : nor will all the snow in the pure heavens of all the world for a hundred years wash white and clean the war-lord's guilty hands. But through it all the law abides, the im- mutable law of justice and service and love. In their ignorance and shallowness and idle clamour men wept, or moaned or shouted aloud, when this world-war first began, that " Christianity has broken down." Half in wonder and half in regret they sighed : " The Gospel of Love is disproved." With the Pagan finality that brooks no doubt and no dispute, they pronounced what they thought was history's last word : " Corsica has conquered Galilee : Caesar has tri- umphed over Christ." That was in the first war tragedies of 1914. The war is fiercer now, more furious, more frightfully desolating. But the cry of the world's great heart is dilTerent. The sol- emnized note of the world's strong voice is LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 37 changed. Corsica is not heard of any more. In every language men say, " It is Galilee or it is Hell." From the trenches and dugouts of the battle-fields and from the battalions who have faced war's stern realities, men send back one strong resonant, unfaltering testimony : •* Not Caesar but Christ." And high over the hellish shrieking of war's artillery, the deathless hope of the world's peace persists. More penetrating than the disproved and discordant Hymn of Hate is the recurrent anthem sung by the wise and the good and the glorified of all the generations of men. It is a hymn of faith and hope and love. Life can sing no Hymn of Hate. Hate is a discord and a jarring. Its key-note can find no common chord. All the great phi- losophers and all the immortal poets of the race agree in this, that only love endures, only peace survives, only truth stands fast. The Voice of Tennyson Tennyson struck the world's key-note more than seventy-five years ago ; and to-day, 102473 38 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA over all the bitterness and strife of a world at war, the anthem gathers volume and from every continent it makes a chorus of the voices of the free. Here in the warm Southland my mind goes away to the far North and to the year before the war. There in the gray fogs of the north Atlantic, where the Union Jack keeps watch and ward over the island colony of Newfoundland, I spent glorious days and unforgetable nights on a salmon fishing trip with Dr. Henry van Dyke, before he went to The Hague as ambassador from the United States to the Netherlands. All day long, below Big Falls, on the Humber River, we cast and drew and cast and drew, as the salmon by the hundreds, five-pounders, ten-pounders, twenty-pound- ers, forty-pounders, heading upward from the sea, made their matchless leap up the Falls, twelve or fourteen feet high, and then pushed on, impelled by the unerring law of instinct, to their original spawning ground, seventy-five miles farther up-stream. The day was glorious. But, when the LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 39 Stars came out far over the summer sky, and when the long, lonesome call of the bull moose died away in the rhythmic music of Big Falls and of the dark rock-bound river, the night was memorable beyond compare. There under the quiet of the starry sky, around the camp-fire on the rock-summit, we sang our evening hymn. It was one of the metrical Psalms of David, the undying Psalm of Refuge and of Strength, sung by the Scottish Covenanters, in the black old days of bloody Claverhouse, and sung during the past year by their descendants in those lurid, bloodier nights at Ypres, the Somme and Vimy Ridge. And there in the shining silence of that holy hour, Dr. van Dyke, Tennyson's choic- est exponent in America, told the wondrous story, untold before, of his vi§it to the im- mortal Poet Laureate in his country home in rural England, not many days before he died. On Monday morning, as he was leaving, Tennyson presented him with a copy of his photograph. And van Dyke, with the im- 40 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA pulse of inspiration, returned the photograph with the request that the poet write on the back of it his autograph, and also the lines from his own life-poetry he would desire should live if all the rest he ever wrote should die. You students of English literature, you lovers of Tennyson, had yours been all the wonder and wealth that Tennyson left as a legacy to the world, had yours been " In Memoriam," and " Locksley Hall," and " Ulysses," and " The Two Voices," and all the idylls, and all the lyrics, and all the odes, and all the songs, with which Tennyson en- riched nineteenth century literature, and had you been asked, at the hour of your " twi- light and evening bell," to write in a hne or two your life's message, your last word to a world that loved you, what of all those four- score years of Tennyson's experience and brooding, and insight into life's secret mean- ings and highest uses, would you have writ- ten as your farewell words ? This is what Tennyson wrote as his very last message to the world, perhaps the last LAW OF THE WORLD'S GOOD-WILL 4I words he ever framed — " and after that the dark " — these two Hnes from " Locksley Hall," first published before the middle of last century : " Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might ; Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight." Love alone can do it. Love alone has the secret or the power or the touch that can so smite the harp of life, smite it so truly, smite it so ringingly, that the chord of self, the chord that spoils all the harmonies of life, in the family circle, in the social sphere, in the national life, in the world of all the nations — Love alone can so touch the harp of life that the chord of Self not only passes out of sight, but passes in music, in the unbroken harmonies of perfect trust and good-will and peace. And the promised day of the world's peace is coming. The law of the world's good- will will yet be the rule of international life. It is brought nearer by every kept treaty of the nations ; nearer by every alliance of the 42 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA free peoples in defense of the rights of freedom for the world. The law of the world's good-will shall be asserted yet more and more, and when this world war is over, all the democracies of the world shall stand together as the United States and Canada stand to-day, and shall stand for a just, a free, and an enduring peace : " Till the war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle- flags are furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world." LECTURE II IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS LECTURE II IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS IDEAS, not things, are the supreme re- alities. Things, mere things, mindless, conscienceless, passionless things, meas- uring so far, weighing so much, bought and sold for such a price — mere things have no real significance apart from the mind that perceives them and the ideas that give them worth. Mere things would not count in the infinite scheme were there no idea charging them with dynamic and giving them direc- tion, and no heart of Love or of Hate to sup- ply their meaning and their motive powen The Supre7nacy of Ideas It is this absolute supremacy of the things of the mind over the things of the flesh, of the spiritual over the carnal, of eternal Thought over evanescent phenomena — it is this primacy of ideas that in all stages of civilization, and never more than now, gives 45 46 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA the great places of opportunity and of responsibility to those who awaken and stimulate and organize the thinking of the people, and especially the thinking of the people of a democracy. The teacher's desk, the preacher's pulpit, the orator's platform, the writer's sanctum — these are the places of true leadership, the thrones of real power. And so it comes that the great conflicts in the world's history, the only real conflicts, are the conflicts, not of brute forces, but of world ideas. For well-nigh three terrible years the world war in Europe has gone on, armies against armies, navies against navies, submarines burrowing underseas, aeroplanes swooping overhead, mechanism and physical force pretending to the mastership every- where. It is all very terrible, very horrible, very ghastly : but were that all — that crash of armed forces along the wide miles of battle fronts, that ceaseless bursting of shells from long-range guns, that welter of the day and that weirdness of the night — were that all, then indeed were this war only a hideous crime on both sides, brutal, vulgar, unheroic, IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS 47 a gigantic dog-fight in the world's front street. What saves this world war from being, in the eyes alike of a Canadian and of an American, an unredeemed and undisguised brutality is that, more than any of the great wars of history, it is a struggle not for terri- tory but for freedom, for the freedom of the soul, for the ideals of liberty : a struggle for the right of a free people to govern them- selves, and for equality of opportunity for the little kingdoms and the small nationalities : a struggle for the right to a place in the sun, not for the Great Powers alone, Britain and France and Germany and Russia, but for Belgium and for Denmark and Holland and the Scandinavian countries and also Greece and the Balkan States, that they, too, as freely and securely as their larger neigh- bours, may each be free to live their own life, to cherish their own ideals, and to make their distinctive contribution to the civiliza- tion and freedom of the world. For any- thing less noble the free peoples of North America ought to be too proud to fight. But 48 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA for anything more worthy none of the heroes and patriots of old ever had a chance to go out to die. Ideas in Conflict The ideas in conflict at the battle fronts of Europe these many months are not merely the selfish ambitions of arrogant dynasties each eager for domination over the others. If Britain were fighting only for the over- throw of Germany and the German race, so that British autocrats might rule the German people as German autocrats have ruled in Alsace and Schleswig, the conflict would be one in which Canadians could have no honourable part. What makes even the thought of the conflict tolerable is the con- ception of its real meaning, of the supreme human interests at stake, and of the world ideas involved in the issue. The world of 1914 had begun to be a so- ciety of nations. Great ideas, through the centuries, had been at work in life and in history. Those ideas were slowly express- ing themselves in the institutions of law and IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS 49 of justice and of free government. Wherever civilization had prevailed over barbarism, in- dividuals were being organized into a com- munity, communities into a nation, and in turn the nations were beginning to feel out into international relations. The old barba- rism of the international jungle began to change into the civilized neighbourhood of interdependent nations. Law, justice, free- dom — those world ideas had found place and had come to expression in the thought and speech of all world nations before 1914. Law, justice, freedom ! Those ideas are the products of no one race, the peculiar possession of no one nation. They are the sparks that disturb the clod in all life and through all history whenever man rises to a consciousness above the brute creation. Each separate people has its contribution to make, its ideal to achieve. Not Israel alone, not Greece alone, not Rome alone ; we and all the nations of to-day are the heirs of their great yesterdays. But the nations of to-day also : each has its part to play, its life to live, its place in the general plan, and its distinc- 50 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA tion of service to all the world, for the en- richment and the ennoblement of the civiliza- tion of to-morrow. Each nation lives by the idea it embodies. If one nation suffers or is spoiled of its idea, or is robbed of its place in the sun, all the world of nations suffers with it, suffers a loss that has no gain to match. Belgium had its idea, and Holland, and Denmark, and Sweden, and Norway, and Italy, and Greece, and Serbia, as truly as Britain, and United States, and France, and Germany and Rus- sia : each had its idea to contribute to the sum total of the world's ideas of freedom and justice and government. That distinctive idea is the soul of the na- tion. To cherish that idea, to guard that depositum of eternal truth, and to release it in the thought and life of the world — that for the nation is to save its soul. But to betray that idea, to allow it to wither, or to barter that idea for any of the things of the flesh, is the nation's suicide. For that idea to be crushed out in order that some stronger na- tion's designs may be gratified — that is in- IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS 51 ternational murder. To make international murder a crime, and a crime not alone against its helpless victim, but a crime against the whole society of civilized nations — that is the function and purpose of inter- national law. And to put behind interna- tional law, behind its declarations and re- quirements and sanctions, the organized opinion and the organized judgment and the organized power of all law-abiding nations — that is the next necessary step towards true in- ternationalism ; and not until that is done will the foundations be laid or the fabric erected, strong and enduring for the world's peace. Great ideas are astir everywhere in the world to-day. Every continent is disturbed. Every nation is unsettled. The established order of things is upset. America as well as Europe is in commotion. Something hap- pened that made a world upheaval inevitable. One vital idea let loose would do it. An idea set free always starts a revolution in the minds of men. Nothing in all the world is so revolutionary as a great idea incarnated in a living personality. 52 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA When Jesus Christ said to a little group of Galileans that He came not to send peace on the earth but a sword, He had in mind nothing so clumsy or so impotent as a deadly weapon drawn from Caesar's armoury. Goliath's heavy sword was good enough to cut off Goliath's stupid head : a centurion's sword was equal to the task of cutting off a servant's ear ; but facing the world in the ceaseless conflict of ideas, the weapons of the military autocrats were of no avail for the Prophet from Galilee. When He set out to conquer the world, He drew a feathered arrow from the quiver of the mind and He flashed a two-edged sword from the scab- bard of truth. He challenged Caesar's in- vincible legions with nothing but an idea ; and the revolution He started twenty cen- turies ago turned the world upside down. That idea released is still the power that makes thrones totter and sets nations free. A whole handful of His ideas were flung out from the hilltop in Galilee when He said, " Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS 53 Those ideas are awork in the seething mind of the world to-day. They start a divine discontent everywhere. In world politics three great words, expressing three world ideas, are already beginning to be the batde-cry of the world's new freedom. Those words are : Liberty, Democracy, Internation- alism. Liberty ! Somewhere underneath all the slaveries and despotisms and blind degrada- tions of humanity there is still left in the least and in the worst a fragment of soul that makes response when the voice of free- dom calls. Liberty to think one's own thoughts, to choose one's own ideals, to live one's own life free from the dictation and driving of any taskmaster — that passion for liberty, incurable and undying in the human soul, is the divine impulse that marks even the backward races and the submerged classes as only a litde lower than the angels. So long as that spark holds on to burn there is nothing impossible in the elevation of any individual or in the enfranchisement of any people. Liberty strikes the key-note through 54 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA the discord of world ideas in Europe to- day. Democracy I The word goes back through the centuries. It bears the flavour of ancient Greece. There is the tang of Plato about it. But the idea of democracy came to its own and justified itself only in the modern world. America, with its United States and its Canada, prides itself over against Europe, as embodying the world's idea of democracy. Here on this continent has been asserted and made good the right of a free people to govern themselves. But America is only the heir of Europe's age-long struggle up from servitude to self-government. So7irces of America! s Ideas Go back to the countries from which North America drew its inspirations and its ideals. Go back to France. Read again that mar- vellous history up from Caesar's absolutism, through Bourbon tyrannies, and over the mad Napoleon dreams of world empire. The trail is often soaked with the blood of patriots, and piled high with the corpses of IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS 55 those who would be free. But that trail, throbbing with the ideas of freedom and de- mocracy, led up through the centuries of blood and sacrifice to this day, this match- less, glorious day of France's renaissance, this day of tragedy and terror when France is born again, born out of her old frivolities and her old infidelities into new life, into a new faith, into a new freedom of the spirit and a new obedience to the Christ. Amer- ica, sated in the materialism of peace, and self-satisfied in the impossible neutrality of humanity's conflict, is now beginning to learn from blood-baptized France the new sanctities of life and the new sacredness of service. And back to Britain ! For fifteen hundred years all Britain has been the battle-ground of the fight for liberty and of the idea of democracy. From the days of the Romans, through the despotism of the Tudors, the autocracy of the Stuarts and the dull re- action of the early Hanoverians, on to our own eventful days, the world conflict of ideas raged blood-red in the Parliament and Press of Britain. On those battle fronts of high 56 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA debate were won the victories which made possible the coming Democracy of all the English-speaking world. And not in high debate alone : in England through the Commonwealth, and in Scotland under the Covenanters, men sealed their al- legiance to political and religious democracy in their blood. The British peoples, among themselves and against the despotism now of their King, now of their Aristocracy, and now of their Crowd, have fought for the free- dom of ideas, for the rights of the common people, and for equal justice for all classes before the law. That idea, that dual world idea of liberty and democracy, is the key to British history. Without its lead British history is a mean- ingless muddle, void alike of sequence and of purpose. But the ideas of freedom and self- government produced the temper of mind and prepared for the union of races and nation- alities at home, and gave birth through the century of conflict to the free, self-governing Dominions overseas. And because the war in Europe is a conflict of world ideas, a life- IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS 57 and-death conflict between world Despotism and world Democracy, it was inevitable that the British Lion and all the Lions* whelps from the ends of the earth should line up, where Democracy makes its last decisive and triumphant stand, in defense of the right of every free people to govern themselves. The Coming of Russia And Russia too I Not even yet has the outside world recovered from the surprise, and caught its breath, because of the seem- ing suddenness with which the old order of despotism changed in Russia and gave place to the new order of democracy. But the change was not sudden. Far back in the generations of Russian pain and passion the ideas of liberty began to be set free, here and there, in the Russian heart. How hopeless the cause of democracy seemed. How dull and servile the peasant mind. How despotic and all-powerful the Prussianized autocrats in St. Petersburg. How far-off and farther-going the day of Russia's enfranchisement. When lo, as in 58 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA the twinkling of an eye, the unthinkable thing is done. The two greatest commonwealths of Europe, the Republic of France and the Kingdom of Britain, battling together against Teutonism for the future of the world's de- mocracy, on the bending line of the west front, all of a sudden they steady their step and hearten their chorus, for, yonder in the measureless north and east, almost unawares, the mightiest Imperium in all the world tosses its cap high in air, and shouts the slogan of the free. The idea of freedom has broken the shackles of Russian bondage and tyranny, and, please God, broken them for- ever. Once more a world idea set free has started a revolution that will change the history of mankind. Like the Hebrew exiles in Egypt when Joseph came to the chancel- lery, the haggard Russian exiles could not believe their ears a month ago, when De- mocracy came to the throne of the Roma- noffs, and the whisper swept over the snows of Siberia that the days of their mourning were ended. Already the desert rejoices IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS 59 and blossoms as the rose. Russia set free from herself, her own chains broken, the in- triguing Teuton spies cast out, and Prussia's brutal idea repudiated, the great Slav power of the world will yet take its place by the side of all the democracies of the Anglo- Saxon and the Celt, for the civil and relig- ious freedom of Europe and of the world. America Follows the Gleam In the world conflict of ideas, with the deathless ideas of liberty and democracy contending for their freedom in the fierce struggle now waging in Europe, it was in- evitable that America, too, should be in- volved and should follow the gleam. And when the conflict of ideas could find no issue except through the world's bloody conflict of brute forces, it was inevitable that in the end the United States should find its place, its only true and worthy place, lined up with Canada and with the Canadian armies, in resolute and unfaltering defense of North America's democracy in the blood-drenched No-Man's Land of war-stricken Europe. 6o THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA No matter what George Washington said or thought a century and a half ago, the Americans of to-day, if they would be true to the spirit and the ideal of the Father of their country, had no choice left in April, 191 7. The old cry of entangling alliances had no meaning and no power, as a reason for neu- trality or as an excuse for keeping out of war, when the liberties of the world were in peril and when democracy in Europe was bleeding at every pore. It may be that to have declared war against Germany in 19 14 would have been treason to the old-time policy of Washington, but still to have held in friendly grasp the hand of Prussian au- tocracy through 191 7 would have been, for the heirs of Washington, treason against hu- manity. In Canada's name, I thank God to-day for the world-enfranchisement of the United States. Aji Internationalised World Liberty 1 Democracy 1 Internationalism ! Alread}' while the conflict is still on, and out of the wild and deafening clangour of war, a IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS 6 1 great new idea is emerging in the world's mind and finding voice among the nations. It is the pregnant idea of an internationalized world. In the world of Yesterday the great word, often spoken in the hard tone of defiance, was " Nationalism." The far greater word of the world of To-morrow will be " Interna- tionalism." Yesterday the emerging peoples of the new-born democracies asserted them- selves in what they lustily called their " In- dependence." To-morrow, when the hori- zons of life have been immeasurably widened, and when the meaning of life has been incal- culably enriched, the dominant idea of the world will be broadened into " Inter-depend- ence." Already the leaders of world-opin- ion, at all the battle fronts of the world's mind, have learned the truth of the Christ dictum in the realm of world politics, that no nation can live to itself or can die to itself alone. And an internationalized world will be the outcome and the product of the world con- flict of ideas. It must first exist in the 62 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA thought of the world's thinkers, and in minds and hearts and consciences of the teachers and students in the schools and colleges and universities of the civilized world. This is America's most urgent call, most commanding appeal, and most compelling enlistment. And in this world service of the mind North America knows no dividing line. Every school in the United States that puts a premium on high thinking, that makes truth its supreme objective, and character its greatest achievement, and that holds honour above success, and sends out into the activi- ties of the Republic men who cannot be bought and who will not lie — that school serves Canada as surely and as loyally as it serves the State in which it stands. Every college and every university in which manhood is prized more highly than money, in which personality is gloried in rather than endowments, from which leader- ship goes out into the life-centres of the na- tion and returns not again until it touches the life-currents of the world — that college cannot be shut in by any geographical lines, IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS 63 or confined by the range of any national flag, or restricted by the theological creeds of any church. All leaders of thought, all teachers of truth, all masters of ideas belong to all the world. Every man's fatherland is to the student a native country ; and every foreign country is to the scholar a fatherland. The Prepared Mind Preparedness? Yes. If North America is to play her true part, her promised part, in the gigantic conflict of Ideas, which will dis- turb and menace the world long after the present war of brute Forces has spent itself, it is high time all the institutions of learning in these two American nations made ready for that inevitable struggle. But the preparedness for which I plead on this occasion and in this place is the pre- paredness of the American Mind, the pre- paredness of the American Conscience, the preparedness of the American Will. Better, infinitely better, to go unprepared into the war at the battle fronts of Europe, as Britain crossed the Channel unprepared in 64 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 19 14, and lined up her little standing army of 150,000 trained and disciplined veterans on the fields of France, against Germany's proud product of forty years — better, glori- ously and triumphantly better to have done that in 19 14, and to have saved Paris, even at its unspeakable cost, from the heel of the slaughtering Hun, than for America, with its universities of culture and its schools of re- ligion to line up in the world conflict of Ideas in 191 7 and in the sterner days yet to come, with an undisciplined national Mind, a seared national Conscience, and with an irresolute national Will. The national Mind ! The national Con- science ! The national Will ! These are the Verdun battlements of America's life. Sur- render them to the enemies of Truth and Honour and Freedom, and, no matter what happens to your battalions and your battle- ships, your nation will have lost its soul. My most earnest pleading, therefore, with you, with all citizens of the United States and of Canada, is for the preparedness of all our peoples in the things of the mind. IN THE WORLD CONFLICT OF IDEAS 65 The Army ? Yes. The Navy ? Yes. Fill up the ranks of the khaki and the blue. But when our bullets and our bayonets have done their fullest part, there will still be a call for leadership in schools and churches and parliaments of the world. The des- olated war nations will call, as never before, for policies and programs that make for truth in our diplomacy and for integrity in our politics. From you and from classrooms like yours must go out that leadership of social good-will and that law of international service, in which alone is the hope of Eu- rope's redemption, and through which alone can come enduring peace for the world. In the world conflict of ideas the college classrooms are our strategic heights. Hold them to-day, and the hinterland of the Vimy Ridge of Truth will be yours to-morrow. LECTURE III THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA LECTURE III THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA NORTH AMERICA among the na- tions is more than a continent of geography. Vital and stimulating, it takes its place in the life of the world, a World Idea. That world idea which North America embodies Is not of North American origin. It was inherited by North America through the Anglo-Saxon and the Anglo-Celtic forebears of the American people. It is presented to the world to-day in the national life and the national history of the two free democracies that hold, and that hold to- gether, the civilized internationalism of the North American continent, from the Mexican border to the North Pole. That North American idea is this : The Right of a Free People to Govern Themselves. A hundred ideas, to be sure, have found, 69 70 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA and still find, utterance and advocacy in North America. Since this continent first heaved above the wavering horizon line of the world's history, every broken-off frag- ment of truth, left anywhere on the dump- heap of error, has, at some time and by some adventurous voyager on the sea of doubt, been given expression and a chance in the free American mind. But the idea that dominates and gives distinction to American thinking is the resdess idea that people ought to be free, and that a free people have the right to govern themselves. Supremely, that is the North American idea. Mexico, indeed, shares in the geography of North America, but not in its idea. The people of Mexico have not come to their own in the North American inheritance of democratic self-government. Mexico does not cherish the American standards of free- dom or embody the North American idea. Mexico does make boast of a Liberty Bell, and does recite proudly a Declaration of In- dependence. More than a hundred years ago, on the night of September i6, 1810, the bell THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 71 in the church tower at Dolores was rung by the parish priest, Miguel Hidalgo, who then pronounced the grito of Mexico's independ- ence of Spain. One hundred years from that very hour, at eleven o'clock on the night of September 16, 1910, as marking the climax of the centennial celebration of Mexi- can independence, from the balcony of the Palace Nacional in Mexico City, facing a jubilating half-million of madly patriotic Mexicans, who filled the brilliantly illumi- nated Zocalo and crowded all the avenues, I was witness of the pathetic stage-play, when the venerable President, Porfirio Diaz, rang the very same Liberty Bell and repeated Hidalgo's historic grito : " Viva Independencia ! Viva la Constitucion ! Viva Mexico ! " Mexico called itself, and still calls itself, a republic. Mexico professes to honour the Liberty Bell, and to prize the rights of national independence. But at bottom its clamour about freedom is all make-believe. The realities of law and of justice and of free 72 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA government are as far removed from the common people of Mexico to-day as they were in the old days of the Spanish autocracy. In the Republic of Mexico citizenship does not mean, and never has meant, the right of a free people to govern themselves. The North American idea as yet finds no directing and controlling place in the Mexican mind. The Idea's Opportunity It is in the United States and in Canada, the two self-governing American nations of the Anglo-Saxon and the Anglo-Celtic blood and background, that the North American idea has had its opportunity. The American Republic and the Canadian Dominion agree in this: they each gave a chance to the released and irrepressible idea of freedom, the idea which disturbed the autocracies of Europe, and began their overthrow, long be- fore America played any part in the history of the world. These two North American democracies are, indeed, Europe's second chance. And North America's real title to greatness must THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 73 be read in the light which these two nations, each in its own way, and both together in their common internationalism, give back to the fatherlands and the motherlands, not of our American peoples alone, but of our ideals of freedom and our principles of justice. North America inherited a world idea, not for her own sake alone, but for the world's. The United States and Canada are trustees for all humanity. Before the world's judg- ment seat we must give account of our stewardship. It was in the power of their common ideas, not by the blood of their common ancestry, that the American colonies of Britain first separated in their thought from their mother country, and then united among themselves in their common struggle for the realities of political self-government, in the last half of the eighteenth century. And so it was that the American Revolution and the American Republic were both alike the product and the purpose of ideas, of vital and energizing world ideas. And it is by their community of dominant 74 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA ideas, and not simply because blood is thicker than water, that these two self- governing nations of North America are bound together, indissolubly bound together, no matter what war spectres may hover about, for the defense and for the supremacy of our North American civilization. Our bond of union is our North American idea. More than that. It is by the ties of their great ideas, not by the secret diplomacies or by the partisan policies of their Presidents or Premiers that the peoples of the United States and Canada are bound up in the great bundle of life with all the free peoples of the English-speaking fraternity over all the world. The idea of freedom is the badge of their North American brotherhood. Its World Reach And wider still. When the ideas of per- sonal liberty, and of political self-govern- ment, and of national integrity, are made the inalienable right, the unchallenged heritage, of all people on every continent ; when every little nationality, distinctive and free in its THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 75 own individual life, shall feel secure against the ambition and the greed of the large and the powerful ; and when the North American idea, cleansed from the corrosions of cyni- cism and prejudice, and from the hard crust- ings of selfishness, shall have become the World idea, inspiring the world's thinking, and organizing the world's power in defense of the world right of every free-minded people everywhere to govern themselves — when that day of the larger idea dawns, then shall the fraternity of the English-speaking world, the whole commonwealth of the Brit= ish Empire and the whole commonwealth of the American Republic, come together into their full membership in the world brother- hood of all nations, sharers together in that world commonwealth of all peoples, in which the welfare of each shall be the common obli- gation of all, and the prosperity of the great- est shall depend on the perfect freedom and equal justice of the least. In that wider sweep of the world life, and in that farther range of the world mind, the North American idea shall find itself and shall have its chance. 76 THE NORTH A^IERICAN IDEA These words of wide range and of large meaning I speak with the utmost deliberate- ness. I speak them at a time when the whole sky of all the world is filled with the fierce shriekings of a world war. I speak them as a Canadian, while all Canada is straining at every nerve, and the sons of Canada, by the hundreds and the thousands, are falling in the trenches and at the battle fronts of Europe, fighting and falling as rep- resentatives of North American democracy, in defense of this very North American idea, the right of the free people of Belgium to live their own life and to govern them- selves. And why do I so speak, and at such a time? It is because I would have you men and women of this University, and all who may hear these lectures, or who may read them on the printed page, believe this one thing, and believe it supremely, that in the long run and in the ultimate end, dominion among the nations and the victory of the world shall not be with the dripping sword, or with the eighteen-inch gun, or with the THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 77 slaughtering squadrons in the trenches of death, but victory, the enduring victory that overcometh the world, shall be with the spiritual powers of the free peoples, who, for themselves and for their neighbours, are loyal to the world idea. Ideas are immortal, not brute forces, and not armed legions. When the last hundred thousand shall have fired their last shot and fallen into their last grave, then shall world ideas gather up the shattered fragments of the world's civilization, and piece together the violated enactments of world law, so that out of the wreck and ruin it seems now there may come a new world of free nations, in which every free people shall have the right to govern themselves. For that far-off divine event the North American idea was released in the mind of the world. The Birth of the Idea The North American idea was born not in America, but in Europe. It is the gift to America from generations long dead and from lands beyond the seas. To this day 78 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA and in both nations on this continent, the idea of government of the people by the people and for the people, the political idea of government by representation, is called Anglo-Saxon. That very name, Anglo-Saxon, runs our American line of inheritance back through more than fifteen hundred years. It takes us to the England we know to-day, that south country of ancient Britannia, in which the seafaring Teutons from beyond the North Sea founded their homes in the last half of the fifth century, and to which they gave their own racial name, " Engla-land." And back of Britannia we must go to the home- lands of those Angles- — or Engles — and Sax- ons, and there in the rude life of Germania, while all the rest of Europe was broken and barbarized under the despotic imperialism of the Rome of the Caesars, the primitive idea of modern democracy, which we call Anglo- Saxon, was born. There the impulses were released which, through the long centuries to come, were destined to recreate the Britannia of the Celts, to create the America we know, and to breathe the soul of freedom into the THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 79 English-speaking world. That was the birth- place of the North American idea. There was a time in the United States when it was deemed safe politics and sound educational practice to start the history of America with the Revolutionary War. Gen- erations of young Americans were led to think of George Washington, not only as the father of his country, but as the father of all free countries everywhere. The Declara- tion of Independence was magnified so as to be regarded as the first real protest of free- dom humanity ever made. Twice over in recent months have I heard professors of history in great American universities con- fess that the facts of American history taught them as fundamental in school and college they had to tear up by the roots, when, as serious students, they came into the class- rooms and libraries of the university. The notion that a North American idea was not born in New England or in Virginia, or in some other breeding place of the Republic, would have been rankest heresy in those days of America's intellectual isolation. 8o THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA This Republic was born in the travail pains of a political revolution. For long it was deemed prudent, as helping to make the achievements of that revolution secure, to put the emphasis for the child and for the nation on the historical facts of national independence and separation. The line was not always drawn between popular history and popular fiction. At the time when his- tory itself was still concerned with the doings of kings and conquerors, and while America had almost no war annals of its own to pro- vide purple patches for the makers of school text-books, and when elections fought over again the old battles of the Revolution, or of the War of 1812, or of the Civil War, it is not surprising that school histories were some- times written with the bias and in the temper of political pamphlets. " Forget it " is the frequent injunction of the history professor to-day. And, for the students of history in the col- leges and universities, that emphatic and sometimes impatient exhortation, " Forget it," is neither unwise nor unnecessary, if we THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 8l would indeed save ourselves, and save the coming generation, from the conceit and the arrogance which ignorance and prejudice al- ways breed. In the United States and in Canada we wrong ourselves, and we lower our national dignity, when we isolate our- selves and our nations from the great cur- rents of world history, and shut out of our national background those heroic struggles up from bondage to liberty, which mark the whole winding and turbulent course, through the centuries, of what we now proudly call the North American idea. But the growth to maturity of the United States is indicated by nothing more accu- rately than by the public recognition of the real function of history and historical writ- ings, and by the important part intelligent self-criticism begins to play in the life and literature of the American people. In the early days of the Republic, while the mind of the nation was still in its juvenile stage, the political campaigner and the lyceum lec- turer, if they would win applause from " the million gods of the gallery," were obliged to 82 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA wave frantically the Stars and Stripes, to shout with lingering emphasis the great names of Independence days, and to chal- lenge all the world with imitations of the choice bits of flamboyant rhetoric in the elo- cution reciters. And the popular novelist, if he touched events in the days of General Washington, or in the days of Commodore Perry, found it useful to make every Ameri- can a gentleman and a hero, while the rest of the world was a bully or a fool. That day is past or is fast passing. When this world war shall have told its story that day for the United states will have gone for- ever. The critical study of the material of American history, and this experience in actual world war, have changed the point of view of the American mind. The politician who expects to win votes because he declares the United States "can lick all creation," never again will be elected to Congress, or, if elected, he will find his low level in the in- significant minority, when the hour of testing comes and the crisis of the nation is on. Events of the past twelvemonth in the his- THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 83 tory of this American Republic have been critical, not for this Republic alone, but for the cause of representative institutions every- where. It seemed at times as though, in the free and fierce clashings of political parties, the nation had lost its bearings, and that democracy itself would be disproved. But, when the fury passed and the red dust set- tled, it was plain that the stars still shone. These months of controversy and conflict in the United States have been writing the noblest certificate democracy ever received. The people have been free. Discussion has been unshackled on the platform and in the press. The opinions of the street have found utterance in Congress, and the maddest con- troversies at Washington have been pub- lished abroad on the street in the pioneer villages and in the mining towns of the mountains. But now, at the dawning of the day, the new day of soul-testing for this Re- public, the day of the Republic's entrance into the world's war, the nation stands before the world unashamed and unafraid. This day is the testimony of experience to 84 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA the judgment of the Fathers of Independ- ence, a hundred and fifty years after, the testimony which the autocrats of the world cannot gainsay — that a free people may be trusted to govern themselves. The Idea in Conflict The political idea of government through representation, released into the world's mind in northern Germania, became an idea in conflict. A vital idea always disturbs the clod in which it is set free. It ceases to dis- turb only when it ceases to live. The Anglo-Saxon idea of representative government, astir two thousand years ago, in its primitive form, in the pagan mind of the remote northern seclusion of the Ger- manic world, untouched by the culture of Greece or by the autocratic militarism of the Caesars and the Roman Empire, has been the inspiring idea in all the history of the English-speaking world. It still is the dis- turbing spark in the heavy and benumbing clod of the world's despotism everywhere. As 1 was pondering this fact in the early THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 85 history of the institutions of poHtical free- dom recently, I chanced upon some perti- nent paragraphs by an American historical scholar, a son of the State of Kentucky, whose right to speak on a question in the science of government has been recognized, not in the United States alone, but also in the two greatest universities of Germany, one whose neutrality of mind is not ques- tioned, and whose services as an expert is being proved this very year in the centres of light at home and by the foremost men in China — Robert McNutt McElroy, Professor of American History in Princeton University. Dr. McElroy's article on " The Prussian War Against Teuton Ideals" was written after careful and sympathetic study of the situation in Germany at first-hand. It was published in an American magazine months after the war in Europe broke out, and while the United States was still neutral, and Count von Bernstorff, the German Ambassa- dor, was still accepted at Washington. I quote only sentences pertinent to the special point here under discussion — the birth of the 86 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA idea of representative government, and its conflict for "a place in the sun." "The grandest political idea ever produced," which Professor McElroy calls "Teutonic" and " German," I venture to call Anglo-Saxon. In its developed form, as the world knows it, I would now name that idea " British." With explanations, and for the purposes of these lectures, I would rename that idea, " North American." " One of the saddest features of this war of the world," says Professor McElroy, " is the fact that the German people are dying by thousands in an effort to check the spread of the grandest political idea ever produced — and one which they themselves origi- nated. "The idea of representative government, so far as its history can be traced, first ap- peared in the forests of Germany, and has long been known among political theorists as the Teutonic idea. Wherever we find the Teutons in the earliest days of European history we find not only the primary as- sembly, which had been familiar to the THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 87 people of ancient Greece and Rome, but also rough attempt at representative as- sembly. Rome had known nothing of the idea of representative government, except the military representation of a government above and independent of the people. With the coming of the Germans into history, however, there appears a new idea — namely, that the people have a right to be heard in the affairs of State, the common people as well as the nobles, and this through repre- sentatives whom they have selected. The precise difference between a modern and an ancient State is marked by the presence or absence of this idea which the Germanic race brought into history. " By degrees, as the Germanic conquests over the Roman Empire extended, the Teutonic idea in government took root ; and soon the germs of representative institutions appeared almost everywhere in Europe. From that day to the present those gifted individuals whose eyes can discern the great forces of history have eagerly watched the struggle between the Roman idea of Empire 88 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA by force and the German idea of Empire by representation. " Gradually the Teutonic idea was beaten upon the continent. The long absence of successive German Emperors in Italy, chas- ing the rainbow of the crown of the Caesars, left their retainers free to war among them- selves for supremacy. By degrees the old gospel of force overcame the new gospel of representative government, and Germany ceased to be a nation even in name. In other parts of the continent, also, except in the highlands of Switzerland and the low- lands of Holland, the Teutonic idea of Government was gradually overwhelmed by the Roman idea. Caesar's spirit again ruled the continent, and representative government was dead. " In the British Isles, however, it still lived. The Germanic tribes who had conquered Romanized Britain had come as barbarians, bringing the Teutonic idea, untainted by contact with Rome. From Hengist's land- ing in 449 to the landing of Augustine and his forty Roman priests in 597, English soil THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 89 nourished the pure Germanic idea in Govern- ment unhindered. The county meeting had come to maturity — a meeting where there sat representatives from each township, speaking and voting for their constituents. The Ger- manic idea, beaten in its native forests, had flourished here in the seclusion of the British Isles for almost a century and a half, and could not be killed. " As the years passed, one king after an- other arose, filled with the Roman idea of government from above, and strove to imitate his brother kings across the Channel — to reestablish the gospel of force, and reassert the theory that kings derive their just rights from God, and not from men. King John dared to assert this ancient idea, and was forced to face his infuriated barons at Run- nymede. Henry III reverted to it, and the grim determined figure of Simon de Montfort scattered his forces at Lewes, and then issued the summons which gave nationality to the Germanic idea in England. In 1265 the people's representatives, whom Earl Simon had summoned, assembled at Westminster, 90 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA and the idea of government by a Parliament representing all the people of England — nobility, clergy and commonalty — took its place in history. Against it the despotic Tudors, the treacherous Stuarts, and the dull Hanoverians struggled in vain. Simon's Parliament had given an ideal of govern- ment to England which could not be moved." The Lesson of the Conflict What the Princeton professor of American history describes as " the saddest feature in this war of the world " is indeed history's oldest story, and its most persistent warning. The present effort of the people of Germany, led by their evil counsellors, to check and destroy the world idea of self-government, which the Angles and Saxons and Jutes carried over from the remote provinces of the Germanic world, to the Celtic tribes of ancient Britain, fifteen centuries ago, and the price modern Germany is now paying, and must pay yet more, for this modern treason to that ancient faith, — that " saddest feature " is in accordance with history's persistent and THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 91 almost unfailing rule. In the end vital ideas triumph over brute forces. Again and again, in the world's historic conflicts, the final conquests went, not to the side that commanded the largest armies and the strongest forts, but to the side whose ideas were strongest, most vital, and most persistently loyal to the law of good-will and to the ideal of human service. Roman arms triumphed over Greece, but in the end Greek culture permeated and elevated Roman life and literature. The rough and sturdy Teuton tribes swept down from their hills and vanquished the de- generate legions of the Roman Empire, but Roman ideas of Imperialism and of military autocracy took root in the Teuton mind, and in the end ideas were victorious over phys- ical force. A hundred years ago Napoleon conceived himself the Caesar of his world, and in the overthrow of his mad world-ambition the power of Prussia had a hand. But in the end, when Waterloo passed sentence, when St. Helena executed judgment, when the 92 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA Corsican himself was dead, Napoleonism was stronger than Napoleon's armies, and, through the mind of Clausewitz and the master mind of Bismarck, and through men of Hke mind who were their disciples, the Napoleonic idea of Will to Power gained control of the German mind in its conflict with the Anglo-Saxon idea of the Will to Serve, brute Force vanquished love, and the Kaiser of to-day became, in his own and his people's mind, the Caesar of two thousand years ago. In very truth one of the saddest features of this world war is that in the crisis-conflict of world ideas Germany has forsaken the ideal- ism of her own prophets and philosophers and poets, and is lined up on the side of the disproved despotism of Roman force. And the lesson of it all, and of all the con- flicts of the ages, the stern warning for all the Dominions of Britain and also for the United States of America, is that neither an invincible navy with an army to match, nor a national neutrality, that seemed safe by sea and by land, could by itself save either THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA 93 or both of these nations from the fatal work- ings of history's inexorable rule. The Anglo- Saxon idea, the British idea, the North Amer- ican idea, the World idea, that a free people must be left free and be kept free — that idea cannot live merely as an abstract idea alone. It must find release in life. It must domi- nate the thinking and organize the service and direct the activities of all who would be free. That conflict of ideas is on. It is always on. The North American idea must fight for its life at all the fateful battle fronts of the world's mind. LECTURE IV THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC LECTURE IV THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC THROUGHOUT the nineteenth cen- tury the Republic of the United States loomed large and still larger in the eye of the world, as the expression and the custodian of the North American Mea. The heart of the world, generation after gen- eration, in all the struggling nationalities of Europe, was filled with fresh hope, even when hope itself almost seemed to be dead, by reason of America's declared judgment that a free people have a right to be kept free and to govern themselves. Into the thickest darkness of the very blackest days of Euro- pean autocracy in the nineteenth century, some javelins of light from America's Dec- laration of Independence had penetrated like flashes of forked lightning, and never again 97 98 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA was Europe without a witness and a fore- gleam of the coming day of the world's democracy. Many Americans themselves, during the first century or more of the Republic, were prone to think of the Revolutionary War as wholly and only an American affair. For them its geography spread over only the American Colonies, from New England to the Carolinas. For them, Lexington and Bunker Hill were its shrines, and its monu- ments were Valley Forge and Yorktown. Its great names with which their orators con- jured, and the heroes to whom their history- writers paid due honour, were George Wash- ington and his half-dozen patriot-statesmen, and his less than half-dozen soldier-saints, with his honoured allies from France, the gallant Marquis de Lafayette and Count Rochambeau at their head. For Young America the achievement of the Revolution, its matchless contribution to the greatness of the world, was gathered up in the founding of the American Republic as "the land of the free and the home of the brave." IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 99 America's Inheritance from Britain But in reality tlie American Revolution was British before it was American. Its tap- root stretched far back through England's political conflicts into Anglo-Saxon soil. Its efficient cause was the cause of every great revolution in British history. The Declaration of American Independ- ence was indeed only one incident in that noble series of the charters of freedom, which knits together the successive ages of Eng- lish-speaking civilization. The Habeas Cor- pus, the Petition of Rights, and, back of all, Magna Charta itself, were its needful pre- cursors, Philadelphia, with its Independence Hall, and its 1776, answers back across the centuries to Runnymede and its assembly of resolute barons who faced King John in 1215. The Fathers of American independence were, indeed, born in the American Colonies, but its true sires, the Fathers after the spirit, were the men, most of them forgotten, who kept the faith of democracy against despots and kings, in the armies of the Common- wealth, on the battle-fields of the Scottish lOO THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA Covenant, through the disheartening strug- gles of Irish nationaUty, and for well-nigh a thousand years in the assemblies and the Parliaments of the Common People of Eng= land. The battles of the Revolutionary War were, indeed, fought on American soil. The victories of the " embattled farmers " were American victories. The " sound which was heard round the world " carried an American accent. But the spirit of it all, the spirit that made George Washington a world hero, that gave to him such infinite patience in the face of colonial selfishness and indifference, and such heroic endurance that faltered not, even when Patriots deserted and Congress with- held supplies — that unconquerable Washing- ton spirit was the unquenched spirit of AnglO'Saxon democracy, as it lived in the Englishmen of England whose blood was in Washington's veins : the spirit that made Cromwell a terror to English tyrants and that set Wellington a rock immovable to English mobs. Through all the decades of Colonial dis- IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC lOI content in America, giving point to every protest and emphasis to every appeal, tiiere were those in Britain, the greatest of her statesmen and the noblest of her citizens, who made America's fight for the larger free- dom their own. And when a half-mad King with his half-puppet Cabinet — the King half- mad because his Prussianized notions of Divine-right arrogance were opposed by the human-right of British democracy, and his Cabinet half-puppet because the British idea of responsible government, in the Reform Bill of 1832, had not yet been born into the world — when such a King and such a Gov- ernment made war with their own colonies and kinsmen inevitable, it was in an insane disregard of the acknowledged essentials of British liberties at home. Edmund Burke spoke words of the soundest political phi- losophy in 1775 when he declared that "the characteristic mark and seal of British free- dom " is in the inseparable union of taxation with representation. And against the half- German King and his half-Junker council- lors, Burke threw his soundly Anglo-Saxon I02 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA challenge in denunciation of Parliament's rough-shod disloyalty to its own Anglo- Saxon heritage : " In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties we are every day trying to subvert the maxims which pre- serve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of free- dom itself." And to this day, and not in Britain alone, but in every one of the British Dominions, the slogan of political liberalism is the his- toric battle-cry : " Taxation without repre- sentation is tyranny." The Voice of Chatham When George III staked the security of his own crown on his policy of the subjuga- tion of the American Colonies, he committed royal suicide, because he denied the essen- tials of British freedom, and defied the great- est tribune of the British people. Greater than Burke, greater than Fox, was that prophet-voice of the North American idea, IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC IO3 the elder Pitt. The brilliant Lord Rosebery in his " Life of Chatham " calls him " the su- preme statesman of his country." And su- preme he was, through a whole generation, as herald of the new day of British freedom : most supreme when, despite the haughtiness of the King and the folly of the Government, he uttered, in 1777, the deathless words which still echo through the musty annals of the House of Lords : " If I were an American, as I am an Eng- lishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never ! never ! never I " The thunder of Chatham's speech, which resounded through Britain like the voice of Sinai, is in the same note as that which rang through the Virginia Convention of 1775, when the Celtic soul of Patrick Henry came to its immortality in words of warning, which, to some thoughtful Americans within the past two years of enforced neutrality that could not be neutral, may have had a strangely modern significance : " Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace ; but I04 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA there can be no peace. The war is actually begun. The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of re- sounding arms. Our brethren are already in the field. Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish ? What would they have ? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God I I know not what course others may take ; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death." It is the same note, the note of liberty, struck by Patrick Henry in America and by the Earl of Chatham in Britain. It is the same passion, the passion for human free- dom, stirring in the hot blood of the young Virginian, and in the uncooled blood of the Englishman tottering to his grave: the in- extinguishable passion for human rights and liberties which throbs to-day in the hearts of the Canadian people, and which, for all these months, has been sending North Amer- ica's youngest nation across the Atlantic, carrying the North American idea to the IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC I05 bloody frontiers of France and Belgium, in defense of all the little peoples everywhere who must be free or die. The ideas of freedom and self-government once let loose in the minds of men, the peace of autocrats and dictators is gone forever. Confusion in the Colonies The conflict in Britain was in part the cause, and in part the consequence of con- fusion in the Colonies. Had there been no George III, dull-witted but masterful, there would have been no George Wash- ington, clear-eyed and resolute. Had there been no George III, the British people would never have been betrayed into so fool- ish and fratricidal a war. And had there been no George Washington the confusions in America, and the jealousies and strife among the Colonies, would have made the War of the Revolution a miscarriage of the struggle for freedom. Looking back over those days of misunderstaSnding, ignorance and folly, in Britain and in America, the con- fidence of the American patriot of the time is Io6 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA justified : " We shall not fight our battles alone. There is a Divinity that shapes our ends." Had there not been, above all the clamour of the hour, and working through the stupidities of politics and the misreadings of events, a Power that is not man's power, the cause of liberty itself would have been wrecked at the hands of the very men who thought themselves the only upholders the idea of freedom had in all the world. Each one of the Colonies, according to its political temper, and the local interests of its people, had its own confusion of thought and purpose. Inasmuch as the real cause of the Revolution was a restless idea, vague and ill-defined, in the minds of the people, there was no cut and dried plan, no definite and conspicuous objective. There were every- where ignorance and selfishness and prej- udice enough to wreck any ordered program, as students of history now see quite clearly. But the Revolution was not ordered. It was born. It grew. The people went out not knowing whither they went. They saw the Gleam, and stumblingly they followed it. IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 107 A purpose was at work in what seemed nothing but chaos. In very truth a Divinity- shaped their ends. By ways that they knew not they were led, and, led by a hand from out the dark, their feet were guided into the larger freedom and the clearer light. In this great university of the South, and here, in what was then part of the Colony of the Carolinas, and in these very days when the call to service with the democracies of Britain and France against the modern enemies of the peace of the world is empty- ing your classrooms of students, and filling your campus with the khaki-clad lads being enlisted and drilled for the battle-fields of Europe — in these first days of this Republic's preliminary experiences in this the World War, we can imagine more clearly the con- fusions which staggered the Colonies, a hun- dred and fifty years ago, when the call was to take sides for or against their lawful King. In some of the Colonies, in Virginia for instance, the pioneer settlers for the most part came from England. English place- names are preserved to this day, indicating Io8 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA the shire and the parish from which the colonists came, and distinctly English ways and customs survived long- after England's political authority was renounced. The Washington family was of uncorrupted Eng- lish blood before it was of proud Virginian birth, and it honoured the Stars and Stripes, as its Washington family crest, generations before that emblem gave national significance to the American flag. George Washington himself bore through life the distinctive marks of a well-born English country gentle- man. Elsewhere in the Colonies the ancestry of the Revolution was of more mixed blood than in Virginia. The sojourn of many English colonists in the Netherlands on their way to America brought a touch of life, an original Anglo-Saxon bias, from the low- lands of Holland, where the original Anglo- Saxon idea of representative government had kept its life untainted by Roman military absolutism, long after other communities in the Germanic world had lost, not only their freedom, but also their desire to be free. IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 109 Every colony in America, before the Revolution, had received a dash of the blood of the roving and irrepressible Scot, and, in not a few of the States of this Republic, the Scottish blood that came round by way of the North of Ireland colours the life of American people, fixes the quality of their minds, and gives strength and definiteness to the accent, alike of their theology and of their politics, to this day. The Strain of the Celt But one great section of the American Republic here in the South, and stretching from the mountains of Tennessee to the sea- board, with North Carolina as its centre, is unique in this : here in this district, more than in any other, the Celts, not the Saxons, found their American homes in the Colonies before the Revolution. Settlers from the Highlands and the Islands of Scotland came to other Colonies, and deposits of Celtic life are to be found in every State. But to North Carolina the Scottish Celts came by the thousands in the hard days that followed no THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA the last Rising of the clansmen for the Stuarts, and their defeat, under Prince Charles Edward, on Culloden Moor, in 1746. Those Scottish Highlanders brought with them to America, and preserved for their children in the new world, the Gaelic lan- guage and the traditions of Celtic life, its blood-virtues and its romantic loyalties, and they poured into the veins of America, into its religious, educational and political think- ing, something of the characteristic qualities of the Celts of history. A half dozen years ago the fact that, in the Cape Fear River district of North Carolina, is to-day a great setdement of people dominating the life of more than a dozen counties, and spreading over into all the surrounding States, and proud, with all the pride of the Celt, to trace their an- cestral line back, through the confusions of the Revolutionary War, to the Scottish High- lands, — even a half dozen years ago that fact was almost wholly unknown in Canada, even in the historic Scottish districts of Nova Scotia and Ontario. And in the States of IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC III the North, cut ofl by the merciless sword of the Civil War, that Celtic element in Ameri- can life was not only not recognized, but its significance in the life of the Republic was unknown, and its meaning, as a factor in the growth of the North American idea, was not understood. But since coming to Nashville four days ago, and here in the academic groves of Vanderbilt, have I met the clan names and the clan legacies that go back to North Caro- lina, and then far back, through more than a half dozen generations, to some strath or glen or mountain loch of Scotland, where the heather still purples the hills, and where the note of the laverock lilts wildly, sweet and long, as in the tragic days that shadowed •* The Forty-five." This is not the place, nor is this Cole Lec- tureship the occasion, for a consideration of the Celtic element in the history of the Amer- ican people. Such a discussion would re- quire a close scrutiny of the dominant fac- tors, not only in this Republic, but also in Canada. It would take us back directly to 112 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA Scotland and to Ireland and to Wales. And, if -we penetrated below the surface and ana- lyzed the constituent qualities in early Eng- lish life, we might find that the idea of free- dom in England itself owes much — very much more than the ordinary student of British history has ever dreamed — to the survivals of the original Celtic life which dominated ancient Britannia, and which had crossed Europe from out the mystery-land of the Near East beyond the Dardanelles, be- fore the Greeks marched over " the ringing plains of windy Troy," centuries before the Anglo-Saxon was born into the history of the world. " Liberty Point " But our concern at this moment is not with these speculations of racial differences, or with the contributions to political theory, made by the Celtic imaginative insight into the varieties of national instinct and feeling, or yet with the Celts' sympathetic under- standing of national aspiration — a spiritual quality quite outside the range of the un- IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC H3 aided Anglo-Saxon mind, as the persistent misunderstandings of English and Irish through centuries of history so tragically il- lustrate. With none of these fascinating problems have we to do. But it would be impossible as it would be highly improper, and, in the thick of the conflict of world ideas, it would not be fitting for a Canadian of unmixed Celtic blood, with a touch of the Tar Heel in his lineage, to turn away from North Carolina's special and peculiar part in the Colonial struggle for national self-gov- ernment in the American Republic. And it would be mere blindness to shut one's eyes to the side-light which the South's Celdc gleam throws on the growth of this North American idea. Here in the South you cherish your Meck- lenburg Declaration, and you do not feel con- strained to take off your hat to Philadelphia, or to stand in special awe before Independ- ence Hall, as the only place made sacred to American liberty by deeds of devotion to the American Republic. In North Carolina, up the Cape Fear River, at Fayetteville, you 114 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA have to-day your " Liberty Point," named and known because there the North Amer- ican idea of Hberty and self-government was spoken out loud by Scottish patriots in the Gaelic language, without any knowledge of the plans or purposes of the patriots of Bos- ton and Massachusetts Bay, more than a year before the Independence Convention set free their immortal idea in the mind of the world. And there, too, at that same historic " Lib- erty Point," on February i8, 1776, Scottish Highlanders from far and near, thrilled to the impassioned words, in their own Gaelic speech, spoken home to their hearts by the truest heroine in all Scottish history, the deathless Flora Macdonald of noble charac- ter and stainless memory, who lived and served in North Carolina through the first five troublous years of the American Revo- lution. She, who in Scotland, over thirty years before, suffered the loss of all things in loyal devotion to the House of Stuart, in America suffered persecution and humilia- tion worse than loss, in loyalty to her oath IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC II5 of allegiance to her lawful King- and his threatened cause of the House of Hanover. And on that same day, from that place of tryst at "Liberty Point," the Royal High- land Regiment, nearly three thousand strong, many of whom had carried the broadsword of " Bonnie Charlie " at Culloden, marched out in America in answer to the call of their ancient Saxon enemy, George III, and his alien Teuton dynasty from Hanover. That half-forgotten story of the Celts in America, and of their queenly heroine, Flora Macdonald, her husband and family, and of all their devotion to misguided leaders and a lost cause, which her name and her fame kept green in the heart of the world, is part of the history — part of the romance — of the Revolu- tionary War. The Motive of the Scots But more important than the story itself, more suggestive of the confusion of the time, and more significant for the North American idea in the American Republic, is the motive which held to their old solemn loyal duty, as Il6 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA they saw it, those Scottish Celts who loved George III in America not one atom more than they loved him thirty years before in Scotland, and in whose Celtic hearts the ancient fires of national freedom, despite their pledged service to Hanover, burned to the whitest glow. Why did they risk all for Hanover in America who lost all for Stuart in Scotland ? Even at this late date that question is well worth asking. The world emotions into which America is again drawn, the world problems which are now up for solution, and the world issues at stake in this war of all the nations, all combine to give a peculiar interest to the confusion of national senti- ments and the conflicts of national aspira- tions which surrounded this American Re- public when, a century and a half ago, it entered the circle of self-governing nations as a democracy of the Anglo-Saxon type. Quite frankly those Scottish Celts who fought on the Loyalist side in the American Revolution were not impelled in their serv- ice and sacrifice by any love they had for IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC II7 the English-born but Teuton-bred King, George III. He could perhaps speak the English language after a fashion, and in this one point he excelled his predecessors on the British throne, George I and George II : but, in his ideals of government and in his notions of Royal Prerogative, George III was not British but Teuton. He cherished the auto- cratic ideas common to the European mon- archs of his time, and, acting on the assump- tion that, having been born in England, he must be a real English King, he gathered about him in his Council such men as ac- cepted his assumption and favoured his autocratic program. It was the last stand of the sovereign King against the sovereign People. The idea of popular government had already disturbed the British mind. The conflict came to a head in those stormy days of George III, and, before the nineteenth century was three decades through, the authority of the People was acknowledged as supreme, and the direct and constant responsibility of the Government to the People's elected representative in Parliament Il8 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA became a foundation-stone in the British sys- tem : the days of autocracy on the throne of British peoples everywhere were numbered. But before the nerve of crowned autocracy in Britain was drawn, the Revolution seemed the only alternative. Here on this continent the conflict raged, and raged with all the excesses of feeling and of speech which rev- olution always brings. The supreme end in view, for the Patriots, was right and patriotic, and was wholly inevitable if a free people must enjoy the right to govern them- selves. But, all extravagances of political speech aside, the choice, for both Patriots and Loyalists, was hard to make. They all wanted to be free in their self-government, but, even for the foremost of the Patriots, who loved " the flag of a thousand years " as truly as did the Loyalists, the wrench away from their old traditions was hard to make. But for the Scottish people here in the Colonies the situation was doubly trying. For the Scots who fought on the Stuart side in Scotland the choice involved, not loyalty to the person of the King, or thought for IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC II9 their own interests of property or of freedom, but rather — and this is the permanently de- termining element — personal regard for the abiding sacredness and authority of a pledged oath of allegiance. The oath, the hated oath compelled by their forever hated enemy, the Duke of Cumberland, they had signed after Culloden. For them and for their descend- ants to this day, that oath was the bitterest humiliation. But they took it in Scotlandj and, in America, thirty years after, they kept it. With the uncharted leagues of the At- lantic rolling between, and in spite of all the plausible sophistries which might satisfy easier scruples of conscience, that hard and hateful oath held. It held even though all their personal sympathies and all their racial traditions and national aspirations might easily have yielded. They swore to their own hurt in Scotland and in America they changed not. The Moral Reaction That was a hundred and forty years ago. The geography of the world's map has I20 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA changed since then, and changed, too, are the poUtical attractions and repulsions of the peoples of the world. Since then the little one of Colonial days in America has become a thousand, and, in the far flashings of Eu- rope's war, the military achievements of the Revolution in America shrink to the size of incidents in a skirmish. In the perspective of the centuries the Revolution is seen to be great, not as a thing, but only as an idea. But the moral law has not changed. Moral differences have not been erased. Moral obligations have not lost their authority. Nowhere in North America to-day, no- where within the sweep of the North Amer- ican idea, is loyalty to a pledged word of honour regarded as disloyalty to any worthy cause. The moral reaction of the American people in these last days has carried this American Republic to the utmost extreme of national revolt against the immoral notion of the German Empire, — that, in the interna- tional sphere, the most solemn treaty be- tween nations becomes, when the selfish in- terests of the State seem to require it, no IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 121 more sacred or more obligatory than a wind- tossed " scrap of paper." How deep tliat moral reaction is, how real, and how significant, even when it touches the treasured traditions of the Revolutionary- War itself, is illustrated for me in two per- sonal experiences of the past twelvemonth, one in the South, the other in the North, and both while the United States was still, in name at least, neutral in its attitude to Brit- ain and to Germany. For some twenty years past there has been in the very heart of that Highland Scottish district of North Carolina, at Red Springs, in Cumberland County, a college for the education of young women. On the occa- sion of my first visit to the State I was taken to see that college, and I found that, of more than two hundred students in residence, eighty-three per cent, were of Scottish name and ancestry. They came to college from a half dozen neighbouring States, but in the far past, in the pioneer years before the Revolution, their forefathers came from the Highlands of Scotland. Cut ofT by the 122 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA Revolution in the eighteentli century from their Scottish heritage beyond the Atlantic, and by a still deeper chasm cut off from life in the States of the North by the Civil War in the nineteenth century, they cherished with intensest devotion, in their home life and in their college institutions, the heritages of sentiment and of blood-relationship which, the world over and in all the generations, make up so much of life for the spirit of the Celt. And last year, under leadership that was, in its origins, pardy Scottish Presby- terian and partly French Huguenot, that college, with its worthy academic history, was incorporated by the Legislature of North Carolina as "The Flora Macdonald College," and, under the patronage of His Honour the Governor of the State, it was re-dedicated, on the birthday of Queen Victoria, to the mem- ory of Scotland's most-loved heroine. Time's Revenges And so the wheels of time bring round its own revenges. There in Cumberland County, the county that, into the history of IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 1 23 the State, carried, in Saxon spite, the very- name of the bitterest old-time enemy of the Scottish Celts, the name of Flora Macdonald, in all the days to come, shall be preserved in most honourable association, with the worthy hope that her spirit of unselfish devotion will be perpetuated by the lives of educated womanhood far and wide through the homes and the schools of the Republic. The spirit of that name shall glorify loyalty to duty as a priceless element in the life of both the individual and the nation : and it shall give immortality, in the minds of American peo- ple, to the noble sense of reverence for treaty obligations, which, in the reactions of national standards that follow this world war, must give world-power and the right to leadership to the North American idea in the American Republic. But more meaningful than the romantic story of Flora Macdonald, and even more significant of the changed interpretations of the history of the Revolution, is the other incident of the past year, which comes to mind here in the historic South. It hap- 124 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA pened in Chicago, one hundred and thirty- five years after the surrender of Lord Corn- walHs at Yorktown, in the ancient English Dominion of Virginia. I was on that occasion the chief speaker at a great celebration, by the Sons of the American Revolution, of the surrender of Cornwallis on October 19, 1781. Some of the paragraphs I then spoke to that most loyal American audience may not be out of place here in the South, or out of time now when the whole American nation is being conscripted for service, in America and in Europe, with the Canadians and the British, for the maintenance throughout the world of the very institutions of democracy and self- government for which General Washington fought so bravely in the War of the Revolu- tion. These are words I spoke to the Illinois Society of the Sons of the American Revolu- tion last year : " This occasion is significant at least in this : for the first time in your history you have chosen as your commemoration speaker a British subject. It would seem as though IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC I25 the division of the English-speaking world, which scored and scarred the eighteenth century, does not, in this twentieth century, divide the English-speaking peoples. And it seems, too, that the estrangement of the American Colonies from Britain, and their separation from what history must forever call their * Mother Country,' was not an estrangement or a separation that cut down to the roots of the things that are deepest, most real and most permanent on either side. The flags were divided, but both remained, and still remain, ' Red, White and Blue.' The forms of government were changed, but never once, in America or in Britain, has there been persistent disloyalty to those Anglo-Saxon principles of civil liberty, which, as the common heritage of both, run back through our common history of more than fifteen hundred years. The century that in- tervenes between this day and the days of Cornwallis and Washington had its mis- understandings and its strife in the English- speaking world, but, for more than one hun- dred years, there has been no English- 126 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA speaking war. For us, as for you, time has made the bounds of freedom wider yet. For you, as for us, humanity to-day calls loud and louder still for those defenses of freedom, those institutions of justice and those ideals of citizenship which are our common inherit- ances, and which it is our national duty and our glorious privilege to make secure for all the world. The Significance of the Past " And this is the abiding significance, the world significance, of what is happening here in this Cornwallis Surrender commemoration to-night. You who glory in your name as ' Sons of the American Revolution ' give warm and liberal welcome to a British sub- ject, and you call him to speak your com- memoration word on this meaningful occa- sion : and why ? It is because for you, true Americans, as for all true men in Britain and all true men in France, the world has come to that new time, that momentous time, when the revolutions of the past are significant only as they signify in the present the larger IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC I27 human freedom, when the achievements of the past are worth remembering only as they give new impulse to something worthier in the present, and when loyalty to the past is noble only when it means, and is made to mean, unfaltering devotion to those principles and those ideals which make past and present a fitting call, a compelling prelude, to a greater future, with its better freedom, its truer jus- tice, and its nobler peace, for all peoples over all the world. " But this occasion has significance even stranger if more personal. You proud Sons of the American Revolution, in calling to be your commemoration speaker a British sub- ject, have called one who is also not only a native-born Canadian, and whose fa- ther and whose grandfather were born in Canada, but whose claim to be one of the ' Sons of the American Revolution ' is as direct and as highly prized as is your own. Forebears of my blood and family name marched in the regiments and suffered the sorrows of the Revolutionary War — but on the Loyalist side. 128 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA "When the Royal Highland Regiment, three thousand strong, marched out of Fay- etteville, North Carolina, on February i8, 1776, their tartan colours flying, their bag- piges playing * vvi' an unco flare,' the air filled with the battle-cries of their clans, among the hundreds of Macdonald clansmen was one, ' Iain Mac Ewan Oig,' who on that day carried, for George III and the House of Hanover, the same broadsword he carried thirty years before, on the fateful field of Culloden Moor, for Prince Charles Edward and the House of Stuart. That man was my great-great-grandfather ; and with him marched and fought three of his sons, one of them a young corporal, whose name I bear. And his fourth son fought under Lord Cornwallis and marched in the line of sur- render at Yorktown. " The fortunes of the war brought that whole family of Macdonald clansmen to Nova Scotia. In 1783, after the war was over, they were each given soldiers' grants of land in the wide valley of the East River, in the County of Pictou. And in that birth- IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 1 29 place of many Canadian Celts, on one of the Macdonald family homesteads, old and gnarled, but living still, and in witness of events we celebrate here to-night, there grows to this day the ' Cornwallis Apple Tree.' "And so it was that I felt qualified and free to accept the coraial invitation to be the guest of the Illinois Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, on this occasion that commemorates the surrender of the sceptre of British dominion in the American colonies to General Washington, as head of the American forces. For I, too, represent the loyal blood and the deathless spirit of that revolutionary war. " But you will ask nie — you have a right to ask me — how it came that men like those Scottish Highlanders, who had neither Teu- ton blood nor Tory sympathy, men who, like their descendants, held to the democratic doctrine of the Presbyterians and to the democratic politics of the Liberals, who in Scotland had been Radicals before the Revo- lution and in Canada for six generations I30 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA have continued radicals in Church and State — how came it that for that brief spasm they stood on the reactionary side and fought against the organizing idea of true de- mocracy. That question deserves an honest answer, but to it no adequate answer is given in any of the histories, either American or British. " And this is the answer, the answer true to the facts of the situation in North Caro- lina, and true also to the blood history of the Celts in America and in Britain, and through more than two thousand years since the Celtic tribes broke into the life of West- ern Europe. Those Scottish Highlanders, who rose with the Stuarts under Prince Charlie in 1745 and were defeated at Cul- loden, were compelled, after the Stuart cause was lost, to take the oath of allegiance to the House of Hanover. That oath was the ut- most limit of personal humiliation to a proud and unconquered race of people. It bound those who took it to their utmost sacrifice in defense and service to their King and his cause. IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC I3I " That oath held in Britain, and it held in America. Their interests of citizenship as well as their personal sympathies might have been with the Patriots. But there was the oath. They lost everything — property, peace and the advantages of citizenship in the United States. But they kept their oath. " That was a hundred and forty years ago when my ancestors marched out under the banner of Scotland in defense of the Union Jack of Britain — marched out against their own Celtic kith and kin, who, freed from the oath, served under General Washington. Your ancestors won the victory, while mine met defeat. But to-day, on this commemo- ration of victory, we rejoice together. But we do not forget, no true American wishes to forget, that among the defeated were those who fought for their oath's sake, who sacrificed for their word of honour, and who earned that day the acclaim which, in this larger and clearer light, in this darker and deadlier shadow, America raises to those who hold to the sacredness and the obliga- tion of a ' scrap of paper.' " 132 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA There was indeed confusion in the Colonies a hundred and forty years ago. There was confusion among the Colonists themselves. There was confusion worse confounded be- tween the Government in Britain and the free-minded British citizens in America. That confusion led to revolution. But, in its turn, the revolution in the minds of men on both sides prepared the way to better understandings, not for the Anglo-American democracy alone, but for all the world. And it was as an expression of the com- plete understanding which, in these later days of democracy's entente, binds together, in this world-war's fierce conflict, the whole British Empire and the whole American Re- public that, as part of last year's celebration of the Surrender of Cornwallis, a native-born Canadian of the Loyalist stock, by the Illi- nois Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, was elected, perhaps for the first time in history, " an honourary member of the Sons of the American Revolution." Eye to eye we see to-day. To-morrow at the battle front shoulder to shou.lder we shall IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 133 stand. And on the third day, the great and glorious new day, the day of the world's de- Hverance from hatreds and strifes, we shall stand together, all we of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of the British inheritance, and of the North American idea — stand together, against the confusion of the nations, for the harmonious life-concert of humanity. The Aftermath of Revolution Revolution in itself is lawlessness. It is open and violent revolt against the estab- lished order of things. At the time, and under the circumstances, revolution may justify itself to men who love liberty and to whom despotic conditions of life have become intolerable. For them it may seem the only way out into the open, and, if successful, their lawless revolution may be justified by their law-abiding chil- dren. So it seems to many lovers of free- dom among the German people to-day: revolution against the Kaiser and the Hohen- zollern dynasty, had they but power to strike, is their only hope. So it seemed 134 THE NORTH A]MERICAN IDEA yesterday to the man who, in Russia's name, rose against the Romanoffs and dethroned the Czar. And so was it with Washington and Jefferson and FrankHn and the Fathers of American Independence, who, for free- dom's sake, made the North American idea express itself in the American Republic. Because of the reactionary dogmas at that time in control of government thinking in Britain, the revolution of the Colonies in America was inevitable. And all true Britons, from the Prime Minister in the Brit- ish House of Commons, to the most loyal British citizen in the remotest colony of the Empire, join with the Right Hon. Arthur Balfour, the loyal Scot, who, as head of the British Mission to the United States, in this strange new time, represents in Washington to-day the sentiments of the Mother Country to the Daughter Republic, and who, yester- day, at Mount Vernon laid the chaplet of the Empire's grateful honour at the tomb of one of the noblest of Anglo-Saxon statesmen. But inevitable though the Revolution was, it also was, in some respects, as revolutions IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC I35 always are, the sowing of dragon's teeth. The aftermath of the American Revolution appeared for the American Republic in the century that followed after. Just because a revolution is an explosion of pent-up ideas, and because the scattering abroad of vital ideas, in a lawless explosion, may be dan- gerous to the institutions of law and order, a revolutionary start puts a heavy strain on a new Republic. Democracy requires that the people's will should be steady, and the sense of law's authority strong, if "the common sense of most" is to "keep the fretful realm in awe." In every time of strife and war in the United States, some of the turbulent ideas of the first Revolution have been astir. The habits of lawlessness, which through the century marked pioneer settlements along the receding frontier of American life, are, by some students of the problem, referred back to the disturbing conditions through which the colonial adventurers passed on their rough, stage-coach way to the settled life of the Republic. A bomb, when fired, may be destructive of things, but explosion 136 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA is the end of it. But a vital idea, right or wrong, once it is set free, lives on in other personalities, and may disturb the peace of generations yet unborn. The War of 1812-14, the last war between peoples of the English-speaking world, was part of the aftermath of the original War of the Revolution. How far off that last war is, and how very long ago, was brought home to me on a motor trip, out from Nash- ville to " The Hermitage," the old home of General Andrew Jackson, who led the Amer- ican forces, in that last battle at New Or- leans, months after peace between the war- ring nations had been declared. The relics in the museum, and the coach in which Jackson travelled from his farm home in Tennessee to his inauguration as President at Washington, are not more out of date to- day than are the questions supposed to be at issue in that controversy of more than a hun- dred years ago between Britain and the United States. Under the shadow of the world's black and desolating war, the British Empire and the American Republic, these IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 137 two nations of one people, with one back- ground, and now with one solemnizing world-responsibility, stand close together, closer far than at any time in all their past. The heroes of each are honoured by both and the achievements of one are the treas- ures of the other. To a Canadian to-day the memorials of Andrew Jackson at " The Hermitage " here in the South, like the Perry Centennial Memorial at Put-in-Bay, on the shore of Lake Erie in the North, are not reminders of the long-dead follies of the century that is gone, but are pledges, sacred pledges sworn in blood a hundred years ago, of our common allegiance to the cause of world-freedom, and of our newly-pledged Anglo-American devotion to the maimed and lacerated causes of the world's peace. Pan-Germanism in A7nerica The North American idea in the American Republic has had to face, through the past dozen years or more, one persistent sys- tematic and insidiously threatening menace. That menace to the right of a free people to 138 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA govern themselves is represented to the man in the street in the doctrines of Pan-Ger- manism. In the days before the war broke up the fixed confines of men's thinking, the term Pan-Germanism awakened only academic interest in the United States. The German war-lords and their noisy undergraduate imitators might drink to " Der Tag " in Berlin on every convenient occasion, but that habit was looked upon by American students, alike in Berlin and in Boston, as a harmless custom befitting young men in their " cups." It conveyed no serious sig- nificance. Not even students from Britain, or from British Dominions overseas, were disposed to feel insulted by the meaning with which the planned and purposed war has since crammed the Prussian toast. They did not believe, they could not believe, that men who were their class-room friends, who sat with them under the teachings of the master minds of Germany's foremost univer- sities, could cherish the barbarous and brutal ideas of a world war, such as " Der Tag " IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 139 suggested to the German militarists, and was made to suggest to the great body of Ger- man students. And if German students did cherish those ideas when they honoured their customary toast, the marvel is in their colossal dunderheadedness in making such open confession. And when at last, in 19 14, The Day of which they sang did come, and when with ruthless plainness it was revealed that the German State had deliberately planned war on a colossal and destructive scale, first against France and Russia, and then, and most determinedly, against Britain, the typ- ical Englishman in England could not be- lieve his ears or credit his eyes. In the early months of the war the news- papers and magazines in Germany w^ere reeking with intense and malignant hatred of Britain. The toast of the years of pre- tended peace was translated by the war- lords, the mom.ent the war was called, into the most diabolical and malevolent curses of Hate. Men in England who thought of men in Germany as their own Saxon half-brothers I40 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA were disposed almost to laugh at the violence and ungovernable manifestations of the spirit of hatred which took possession of many soldiers in the German army and of many civilians in the cities of Germany. Even though the war had actually begun, Cana- dians were as slow of heart to believe in the fiendish blood-lust of the German soldiers and their officers as were the British. They all smiled an almost incredulous smile at the seeming extravagance of Ernest Lissauer, in his poem, so widely read in Germany at the time. But before the first Christmas of the war had passed, observant Canadians knew that Lissauer's lines in " A Chant of Hate Against England," was the utterance of no mere madness at work in the poet's brain, but was the free expression of a national hatred, ruthless and murderous, but true to the temper and the spirit of the Prussian mind. Since October, 1914, the world has seen too much ugly evidence of what the war-lords of Germany really meant, to try any longer to explain away the German poet's Hymn of Hate : IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 141 "In the Captain's Mess, in the banquet hall, Sat feasting the officers, one and all ; Like a sabre-blow, like the swing of a sail, One seized his glass held high to hail ; Sharp-snapped like the stroke of a rudder's play. Spoke three words only : ' To the Day ! ' " Whose glass this fate ? They had all but a single bate. Who was thus known ? They had one foe, and one alone — England I ** Take you the folk of the Earth in pay. With bars of gold your ramparts lay. Bedeck the ocean with bow on bow. Ye reckon well, but not well enough now. French and Russian they matter not, A blow for a blow, a shot for a shot, We fight the battle with bronze and steel. And the time that is coming Peace will seal. You will we hate with a lasting hate, We will never forego our hate : Hate by water and hate by land. Hate of the head and hate of the hand. Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown, Hate of seventy millions, choking down. We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe, and one alone — England I " As it has been interpreted in the after experiences of the war, in its cold-blooded 142 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA brutality and in its insane war-lust, the pagan spirit of the Prussian soldiery, when they crossed Belgium and rioted in France, is now known to be of a piece with the spirit of the Kaiserism. And that spirit is in tune with what they meant when, in their serious discussions in university class-rooms and in journals of culture before the war, they pre- sented the qualities and ideals of Pan-Ger- manism. Bernhardi^ s Secret Mission Within the past year or two a great deal of light has been thrown on the Pan-German program in the United States, and the public mind is much more sensitive to the signif- icant facts of Germany's intrigues in this Republic. Since coming to the South I was not a litde interested to learn that, even to leaders of public opinion on the press and in public office, it was unknown that the most notorious officer on the General Staff of the German Empire was a secret visitor to the American Republic in 1913. that he spied out the land from San Francisco to New IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 143 York, that he was the authorized go-between from the war-lords in Berlin to the German- Americans in the United States, that in con- fidence he warned them of the Plan of Cam- paign laid down by the German General Staff for the opening and the prosecuting of the war, this world war, which, he told them, the year before it broke, was both certain and imminent. The fact of that secret visit of General von Bernhardi to the United States, the program of it, and its meaning in the light of subsequent events, were told to me by one of the two Americans who knew these facts at first hand from Bernhardi himself — Dr. David Starr Jordan, the Chan- cellor of Leland Stanford University, Cali- fornia. It was in September, 19 14, that I met Dr. Jordan in Boston. He had just ar- rived from London, on his return trip from Europe and the Balkans, after an absence from the United States of a year and four months. There in the office of the World Peace Foundation, of which both of us were directors, he told the story of his meeting in 144 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA May, 1913, with von Bernhardi in the Ger- man Consulate in San Francisco, at a private gathering of German-Americans invited by the German Consul. Not only had the story never been published, but it was so amazing and so significant that I asked him to write out what he could remember of Bernhardi's address, that I might publish it if I saw fit. He wrote nearly a dozen foolscap pages. On November 26, 1914, I published in The Globe the following paragraphs from Chan- cellor Jordan's manuscript : " I met von Bernhardi in San Francisco and heard him give an address on May 26, 1 9 13, just as I was leaving for Europe on a tour of Germany, the Balkans and Australia. The invitation was from the German Consul in San Francisco. It was on the official paper of the Consul's office. The gathering was composed of about three hundred per- sons, all Germans except one other American and myself. The Consul presided, and the meeting was semi-official, but private. So far as I know there was no reporter present, and no report was published. I would not IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 145 have known that the German cavalry gen- eral was in America except for this meeting. He went to Los Angeles for a similar gather- ing, then to St. Louis and eastern centres of German population. I understood he came over from Japan. " Bernhardi's mission was to Germans in America. His very evident purpose was to neutralize the policy of good-will among the nationaUties represented in our population, to counteract the work for international peace, to prepare the Germans for the com- ing war, which he said was both inevitable and near, and to convince them that Ger- many's idea of war is righteous, and that this particular war was thoroughly well planned and would be carried out to the greatness and glory of the German Empire. " Very unmistakable were his references to the planned march through Belgium and the taking of Paris. He did not mince matters. Questions of morals, of international treaties, of national rights, he brushed aside. * Law,' he said, * is a makeshift ; the reality is force. 146 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA Law is for weaklings ; force is for strong men and strong nations.' " Perhaps his chief purpose was to advise Germans in the United States that Britain, not France, is in Germany's way, that Britain would soon be reached, and reached by Ger- many's war. " Bernhardi's address was a little more unreserved, more brutally frank, than his book. His work was part of the campaign to organize German opinion in the United States, and to separate it from American opinion. That campaign was begun here fifteen years ago by Professor Karl Lamp- recht of Leipsig. The same campaign has been carried on in Brazil, only much more openly. Its note was struck by General Keim in Germany, who preached the doc- trines of Faith, Hope and Hate. Belgium was to be invaded for the purpose of secur- ing Antwerp and other naval bases from which to strike Britain. " When I heard Bernhardi I thought his words those of another of the war-mad mili- tarists. When 1 was in Germany last Au- IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC I47 gust, and saw his plan of campaign adopted by the German army, I knew he spoke for the General Staff, and that they are all vic- tims of the same madness." The publication of that statement from Dr. David Starr Jordan was the occasion of much comment. At first pro-Germans denied the authenticity of the report. Failing in that, they repudiated the reliability of General von Bernhardi, and his right to speak for the authorities in Germany. But it was after- wards known that his mission had the ap- proval of the Imperial authorities at Berlin, and for his services on that mission he was honoured by the Kaiser, and, since the war began, was appointed to a higher and more responsible post. What gave von Bernhardi's world tour and his statements permanent interest is the fact that he was not only authorized by the Imperial authorities, but that he was himself received, and his plans and purposes were promoted, by the German consuls in the United States. He travelled from place to place without any publicity. The fact of his 148 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA visit to the Pacific coast became public only through Dr. Jordan's chance account of it after the war, which he foretold, had actually begun. His visit to the German Ambassa- dor was never made public. That he was in Egypt in February, 1912, and subsequently in Singapore and elsewhere in the Orient, became known in America only by accident. Everywhere secrecy was maintained. Every- where the German mind was secretly pre- pared for the coming of the war. On a later occasion Dr. Jordan made to me this state- ment : " I read ' Germany and the Next War ' before I met the author. I said then that if Germany really accepted Bernhardi's views, Europe would have to crush it out like a nest of snakes. Germany did accept those views, and now there can be no peace or safety until the snakes, and the whole system that produced them, are utterly crushed out." Bcrnstorff^ s Treason to Honour In May, 191 7, it is unnecessary to prove the now known facts of Germany's treason to truth and honour and international good-will. IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC I49 The disclosures made in connection with the dismissal from the Embassy at Washington of Count von Bernstorfi justify the very worst suspicions and rumours current in the United States and Canada. Indeed not the half has yet been told. It is true, as an informed American has stated, that there is evidence enough to have hanged the dis- missed Ambassador, six times over, for the murder of Americans in the United States, to which crimes Count von BernstorfiE and members of his staff were parties. Some day that evidence will be given to the public. It involves hundreds of Germans in the United States. It deals with the most notorious crimes committed in North America during the past three years. It involves every one of the German diplomats and statesmen, who where the honoured guests of the Govern- ment and people of the United States at the very time they plotted against the lives of American citizens. A case in point was brought to my atten- tion only to-day. I cite it because of its interest in other directions. It touches not I50 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA the crimes of murder and arson involved in other cases, but only the impudent and brazen dishonour of Count von Bernstorff at the very time when he was the proud guest of American universities, and was honoured by them with their very highest degree of Doctor of Laws. As if to brand the culprit with insolence as well as with dishonour, his ofTense in this case was committed as orator before the American Society of Political and Social Science, when he presented with great and circumspect detail an oration on " The Development of Germany as a World Power," in which he plagiarized dozens of whole passages, both of opinion and of argument, from William H. Dawson's book " The Evolution of Modern Germany." In the most barefaced manner, Bernstorff pre- sented extracts and opinions as his own, and was party to their publication in the annals of the Academy, and to the " copyright " notice which the oration carried. A more shameless case of deliberate plagiarism, and under circumstances more vulgarly dis- honourable, cannot be found. The facts of IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC I51 it were published in the issue of the New York Herald for December 25, 1914, but, as far as my information goes, the guilty Am- bassador made no apology and expressed no regret. Mention of it here is pertinent be- cause gentlemen of Vanderbilt University had to do with the exposure of this pla- giarism and with the condemnation of the "Shyster" — to quote the word applied to the notorious Count — who scandalized the ten American universities, whose honourable degree he so basely dishonoured. Not many weeks before the war broke out, which Germany had planned against the democracies of the world, I was guest with Bernstorff at the annual banquet of the New England Society of Jewelers and Silver- smiths, in Providence, Rhode Island. His conduct on that occasion, as I now very well remember, was such as became the privi- leged " Scoundrel " he proved himself to be. That he knew of the coming of the war, and that, as Chancellor Jordan has since declared, " Britain, not France was in Germany's way and would soon be reached by Germany's 152 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA war," and that Canada was involved with Britain in tiie German Ambassador's mind, was made memorably plain to me by the personal conduct of the Count himself. Not even the studied insolence of his Prussian habit would explain his behaviour to me as a Canadian. When Germany made war with Britain inevitable, four months later, 1 under- stood. And it is a distinct satisfaction now to recall that then, under his very eyes, the response of a great audience of represent- ative New Englanders made it very unmis- takable that, if the worst came to the worst in international relations, the United States and Canada would stand together, in un- wavering defense of Anglo-American democ- racy, against all comers whether on the Atlantic or on the Pacific. Count von Bern- storff as a diplomat was true to the ethical standard laid down by General von Bern- hardi in his address at the secret meeting in San Francisco a year earlier : " The State is above morality." By him and by the whole German Embassy staff in Washington, Bern- hardi's dictum, as quoted by Dr. Jordan, was IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 1 53 accepted : " Law is a makeshift : tlie only- reality is force. Law is for weaklings : force is for strong men and strong nations." And it is this arrogant denial of all the moral obligations, of nations as of citizens, this systematic intriguing against the peace of every nation except their own, and this long-continued campaign of Pan-Germanism in America, in spreading their devilish doc- trines of " Faith, Hope and Hate," — it is this experience of what German " kultur " really means in American life that, now when the guards are down, makes every Prussian a suspect in America, and makes Pan-German- ism an intolerable ofifense against the liberty and the honour of the American Republic. The ideas of Pan-Germanism can be allowed no quarter in the national mind that gives free play to the North American idea of the right of a free people to govern themselves. LECTURE V THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION LECTURE V THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION CANADA was the first colony of any Empire in all the world's history to come to national self-government without revolution, without separation and without sacrificing the background of the nation's history. The Coming of Canada Not by the old way of war, and not at the cost of the alienations war always brings, but by a new and living way, the way of normal evolution and peaceful development, came Canada to share in the inheritance of the North American idea, and to hold on this continent the most strategic place of Anglo- American unity in the English-speaking world. And not by inheritance alone, nor by any 157 158 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA happy chance of geography or of history, but by the deliberate and persistent choices of the Canadian people, was it determined that Canada should stand up in North America, a free nation, embodying the North American idea. Through a half century of confusion and conflict, involving sometimes fierce political struggles and sometimes even armed strife, the people of the colonies of Canada came up to the rights of national autonomy secured through the British North American Act of 1867. In and through that Act of the Imperial Parliament, the people of Canada, first by their representative commissioners, and then through their responsible Legislative Assem- blies, declared to the Government and Par- liament of Britain and to all the world, the Canadian interpretation of what we call the North American idea — the right of a free people to govern themselves. And a half century later, when the scat- tered colonies had grown into a federated and united Dominion covering a half conti- nent, and when the far-separated and diver- IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION 159 gent populations had become a nation of eight millions in the epoch-making war days of 1 9 14, Canada was not disloyal to the North American idea, nor disobedient to that heav- enly vision. When the day of testing and of decision came, when the declaration of words had to be registered in deliberate and costly deeds, the responsible Parliament of Canada, with the consent and by the support of all political parties in the elected House of Com- mons, declared to themselves, to their con- stituents, and to all men everywhere, that the historic Anglo-Saxon idea of government — the right of free people to govern them- selves — meant, and must be made to mean, freedom and self-government, not for Canada alone but for Belgium as well. That decla- ration of the world significance of the North American idea Canada has endorsed in the unstinted sacrifices of all her people, and has sealed, and to the tragic and terrible end will continue to seal, with the strong young blood of the best of her sons. In a Canadian university and to a Cana- dian audience it might perhaps be thought l6o THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA somewhat out of place to present with such precision, and such deliberateness of em- phasis, the large and practical freedom of Canada in all matters that touch the terri- tory, the government and the obligations of the Canadian people. Canadians might be supposed to know the range of their own liberties, to consider the fact of their own duties, and to appreciate the worth of their own inheritance. To say that Cana- dians do not always know, do not always consider, and do not always appreciate the deeper meaning of self-government, nor al- ways answer up to the higher obligations of democracy, is but to say that they are a people of the same breed and democratic type as the people of the United States. Each people have their advantages and their handicaps. Both are alike in this, that, as the child with the parent, as the junior with the senior, Canadians have been slow to learn from the longer experience of Amer- icans, and quick to resent both dictation and advice ; even as Americans, in the youthful days of their nation, thought Britain an old IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION l6l fogey, whose experience was not worth study- ing and whose example was to be shunned. With so much in common we have often de- cHned to learn the primary things in each other's history, and sometimes we have be- haved with the brutal frankness of blood relations. Americatt Questions Aboict Ca^tada! s Politics But in the fierce light which the war in Europe has turned upon Canada and affairs Canadian, the people of the United States, until now absorbed in their own affairs and in the colossal problems of life in their own Republic, now ask about Canada the ques- tions asked by those who seriously desire to know. And it is in response to that desire which one meets everywhere — the desire not of acquaintances and neighbours, but of allies and brothers — that I venture to deal in a very concrete way with the relation of Canada to the North American idea, and the coming of Canada into the world-civilization and world- democracy of North America. A personal experience illustrates what I l62 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA have in mind more clearly than it might be set forth in an abstract statement. Not many- months ago, when Canada was a belligerent in the war in Europe and the United States still a neutral, it was my privilege to give a commencement address at a university in one of the most progressive of all the Northern States. In that university address I ventured to discuss problems of Liberty, of Democracy and of Internationalism, raised several times during the present week in this Cole Lecture- ship here at Vanderbilt University. Empha- sis was laid on the primacy of Ideas over Things, on the Pauline doctrine of the abso- lute supremacy of the things of the Mind over the things of the Flesh, and on the reactions of national Liberty upon the life and thought of a free people. Being a Canadian address- ing an American university, it was convenient and not uninteresting to draw illustrations from Canadian history and from the attitude of Canada to the world conflict in Europe. I recall that day's experience not simply be- cause it was peculiar, but rather because it IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION 163 touched three pohits pertinent to matters un- der review in this present discussion. At the close of the lecture on that occasion, one gentleman of high university standing and of wide academic culture asked me this question, which seemed to surprise no one present except myself : " Did we understand you to say that the taxes paid by Canada to England are not assessed by the King of England, or collected by the English Gov- ernment?" That question might have staggered me, not by what it asked of me but by what it im- plied in him, had I been a stranger in the United States, or even a total stranger in American university and college circles. As it was, my words in reply quite failed of their mark, and seemed to sound like a fairy tale. Very definitely I gave unreserved assurance that never once, in all its half century of na- tional history, did the Dominion of Canada pay any taxes of any kind to " England," either directly or indirectly ; that Canada is not taxed for the maintenance of the " Eng- lish " Government either at home or abroad ; 1 64 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA that Canada has made no contribution, either through direct assessment or by indirect pay- ment for the upkeep of the Navy or of the Army or of the Royal House or even of the King himself ; and that, in any case, Canada, having due regard to the facts both of history and of geography, does not recognize any such divided sovereignty as the King of " England " or any such maimed authority as the " English " Government, or any such sectional power as the " English " Parliament, 6ut only the " British " King, the " British " Government, and the " British " Parliament. And, to make assurance doubly sure, I ven- tured to assure those surprised Americans that there was no power anywhere in all " the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland " — not in the War Office, not in the Admiralty, not in the Government, not in the Imperial Parliament itself — no power and no desire for the power that could take one dollar out of the Canadian treasury for war expenses, or for any expenses whatsoever, or that could conscript one man out of any Canadian home to serve in the army, or in IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION 165 the navy, in the flying machines or in the sub- marines. It is that assurance of national in- dependence and self-government within the world Commonwealth of the British Empire that gives meaning and reality to Canada's historic interpretation of the North American idea, the right of a free people to govern themselves. And here to-day I would go even farther than in that northern university I went last year. Here we are near the close of the third year of the war. Britain enlisted and trained and outfitted for her voluntary armies more than five millions of men, and taxed herself for her own armies, and for the war purposes of her allies, almost uncounted millions of money, but never once did an order or any command come from Britain to Canada for one conscripted dollar or for one conscripted soldier. What Canada has done in this war has been done by Canada with- out constraint and without compulsion, done by the responsible action of the Canadian Government, and with the free and undivided authority of the Canadian people. That was 1 66 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA my answer then to the first question touching Canada's government, put to me on that university occasion. That is my answer now. But a second question followed the first. It was in these words : " If Canada pays no taxes to England what good is Canada to England ? " That question might have been pertinent before there was a Canada. A hundred and fifty years ago some very eminent British statesmen, Whigs and Tories alike, were quite of the opinion that a colony that paid no taxes to the mother country was both a hindrance and a menace. And even fifty years ago, when the problem of Canadian Confederation was before the public mind, had Canada hived off from Britain, the re- sponsibilities of Britain, so it was thought, would have been greatly lessened, the shore- line of the Seven Seas would have lost some- thing of its terror, the cost of Britain's naval defense would have been reduced, and the threatening dangers from international com- plications would have been greatly mini- mized. IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION 167 But what a far cry it is from this day of the world-wide commonwealth of free na- tions to that day when colonies and overseas dominions existed for the enrichment and the gratification of the homelands, and when the notion was cherished that Canada's chief purpose was to provide revenues for Britain. That notion takes us back to the world of two centuries ago, and to the ideas of empire which prevailed before democracy came to its own. It is still the notion that enthralls the minds of those who have not heard that George III is dead, and who do not know that with him died, out of the ideals of British sovereignty at least, the old world conception of the Divine Right of Kings and the disproved theories of despotic imperi- alism. But long ago a new day dawned on the English-speaking world. It is now the day of new ideals alike for masters and for serv- ants. It is a new day for Empire and for Colony. In this new day the greatest Em- pire in all the world's history has cast off its old imperium and it begins to glory most l68 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA of all in its pledge and its promise and its proudest achievement as the world's greatest Commonwealth. Then came the third question from my three " Job's Comforters " in that American university. It was in these terms, expressed with the utmost good-nature, but in the note partly of sorrow, partly of wonder and partly of regret : " Why does not Canada strike for freedom ? " Strike for freedom ! Freedom from what ? And there was found nothing in citizenship, nothing in national aspiration, nothing in the democratic ideal, nothing which is not Canada's now or which may not be enjoyed by Canada, if Canadians supremely desire it and unite to make it theirs. Canada's First Half-Centiiry And all of that in freedom and in democ- racy is not only Canada's to-day, but it was Canada's in essence and in spirit and in promise when, just fifty years ago, the Con- stitution of Canada, as a united Dominion formed by the federation of the several Prov- IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION 169 inces, was framed. The essentials of that constitution were devised and agreed upon by representative Canadian statesmen after prolonged debate, and were expressed in the resolutions of the Quebec Conference in 1864. And when the Confederation conference met in London in 1867, the Canadian dele- gates knew then, as they had known before, that so far as the Imperial Government was concerned the door was still open — as John Bright very plainly said in Parliament — wide open, for Canada's withdrawal, for Canada's independence, and even for Can- ada's union with the United States. The British North America Act, its scope and the details of its enactments, and even the language used in its provisions — all this was the work of Canadians. The British Government and the Imperial authorities recognized the fact that although it was an act of the Imperial Parliament, it was legisla- tion for Canadian application, and must be what responsible Canadians desired. And it was their expressed desire that the Canadian constitution should be British " in principle," lyo THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA not American, in that it provided for "re- sponsible government," and for the union of executive and legislative functions, and defi- nitely held the executive directly and im- mediately under the control of the will of the people as expressed through Parliament. The constitutional development of Canada during these first fifty years has been in harmony with those original principles ; and every amendment to the British North Amer- ica Act has been such, and only such, as Canada deliberately sought, that its work- ings might the more perfectly serve Canadian purposes and make the bounds of Canada's freedom wider yet. No informed Canadian thinks that the summit of the hill has yet been reached, or that the last word in Canada's constitutional development has been spoken. But the road runs forward and not back. The larger freedom will not require any violent breach with the past or any isolation from other free peoples in other parts of the world who also are working out the vexed problem of self- government. Freedom for Canada, and the IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION 17I right of Canadians to govern themselves, does not mean, on Canada's part, any dis- loyalty to the North American idea. Canada and the British Commonwealth The coming of Canada from colonial de- pendence to national self-government, with- out revolution from the mother country, and without the vital losses and alienations rev- olution always brings, not only was some- thing new in world politics, but also it released in the mind of the world a new idea. It prepared the way for the British Common- wealth, and in the mind of the English- speaking world it gave the idea of World Commonwealth precedence of the idea of World Empire. For this reason the British North America Act, as the Constitution of Canada, takes its place, its righteous place, with the Declara- tion of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The one, to be sure, meant war and separation, the other peace and good-will, but together they constitute North America's incomparable contribution 172 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA to the freedom, the progress and the unity of the world. The coming of Canada, to be sure, seemed a comparatively insignificant incident in Im- perial affairs a half century ago. There was no wild ringing of joybells in London, and even in the inner chambers of Imperial headquarters in the Colonial Office, the Confederation of Canada was regarded as useful in its way, but quite unimportant so far as the British Empire was concerned. Lord Blachford, then Permanent Under- Secretary, exhibited the average reach of official imagination when, quite soberly, he declared : " I had always believed — and the belief has so confirmed and consolidated itself that I can hardly realize the possibility of any one seriously thinking the contrary — that the destiny of our colonies is independence, and that in this view the function of the Colonial Office is to secure that our connection, while it lasts, shall be as profitable to both parties, and our separation, when it comes, as ami- cable as possible." IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION 1 73 The bill which had been prepared by the delegates from Canada passed the House of Commons as the Canadians desired it, but the debate, while cordial enough, gave no suggestion that Parliament, in opening the door for a new nation, had " yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down." Everything was proper, but there was no vision. In introducing the measure in the House of Lords, the closing paragraph of Lord Carnarvon's speech almost caught the gleam ; and, read in the light and filled with the meanings of fifty years after, his words seem vaguely prophetic : " We are laying the foundation of a great State — perhaps one which at a future day may even overshadow this country. But, come what may, we shall rejoice that we have shown neither indifference to their wishes nor jealousy of their aspirations, but that we honestly and sincerely to the utmost of our power and knowledge fostered their growth, recognizing in it the conditions of our own greatness. We are in this measure setting the crown to the free institutions. 174 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA which more than a quarter of a century ago we gave them, and therein we remove, as I firmly believe, all possibilities of future jeal- ousy or misunderstanding." And so, on May loth, the Royal procla- mation was issued, which created on July I, 1867, the new Dominion of Canada. It was only the beginning of a new nation of the British type, and inheriting the British idea of self-government, and it united only four Provinces. But it was a beginning. And the idea grew until the Canadian Con- federation covered more than half of North America between the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic. Canada was the first born in the British family of free nations. The family has grown, and is still growing. Australia in the South Pacific followed Canada. Then came New Zealand. Through the birth pangs and agony of war South Africa claimed its rightful place. Newfoundland has long re- joiced to hold itself a self-governing colony in the surge and fogs of the North Atlantic. And when the world war broke there came IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION 1 75 from out the farthest East with pledges of devotion to the British mother, and with the sacrifices none but sons can mal<:e, India mysterious and mighty standing up on aUen soil to do a nation's bit at the fronts of battle, in heroic defense of the British Common- wealth ; and this is the wonder and surprise of a series of world surprises when an Orien- tal empire of the most ancient fame comes into the Western world to fight side by side with the Allies of modern Democracy against the latest born of world Empires whose chal- lenging alternative was "World-power or Downfall." And all of this marvel of the age, this strange meeting of the East and the West, this flowing together, over the plains of France, of the life-currents of the St. Law- rence and the life-currents of the Ganges — all of this is Freedom's issue from what was so simply done when Canada rose from be- ing a colony and began to be a nation, and when Britain turned away from the false mirage of Empire and began to be the Commonwealth of free nations that to-day 176 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA swings round the world singing together " God Save the King." Com 7non tvealth — Not Imperiu tn The Imperium is dead : and after this war on outgrown and autocratic imperialism there can be for it no hope of resurrection. The British Empire is not an empire at all in any historical sense. The King is not Emperor, neither in Great Britain nor in any of the self-governing Overseas Dominions. And even the new tide, " Empress of India," taken up by Queen Victoria for political reasons impressive within the ancient Indian Empire, is changing its content as India moves out and moves on along the tried and tested British road towards democratic self- government. Indeed the term " Dominion," as first ap- plied to Canada, was itself the convenient compromise of an afterthought. Fifty years ago, when the federation of the Provinces of Canada was being consummated by Imperial legislation in London, the term " Kingdom of Canada" was proposed as fidy describing IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION 1 77 the status of Canada and its relationship to the Throne, as conceived by the Canadian delegates. That title would probably have been adopted were it not for the objection to it pressed by Lord Stanley out of respect for what he thought would be republican sensi- tiveness in the United States. That was not the first time, or the last time, in which the views of Canada, rightly or wrongly held, were thwarted by British statesmen or diplomats out of regard for the opinions or the interests of the United States. There have been troubles over tarif? matters, always troublous, because usually selfish, and troubles over the international boundaries be- tween the two countries : the Maine bound- ary in 1842 ; the Oregon boundary in 1846, with its slogan, " Fifty-four Forty or Fight" ; and the Alaska boundary in 1903 — in which British jurists or diplomats had their say. The Canadian political enmities engendered in these controversies might in the bitter end have led to war, had it not been that British experience and diplomacy were behind and corrected Canada's youthful impulse. It may 1 78 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA be worth while for Americans to-day to re- member that in the judgment of Canada the attitude of Britain, in matters that involved Canada's territorial interests on this conti- nent, has invariably been friendly to the United States. And it is no crime for a native-born Canadian of distinctly demo- cratic views to confess, and to confess to- day in an American university, that in some of those disputes in which the mother country took sides against Canada and in favour of the United States, the events of history have proved Britain not only wise but right. And Lord Stanley may have been right in 1867, when he blocked the way to the "Kingdom" of Canada, and left the way open for the Canadian " Dominion." Not that consideration was needed for the repub- lican ideals or jealousies of the United States. Those things perhaps mattered more then than they would matter now. With shallow minds and for vulgar ambitions, forms often count for more than do realities. In the United States to-day, as in Canada, there IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION 1 79 may be those who secretly sigh for the ex- ternal institutions of monarchy and espe- cially for the social distinctions a " Court " would provide. But the aspirations of that small class are insignificant. The fact of " King " has its advantages even for some democratic minds over the fact of "Presi- dent," especially in the aftermath of a Presi- dential election campaign. But these dis- tinctions in Britain or in the United States give the country neither dignity nor endur- ing worth. The froth that floats and eddies around a throne may always be in evidence at Royal functions and in Society journals. But the people of the nation, the real people, move forth and right on. But King of Canada, King George V is to-day in fact and also in form. His Coro- nation in Westminster Abbey on June 21, 191 1, proclaimed him King, not of the King- dom of Great Britain and Ireland alone, but also King of Canada and of all the British Dominions Overseas. The Governor-GeU' eral of Canada is the King's accredited and accepted representative, with powers in Can- l8o THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA ada, in the King's absence, neither less nor more than the powers of the King. Symbol of the People^ s Power But those powers of the King or of his representatives are not the powers of an Em- peror, either a Caesar of Rome or a Kaiser of Germany. There is no Emperor because there is no imperium, no centralized power holding autocratic rule and discharging the functions of absolutism. Legislation in Can- ada is by the People's Parliament. The King's advisers in all things are the People's Government. That Government is repre- sentative of the people, and every day it is in power it is directly and immediately responsible for its conduct to the people's elected representatives in the House of Com- mons. And when a Government is defeated, either by the people at a general election or any day by the people's representatives in the House of Commons on any Government measure, it goes out of power. There is no interregnum, no four months of semi-sus- pended animation or arrested activity, as IN THE CANADIAN DOMINION l8l you sometimes have in the United States. It is with Parliament as it is with the King. The King never dies. The same breath that wails for one monarch, " The King is Dead," shouts for his successor, " Long Live the King." The King is but the symbol of the people's power, the honoured and lawful sceptre of " government of the people by the people and for the people." LECTURE VI THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM LECTURE VI THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM NORTH AMERICA'S civilized in- ternationalism is North America's greatest achievement. It is the chiefest thing North America has to show. It is the noblest expression of the North American idea. Other things have been done on this con- tinent, new and great and surprising things, which are heralded as among the wonders of the world, the enduring marvels of all the centuries. Lines of transportation have been constructed which join the equator to the poles ; a canal has crossed the hemisphere from ocean to ocean ; insuperable mountain- ranges are made as though they had not been. Things have been done, as by the waving of a wizard's wand, which mock at the achievements of other continents. But this that these two English-speaking 185 1 86 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA nations of North America have done, and have done together, and done through more than a hundred changing years, is without parallel on any continent, without precedent since time began. It is, indeed, not a thing at all. It is an idea : the noblest expression of the North American idea. It is a promise : the confident promise and the matchless pre- lude of the world's Christian civilization. It is a spirit : the embodied spirit of the Inter- national Christ. North America! s Internationalism Citizens of the United States and citizens of Canada cross and recross their interna- tional boundary a thousand times, uncon- scious of its meaning and its marvel. But travel its historic course with open eyes, and see what it is. Think what it means, and " the ground whereon thou standest is holy ground." Westward a thousand miles from the surge of the Atlantic, through the spreading Gulf, up the mighty River, past the sentinel fort- ress of Quebec, where Britain and France IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 187 once contested for a continent, past Mount Royal where Jacques Cartier reared the tleur de lis and cross, past the Rapids of Lachine, sacred through the centuries to the faith of La Salle, and on through the Thousand Is- lands to the headwaters of the mighty St. Lawrence ! Westward up another thousand miles of open international waterways — Lake Ontario and the Niagara River I Lake Erie, the Detroit, and the St. Clair! Lake Huron, the St. Mary's, and Lake Superior I then down the Rainy River and out over the Lake of the Woods ! lakes greater than Europe's seas, and carrying on their peace- ful waters the abounding commerce of both nations, from the throbbing heart of the con- tinent to the ocean currents of the world ! Still westward from the Great Lakes, another thousand miles to the foot-hills of the Rockies, over wide open prairies, where yes- terday the buffalo roamed, his range disputed only by the Red Man, where to-day the White Man has his many-mansioned home, and where the unguarded international divid- l88 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA ing line never answers to the tread of an enemy army from either side ! From the foot-hills westward again, a thou- sand miles over a billowy sea of mountains, through whose solitary passes no army ever files, and whose echoing peaks give back no shriek of any shell ! And then northward up the coast, and, from the Pacific, far more than another thou- sand miles northward to the Arctic, over a primeval wilderness of wealth and wonder, where nation keeps faith with nation, and where, in the vast solitudes of Nature, even the world's outlaws obey the law 1 There you have it 1 More than five thou- sand miles of North America's international boundary between the United States and Canada! More than five thousand miles where free nation meets free nation ! where vital interest touches vital interest ! where imperious flag salutes imperious flag 1 where a people's sovereignty answers to a people's sovereignty ! More than five thousand miles, with never a fortress! never a battle-ship! never a yawning gun 1 never a threatening IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 1 89 sentinel on guard ! More than five thousand miles of war's neglected opportunity I More than five thousand miles of civilized and Christianized internationalism ! God's shin- ing sun in all his circling round lights up no such track of international peace, and crosses no such line of international power, anywhere else in all the world. And this that these two nations of America have done, this unprecedented and unparal- lelled achievement of North American good- will, is the work, not of spiritless and back- ward races, but of the most enterprising peo- ples in the foremost files of time. Other na- tions on other continents can boast of their past, but with these young democracies of North America is the future of the world. The United States and Canada, two democ- racies with their two flags, have kept the peace, the peace with honour, not for one brief spasm, or through one sudden outburst of good-will. For more than a hundred years, a hundred restless, turbulent years, while the boundary lines of every other continent have blazed in war and dripped with blood, the igo THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA internationalism of North America has held ; and to-day, in the smitten face of Europe's international tragedy, North America gives the unbroken pledge of a far greater peace for all the world through a millennium yet to come. The Last Anglo- America7i War It was not only the latest war between Britain and America; that War of 1812 was also the last. Never again shall the nations that speak the English tongue, that inherit the demo- cratic tradition, and that stand true to the ideals of freedom, have recourse among themselves, either for justice or for liberty, to the vain and barbaric arbitrament of war. And just because it is the last instance of Anglo-American armed conflict, that war on our international boundary, more than a hundred years ago, carries with it the special interest peculiar to a relic. How genuinely a relic war has become be- tween the United States and Britain is brought home to any American or Canadian mind in IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM I9I these days of the world's war, by any chance revival of some story of cruelty and injustice that dates back, say, to Nathan Hale and his gallant services to General Washington, or to the equal hardships and injustices suffered in the same war by United Empire Loyalists. Those incidents, whether false or true, like the faded records of an old family quarrel, had in them elements of bitterness and strife which to-day do credit to neither side. The human elements in the story, as illustrating personal heroism or fidelity or noble sacrifice, have their permanent value, but in the hands of the story-tellers in school text-books their exag- gerations and misplaced emphasis have done little but damage in North America's civiliza- tion. We now know, and we all know, that war everywhere and always is cruel, is lawless, is a hideous and ghastly crime against civiliza- tion. For this reason the internationalism and good-will of North America, on the lips of the peoples of both countries, declare that between our two nations there shall never again be war. For us it would be without 192 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA excuse. For us and for our nations the North American idea asserts the right of every free people to govern themselves. That idea holds all our people. In these days of the world's marvellous internationalism, illus- trated in the community of international in- terest at Washington — American, British, French, Russian, Italian — the grip that holds us all is not fear, and is not force. It is the growing and constraining power of the demo- cratic idea. The foundation stone of North America's internationalism is in the freedom of our peoples to league together their re- sources of wealth, of foods, of soldiers and of civilians, with the leagued free peoples of Europe and of the world, for defense of the world's common good. The Refiex from Europe It is in this new light, the light of the world's interdependence, and from this point of view of the Anglo-American unity, that to-day with steady blood-beat we can go back to the events of the War of 1812. At that time the disturbed and involved IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM I93 situation in Europe was the occasion of war in America. The seeds of that war were sown long before, in the family quarrels and family animosities that belonged to the War of the Revolution, The war on the Canadian border in 18 12-14 was the reflex of the long war in Europe between Britain and France. American sympathy was with France, run- ning back in gratitude to the struggles of the Revolutionary War, and cherishing the name, and his devotion to the American cause, of the Marquis de Lafayette. In that European war between France and Britain, the United States officially was neutral. But in several of the States pop- ular feeling was not neutral. Many of the leaders of the people, still remembering the old struggle with George III, were against Britain and their sentiments were pro- French, This pro-French feeling, to be sure, was part of the smouldering fires of the old strife. It was utterly oblivious of the fact that, al- though the campaign cries in 1812 rang the changes on America's rights in Europe's trade, the damage done to America's com- 194 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA mercial interests by France was far greater than the damage done by Britain. The anti- British party in the United States also dis- regarded the deeper fact that both then and earlier official France, in defiance of the political theories of Lafayette and Rocham- beau, was dominated by the Bourbon autoc- racy. The spirit that inspired the France of that day was the arrogant and masterful spirit of . absolutism, the restless spirit of Napo- leon, that reached out for the overthrow of free government and democratic institutions everywhere. The revived and ruthless am- bition of Csesar found expression in the new Napoleonism, which contended against Brit- ain's supremacy at sea. Napoleon's true objective was the im- perium of all the world. Napoleonism fought Britain, because it gready feared Britain's democracy, even though it re- spected the forms of monarchy still prevalent there ; and it professed alliance with the American Republic, while it loathed and hated American republicanism even more IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 1 95 than it feared British power. In France at that time of the Bourbons, Democracy was both feared and hated, as surely as Social Democracy is outlawed under Kaiserism and the war-lords in Germany to-day. The day of France's new birth had not yet come. The international situation in America was still further complicated by the fact that when war was declared in the United States, none of the colonists in Canada stood more resolutely for British connection, or fought more bravely against the invaders from the United States than did the French Canadians, who, in that war, made the name of Cha- teauguay immortal. Youthful and headstrong leaders of aggres- sive and belligerent American opinion, like Henry Clay of Kentucky, and John C. Calhoun, cherished the lofty ambition of seeing the Stars and Stripes wave trium- phant over the North American continent all the way from Mexico to the North Pole. Clay's eloquent exhortation, which did duty on many a platform and in many school- houses, was in these words : " Call out the 196 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA ample resources of the country, give them judicious direction, prosecute the war with the utmost vigour, strike wherever we can reach the enemy at sea or on land, and negotiate the terms of peace at Quebec or Halifax." The war of 181 2-14 dragged out its costly length, but in it the scattered handfuls of colonists in Canada, English-speaking and French-speaking, alone were united. Britain was not seriously active in it, because Brit- ain's hands were full in Europe. The Ameri- cans were divided in the politics of the war, many of their leaders, even in Congress, were opposed to it. Canadians alone were united ; and, although at the time they did not know it, Canadians alone, of French blood as of British blood, fought for the North American idea. They defended on their own soil their Anglo-Saxon right to govern themselves. American historians to-day see quite clearly what was confused to many American leaders at that time, and what was made misleading by many American story writers IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 197 since. But informed and sober history agrees with Professor Albert Bushneli Hart of Harvard University : " Nothing but a total want of understand- ing of the conditions in Europe would have brought about the War of 181 2. The con- tinental system had broken down, because Russia would no longer cut oflf the trade in American ships. The result of this breach was Napoleon's Russian campaign of 181 2 ; his success would have totally excluded American commerce from the Baltic and would probably have resulted in the over- throw of England. The Americans were assisting the cause of a great tyranny and a great commercial monopoly. During 181 2 and 1813, while the Americans were vainly struggling to capture a few petty forts on the Canadian frontier, Napoleon was falling back step by step ; and on April 6, 18 14, he abdicated his throne, and a general Euro- pean peace was made." But costly and useless though it was, that War of 18 1 2 did one thing for North America which was greatly worth while : it cleared 198 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA the air. The Treaty of Peace was not signed at Quebec or at Hahfax, as Henry Clay de- manded in 181 2, but at Ghent, on Christmas Eve, 1814, with Clay himself as one of the American negotiators. And that Treaty made no mention of the rights of neutrals, and it left the Canadian frontier at the Great Lakes, where it had been, and where, more than a hundred years later, it is to-day, and where, in the judgment of both nations, it shall remain. And in clearing the air as between Britain and the United States, the War of 181 2, the last armed conflict of the world's two great powers of English-speaking civilization, dug the foundations for North America's inter- nationalism. After the smoke had cleared away, each side began to see that the other was not a Despotism but a Democracy, and that between democracies war is an advan- tage to neither and a damage to both. A Hundred Years After How completely this North American idea has permeated the thinking of both nations IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 1 99 was illustrated on September 10, 1913, at the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the day of decision in 1813, the Battle of Lake Erie at Put-in-Bay. That celebration was held in sight of the scene of the historic naval engagement in which Commodore Barclay commanded the British iieet and Commodore Perry, made immortal by that day's victory, commanded the American. Oliver Hazard Perry has been one of the heroes of generations of American school children, but at that centennial celebration the unadorned facts of history were held without boasting for either side. It was not national ; it was international. I recall that unusual occasion with a deepening sense of its international significance, not for the United States and Canada alone, but for democracy everywhere. There at the historic rendezvous of Put-in- Bay, on the south shore of Lake Erie, under the presidency of the Governor of Ohio, thousands of the celebrants of the naval con- flict of a full century before assembled from many of the neighbouring States. A military 200 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA touch was added by the presence of a detach- ment of the Rhode Island Artillery from the native State of Commodore Perry, and in the ceremonial the Church was represented by Bishop Perry of Rhode Island and Arch- deacon Cody of Toronto. The official spokesman for the United States in the commemoration program was ex-President William H. Taft, and mine was the honour and the duty of speaking for the British and the Canadians who shared in that last naval battle of the Anglo-Saxon world. Perhaps the most memorable incident in that Battle of Lake Erie on September lo, 1813, was the very significant fact that, after the batde, the contestants who so earnesUy fought against each other, met for the burial of their officers who fell in the fight, three British and three American, and, true to the military and naval traditions of their nations, the surviving soldiers and seamen marched two and two British and American, and de- posited in a common burial plot, with cere- monial honours, and the appointed burial IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 20I service of the Church of England, the bodies of their heroic dead. That burial service, within sight of the scene of the struggle, shared by both sides and under the folds of both flags, closed the very last naval conflict of the two nations, and that War of 1812 was the last the Eng- lish-speaking world would ever know. And one hundred years afterwards, in September, 1913, the representatives of these two nations, the great Republic of the United States and the great Dominion of Canada, met at that hallowed spot, and gathered up what re- mained of the dust of those heroes of the days of conflict, reverently deposited it in one common coffin, over which they draped their two flags, the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes, and to the solemn sound of the Dead March, marched two and two to the Perry memorial, the magnificent shaft which has since been completed, and there was reinterred the dust which North America guards as a sacred heritage for all genera- tions of North America's internationalism. That last naval battle, and its centennial 202 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA commemoration, must never be forgotten. They never will be forgotten by the two nations and the two peoples that there pledged their faith. On that centennial oc- casion I spoke this sentence which to-day has an accent almost prophetic : " In the light of North America's experience the in- ternational boundary lines of Europe are barbaric. They cannot long endure." Little did I dream that, before twelve months had passed, the barbarism of Europe would kindle the fires of hate and desolation for all the world. But if the words of warning and fear then spoken have been tragically fulfilled in Europe, even more truly and altogether splendidly have been fulfilled the words of America's international good-will. I venture to quote these closing paragraphs from that address, as it appears in the official report, only recently published — " The Perry's Vic- tory Centenary." America : Vision, Message, Obligation Although these words were spoken in Ohio in the year before the war, I speak them IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 203 now in Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, crammed as they now are with the deeper meaning of what I then called " America's Vision, America's Message, America's Obli- gation " : "All this growth of nationhood in North America, this sanctity of national aspiration, the commonplace among us to-day, had its beginning a hundred years ago, when, through the smoke of battle, Britain and America began to see eye to eye. The dis- tance that vision has brought these two na- tions, the revolution it has wrought, may be measured by the diflference between what happened at Lake Erie in 1813 and what happened in 1898 on Manila Bay. The sig- nificance of the change is expressed in to- day's celebration. At this place and on this day our deepest concern is not with the wars of the past, but with the peace of the future ; not with the triumphs or the defeats of yes- terday, but with the responsibilities and obli- gations of to-morrow ; not with the glory that either nation achieved a hundred years ago, but with the message which both na- 204 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA tions, Speaking in the name of our common North American civilization, shall give to the world through the hundred years to come. " Our message here to-day, spoken by two voices, one from the United States, the other from Canada, is one message. It is Amer- ica's message that, on this continent, between two proud peoples, the barbarism of brute force has long yielded to civilized interna- tionahsm. It is the assurance that Canada's national standing on this continent binds the British Empire and the American Republic in one world-spanning English-speaking fra- ternity. On all continents and on all seas the power of North America is the combined power of the United States and Canada, plus the power of Britain and of the British Do- minions in Africa, on the South Atlantic and beyond the Pacific. These are all bound together, each with all the others, for the maintenance of that principle of nationhood : any people that desires to be free and is fit to be free ought to be free and must be free. That principle means peace and freedom in the English-speaking world. IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 205 " More than that. What this principle of nationhood has done for America and for the English-speaking fraternity it yet will do for the world. In the light of North Amer- ica's experience the international boundary lines of Europe are barbaric. They can- not long endure. In our own day war has begun to be seen not merely as cruel, bur- densome, brutal, but as too foolish and too futile for sane and civilized peoples. The nations of civilization will yet leave war be- hind, as civilized men have left behind the street fight and the duel. As individual cit- izens have found the only sure vindication of personal honour, and the only true pro- tection of vital interest, to be in respecting the personality and the personal interests of others, and in trusting for justice to the law of their land, so are the nations learning, and so the nations must learn, that the only sure vindication of national honour and the only certain protection of vital interests is in re- specting the nationality of others, and in trusting for justice in the growing conscience of the race, codified in international law and 2o6 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA expressing itself through international arbi- tration. " On that, as on a sure foundation, rests the hope of the world's peace. Once men dreamed of peace through the world sover- eignty of some master-mind, like Alexander, or some ruling race like the Romans. But that dream of peace, the peace not of free men but of weaklings and slaves, was doomed forever when Napoleon and his army staggered back through the snows of Russia under the curse of God. " But a new day has dawned, dawned for the statesmen, dawned for the nations. It is the day of national rights and national re- sponsibilities. The two nations of America have seen the coming of that day, have seen it through these generations of peace, have seen it and are glad. We of to-day, stand- ing on this historic boundary line, a bound- ary no longer of separation but of union, are pledged, we and our nations with us, pledged to preach this gospel of freedom, good-will and peace. This is America's vision ; this Ameri- ca's message ; this America's obligation." IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 207 Lord Palmerston as a World- Prophet The question of internationalism in North America at this time justifies me in making public use of a memorandum handed to me only yesterday. It presents an interesting historical side-light on the Anglo-American unity, to which prominence has been given throughout this course of Lectures. It car- ries the name of the great British statesman, Lord Palmerston, and it records a " proph- ecy " made by him to a group of British and American diplomats, at a private gathering in London, early in 1841. No Life of Pal- merston contains any reference to it, and, so far as I know, publicity has not been given to it in any form. But the " prophecy " itself has such historical interest, and the presence in Washington, at this very hour, of the Right Hon. Arthur J. Balfour, and the circumstances and purposes of his mission from Britain to the United States — all these factors combine to give timeliness to this Anglo-American message from out the his- toric past of three-quarters of a century ago. This memorandum was given to me at the 208 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA close of yesterday's lecture by a venerable clergyman — of nearly fourscore, who " has been pastor of Presbyterian churches here in Nashville for over forty years," the Rev. J. H. McNeilly — and whose pastorate in Houston, Texas, in 1878, permitted him as he says to become intimately acquainted with one of the parties in the case, " the Hon. Ashbel Smith, a most remarkable man, one of that strong band of pioneers who won the independence of Texas. He had been educated at Yale College, completing his course in medicine in Paris, where he was under the direction of Lafayette in 183 1, through the cholera epidemic. " When Texas was established as an inde- pendent Republic "—Mr. McNeilly continues in his memorandum — " Dr. Smith was sent as Minister to England and France, having charge of both legations. He was held in close friendship by Louis Philippe. The inci- dent about Lord Palmerston he told me in the course of an intimate discussion of the Russo-Turkish war, which was raging at the time. He was then seventy-five years old, IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 209 and had been a diligent and intelligent stu- dent of history. He had known the inef- fective struggles of Europe for liberty in 1848. He had studied the wars by which the German Empire was consolidated by Bismarck's brain and von Moltke's sword. He had as keen sympathy for France as he had detestation for Germany. " In the course of one of our personal talks, Dr. Smith told me how that, in 1841, he was in London in charge of his of^cial duties. Many British and American diplomatic ap- pointees were in the city at the time, going to or returning from their various stations. The Englishmen gave a banquet to the Americans, at which no foreigner was pres- ent. It was exclusively for British and American diplomats. " At the banquet the speech-making was mainly good-natured banter as to what would happen if the Daughter should put on airs, and her old Mother should conclude to administer a lesson on humility. The last speaker was Lord Palmerston, at that time Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Melbourne 2IO THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA Cabinet. After a few minutes of genial talk, he became far more serious, deprecating any idea or even idle talk of war between the two countries. Then he uttered this prediction, which so impressed Colonel Smith that, as soon as he went to his room, he wrote down the exact words, as nearly as he could recall them, used by Lord Palmerston: "'Those of us who from our positions are familiar with the trend of opinion in Europe, and the policies of the various Governments, know that great changes are coming. How soon we cannot know ; for it takes time for great movements to come to a head. But I am confident that, about the end of this century or the be- ginning of the next century, the greatest war in the history of Europe will occur. It will not be a war for territory, nor for commercial advantage. It will be a con- flict to the death between antagonistic ideals or policies of governments, that is, between Liberalism and Absolutism (or as we would say, Democracy and Aris- IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 211 tocracy). In that war England must, from her historic position, lead the forces of Liberalism, and she will gather to her side those forces in Europe that then may be striving for liberty. By a like historic necessity, Russia must lead the forces of Absolutism, and the strength of organized despotism will be arrayed with her. In that desperate conflict of ideas and principles, England's strength and her resources will be tried as never be- fore in her history. She will be strained to the utmost limit to preserve her very existence as a free and independent Na- tion. And if in that hour of her direst need she cannot reach forth her hand and bring help from her mighty Daugh- ter across the sea, then woe be to the hopes of the world for civil and religious liberty.' " In his comment on this remarkable predic- tion by Lord Palmerston, Mr. McNeilly asks this question which represents the serious thought and high resolve of every true 212 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA American mind to-day : " Can it be that this world war now devastating Europe is the ful- fillment of Lord Palmerston's prophecy, with Germany, instead of Russia, in the lead of autocracy? Surely the entrance of the United States into the conflict ought to be a largely determining factor, on the side of righteousness, against the most cruel and devilish theory of the State ever held by a despot 1 " World Democracy f 07' World Liberty There are those among us who deny that democracy and liberty go together, or that democracy gives any assurance against the spirit of domination. Democracies, they say, have been as ruthless in their power as au- tocracies, as eager to extend their sway, as careless of the right of other peoples to self- government. They point to the democracies of ancient Greece which pursued to their own destruction insatiate careers of conquest. They point to Republican Rome which brought the known world under its iron law. They point to the democratic cities of the IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 213 Middle Ages with their pitiless wars. They point to Revolutionary France which had scarcely unfurled the flag of " Liberty, Equal- ity, and Fraternity " when it made dominion its ideal and Napoleon its God. And they imply that the democracies of to-day offer no security against the recrudescence of the same blind spirit of tyranny. If this were so then the outlook would indeed be black, for it is clear at least that if democracy cannot safeguard the world against the menace of militarism no other way of safety can be found. If that fails our hopes are vain, and our dearest efforts mere futility. There is no bright dawn beyond the darkness of the night of war. Our ideals are "the baseless fabric of a vision," and the sacrifice, struggle, and devotion by which we seek to realize them are a mockery of waste. But this accusation against democracy is false. Ancient so-called democracies were in reality slaveholding oligarchies in which the true democratic spirit could not possibly exist. The most democratic state of the ancient world, the state which prided itself 214 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA most on its liberality of spirit, was Athens in the later part of the fifth century B. c, and it never admitted as citizens more than a frac- tion of its inhabitants. Democracy as we understand it was unknown to Greece and Rome, and but faintly understood in the caste-dominated states of the Middle Ages. Where slavery, serfdom, caste prevail, the foundation of democracy, the sense of per- sonal right and obligation, the sense of the citizenship of all men, which allows to others the liberty we claim for ourselves, is never secured. Democracy is a process, not even to-day an accomplished fact, an evolution, not a fulfillment attained in any past stage of the world's history. Why then do we believe that democracy stands for liberty, not for liberty within the democratic nation alone but for liberty of the nations in respect of one another, for world liberty ? Because just in so far as democracy has developed it has shown itself the enemy of aggression without as well as of tyranny within, the friend of justice between nations as well as of fraternity between citizens. It IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 215 is only because of their undemocratic institu- tions — and the institutions controlHng foreign relations are the last to be democratized — that modern democracies have shown aggres- sive tendencies. When France threw down her feudal tyranny she instinctively pro- claimed the brotherhood of nations, and might have continued in that spirit were it not that Europe's dread of revolutionary re- publicanism surrounded her with enemies. And now the world has again a signal instance of the difference between the out- look of autocracy and democracy. What- ever dangers inhere in the Russian Revolu- tion, it has proclaimed in tones of undying sincerity the protest of the democratic masses of the people against any policy that savours of aggression or annexation. Here at least it has spoken in the true accents of democ- racy. But both these examples, revolutionary France in the eighteenth century and revolu- tionary Russia in the twentieth, enforce an- other lesson. It is that democracy is insecure in any country unless it meets a kindred 2l6 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA spirit of democracy in the world outside. It is that, in the long run, for world liberty world democracy is necessary, that no one state can enjoy in freedom and peace the fruits of democracy save in a world that enjoys them with her. In so far as they understand this lesson all democratic states will cling together, will band themselves together in fraternal alliance for their own security and to bring nearer the coming of democracy all over the earth. May not the Washington Conference symbolize this per- manent coming together of the democracies, the democracies of Europe meeting in coun- cil with the democracies of the West. For long they have stood apart, as if democracy were a thing to be realized and preserved in isolation, until the lightnings of the world catastrophe revealed their need of one another, their dependence on one another, the world's disaster in their separation, the world's promise in their union. It meant more than common council in a common danger, it signified the recognition of a common spirit, the kinship of all democracies. IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 217 Many obstacles and misunderstandings have hitherto prevented the full recognition of this kinship, but chiefly the fears engendered by lapses on one side or the other from the democratic ideal. We may well hope that these will now be dissipated, and the era when all democracies will build on their international interdependence ushered in. And this, in some form, may express the deeper motive behind the great welcome accorded in America to the Allied mission. The meeting at Washington would then be only an adumbration of the greater council of the democracies yet to be born. The whole world is beginning to ripen towards democracy, and Russia is the first fruits of the harvest. In the revelation of war the peoples are learning everywhere that their hope is in self-government. The North American idea is pervading the world. Even among our enemies there are signs that the great masses are turning to the democratic solution. These signs should fill us with hope, and we should take infinite care that no act of ours shall discourage them from 2l8 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA following that road. For we too have learned that only in world democracy is world liberty fulfilled, the security of the nations that have already embraced democ- racy being dependent on the achievement of liberty by the nations that are still in bond- age. The old ideal of world power, world empire, has meant downfall for all who have pursued it, has meant the enslavement of the world, conquerors and conquered alike, but the new ideal of world democracy means the liberation of the world. Democracies as naturally come together, when they are true democracies, in cooperative good-will as autocracies fall apart in conflict. The com- ing together of the democracies is the neces- sary and inevitable operation of the law of the world's good-will, the necessaiy and in- evitable precondition of the establishment of the world's good-will. The Faith Basis of hiternational Reconstruc- tion A great act of faith is demanded of all the peoples who have fought for what they be- IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 219 lieve to be the cause of justice and liberty in this war. It is the faith in human nature, in the humanity not only of themselves but also of the great suffering, misled masses of their foes. To believe this is really a part of the whole democratic creed, which implies that every people, if they are free, if they are released from the bondage of false obses- sions or tyrannous institutions, will have the wisdom, as they also have the right, to govern itself. It is part of the whole demo- cratic creed, but in face of a war like this it is a peculiarly difficult part. Yet it is hardly too much to say that without that faith, whatever else may be won, the permanent basis of reconstruction is lost. In the establishment of that faith, America, in the very hour in which she is most ear- nestly preparing for war, is leading the way, thus revealing the inner quality of her demo- cratic beliefs. President Wilson has ex- pressly distinguished between the German government and the German people. He has declared that " there is only one sort of peace that the peoples of America could join 220 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA in guaranteeing. . . . Only a peace be- tween equals can last — only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settlement of vexed questions of territory or of racial and national allegiance." A peace without the reestablishment of in- ternational amity is only the suspension of war. Peace demands amity as certainly as enmity provokes war. If it is true that, as Lloyd George has said, the Peace Conference ** will settle the destiny of nations, the course of human life, for God knows how many ages," how overwhelm- ingly important it is that the nations, or their representatives, should enter upon it with one purpose above all others in their hearts, with one master resolve as to the outcome, such a settlement as will prevent, so far as the foresight of men can prevent, the recurrence of the catastrophe which has desolated our age. There are two main alternatives open, and IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 221 the choice between them may well be the most momentous in history. One is the consolidation of the present League of the Allies, together with such neutrals as might be induced to join, into a permanent defen- sive alliance. Such a league is advocated in influential quarters, and it falls in with the war-begotten mood of many men in Britain and in France. Who can wonder at this in the light of what has happened since the war began? And yet a scheme of this sort, a settlement that went no further than this, would be a shipwreck of the greater hopes of the world. The security it would give would be partial and impermanent. It would render impossible the construction of a real international law ; it would be a barrier to the operation of the law of the world's good-will. It would destroy all hope of a concerted plan for the reduction of armaments ; it would leave the roots of inter- national fears and suspicions still living beneath the soil of peace. It would foster in the excluded peoples a desperate endeav- our to establish an opposing balance of 222 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA power. It would foster the economic rivalry of the opposing leagues, and their competi- tive exploitation of the less developed parts of the earth. It would delay the mutual understanding which is the mother of coop- eration, the only permanent foundation of peace. It would therefore accord ill with the North American idea. The United States would never enter heartily into an alliance of this kind, and so it could have no stability in itself. And the bitterest throes that the world has ever endured would bring to birth no redeeming offspring of peace. The fundamental objection to a recon- struction of international relations which would merely perpetuate and solidify the existing alliance is that it would be a denial of that faith which alone would remove the mountains of hostility, the Pelion upon Ossa which the war has piled between us and our foes. No people can have security unless all peoples have security. No people can be wholly free unless all peoples are free. We must, in rebuilding the international world, look beyond governments to peoples. IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 223 We must believe that our enemies, awakened, by the inconceivable loss and suffering of the war, to the awful fruits of false ideals, will of themselves overthrow all institutions which rest upon and all governments which inculcate such ideals. If we have this faith our enemies will justify in time our faith ; if we have it not, we will instead confirm their fears. That faith alone will bring into being the federation of the world. Without it there is only the prospect of endless division, unceasing mutual suspicion, keeping before men's minds the alternatives of subjection and domination, fostering the fear of the former in the many and the hope of the latter in the few. That is why we must work for the second alternative, the establishment, out of the vast- ness of world desolation, of a real League of Nations, of a community of peoples as far extending as their interdependence. The two great obstacles in the way of such a consummation are the spirit of hatred and revenge engendered by the war, and the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of the 224 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA State. But if the great settlement means the renunciation of conquest and repudiation of mihtarism, as it must, then the spirit of hatred and revenge may well be stilled in the thought of woes already suffered and tears already shed. In the sight of the bereavement of the world the idea of further punishment will fade away. Neither on reward nor on pun- ishment can a civilization so ruined be re- stored. There can be only one punishment that counts, the visitation of sorrow already so awful in its universality ; only one reward worth while, the better reconstruction of the world. And this, as all historical precedents go to show, can be attained only if all the warring peoples enter into a great alliance, substituting community of interest for divi- sion, cooperation for conflict, good-will for hate. Peace on earth cannot be secured save by good-will among men. The second obstacle, the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of the State, has in the past been a standing barrier to the establish- ment of the only kind of alliance which could possibly secure international amity. IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 225 It is a doctrine that nearly every state has been zealous to defend, and that nearly every political thinker, Hobbes and Austin no less than Fichte and Hegel, Rousseau no less than Treitschke, have sought to justify. If it stands, then nothing can bind the sov- ereign will of a state, and nothing it does can be a breach of law. It is as just in vio- lating as in making treaties. It owes no responsibility, and from its decisions there can be no appeal. If it stands there can be no true law of nations, for each is necessarily a law to itself, the final arbiter and judge of what it does. On what then does this doc- trine rest ? Only on a false pride of rulers and peoples. For it proclaims the inde- pendence of the state, and all the facts of political evolution show that states are inter- dependent, bound up in each other's destiny, affected by the wealth and poverty of one another, affected still more by the ideals of one another. " Am I my brother's keeper?" This, in the early ages of the world, was the plea of the violator of the nearer law. " Am I my brother's keeper?" This is still the 226 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA plea of the state that breaks the law of na- tions. And the voice of the brother's blood cries to heaven from the ground. North America has been leading the way in removing both of these obstacles to a league of nations. The United States has repudiated the thought of revenge. She has recognized her vital interest in the European conflict, but she has also recognized that this interest cannot be a selfish one. One of her best American interpreters puts the case thus : " Any attempt to define American interest in Europe can lead only to one conclusion. We have no territory to acquire, no strategic frontiers to win, no unredeemed provinces, no trade routes to defend. We can win nothing from this war unless a good Europe arises from it. We cannot even end the submarine menace by defeating Germany, because the submarine, as a weapon, will remain after the war. There is no single thing we can win, except a stable peace in Europe. That we must win if our own democratic experiment is to have a decent chance." IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 227 North America in the World's War This entry of the United States into the European war is indeed the last extension of the North American idea. In the past she has stood for it in the American hemi- sphere. The Monroe Doctrine, in its pure form, was the expression of that idea as a governing principle for the New World alone. But often there was associated with it the view that the New World stood apart by itself, as if it could be isolated from the Old. Her political evolution has gradually been revealing the error of that view. The seas unite as much as they divide. The march of events compelled the American Re- public to support in the Far East the same policy of democratic responsibility which she had assumed, in the face of many dangers, nearer home. She saw that the stability of China concerned her, the right of that people to govern themselves, as well as the stability of a South American republic. It was inev- itable that her sense of responsibility could not stop there. At the last, at this crisis of the world's history, she took the final step, 228 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA declaring that the responsibility of a demo- cratic state can have no limits, that all are bound up with one another, that none can be indifferent to what befalls the rest. And as the United States and Canada are now carrying into the most dreadful war in history the principle of the inter-responsibility of the nations, so they will carry it into the ensuing peace. Thus, and only thus, will North America lead the world towards the establishment of that great league of nations, chastened of militarism by the final revelation of the meaning of war, which must be the permanent witness and embodiment, over all the world, of the North American idea. What was begun in destruction must be continued in construction. The greater the destruction the greater is the necessity of re- building ; and never was that necessity so imposed on men as it will be at the ending of this war. Shall we be half-hearted in re- building when we have set no limit to pulling down? Shall we be content with a partial league of nations that will but perpetuate the cleavage of to-day? Or shall we dare to IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 229 hold that faith in humanity which will invite all nations, friends and foes, to participate in the rebuilding of the world, and to enter with us in repentance on the way of healing ? May not this well be the most momentous alternative ever presented for the decision of the world ? If North America leads in giving the answer, it may be a greater triumph for the North American idea than it has ever achieved before. Service : the Key- Note of De^nocracy Several years ago, at the time when Land Reform was the batde-cry in the fierce po- litical struggles then raging in Britain, I visited the home of my ancestors in one of the most spacious glens in all the Highlands of Scodand. For centuries that glen, and the country round about, had been the breed- ing-place of the historic clans whose blood mingles in my veins. Ever since the days of fateful Culloden, every Highland countryside suffered the loss of the best of its human breed. Sometimes it was war that did it. Endless and almost 230 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA inevitable wars at the ends of all the earth made call to the men from the Scottish glens. The pipes of war sounded wild and high through every valley, and called the clans- men forth to fight for their chieftain or for their sovereign, on many a tragic battle-field of history. When it was not war that called the children of the peat cottage and the parish school from " their ain dear glen," it was the curse of the land laws that drove them from the crowded sheilings and the steadings of their fathers to the vast and vacant spaces of America, or of Australia, or of Africa, or of India, to leave room in Scotland, as in England and in Ireland, for the all-powerful and autocratic landed-aristocracy, with their grouse and their pheasant and their big- horned stag. The lilt of the folk-song and the solemn drone of the Gaelic psalm died away, and in their places was heard only the lonesome call of the stag and the " hallo " of the huntsman. It was with those old ancestral feelings and broodings in my heart, and with the IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 231 " gloomy memories " of many a glen in the back of my mind, that I arrived one day in Edinburgh, and made my way, on the top of a tram-car, from the Caledonian up the Lothian Road. Surging about the entrances to the King's Theatre, I came upon a great crowd, agitated and restless as if something was in the wind. The cause was obvious when, at the side of the tram, I caught sight of the self-possessed but irrepressible Mrs. Pankhurst, with the light of " Votes for Women " in her eye, and at her side, keep- ing silent guard, a stolid Edinburgh police officer. The presence of such company — the meeting of turbulent ideas and police author- ity — found adequate explanation in the fact that inside the theatre a great political meet- ing was under way, with Winston Churchill making a campaign speech on the vexed land question. Here was the political issue of my High- land experience of the land laws — the acute sense of injustice to the common people awakened by the land monopoly enjoyed and exercised by the hereditary lords of the 232 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA land. From the crowded lobby door of the theatre I caught this sentence from Churchill's speech, spoken to those sober-minded citi- zens of Edinburgh : " The time has come when the most searching question put to a man is not, What have you got ? but this, How did you get it ?" I have thought long and earnestly over that question with which Churchill disturbed the satisfied content of the landlords in Britain in the years of discontent and political upheaval before the war. But another ques- tion, more penetrating, more searching, came to me then, and comes to me now, a question that loses none of its pertinence or power by being transferred from Britain to America, and that is only intensified and made more direct and personal by the coming of the war. It is a question that goes more deeply to the very roots of our whole social problem, and probes to the heart our theories of life and its supreme uses, in these days of world- travail and of national self-examination : not the arresting question, " What have you got ? " or even the still more perplexing, IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 233 "How did you get it?" but this, that searches every conscience and tries the reins of every heart, " What are you doing with it?" In these stern days that question is put to every man. And that question cannot be evaded, or postponed, or silenced with an airy wave of the hand. It goes right to its mark. It haunts the ways of every life. It tests the services of every nation. What are you doing with the opportunities that are yours ? with the privileges ? with the superi- orities of which you boast ? You man of wealth, whether your wealth was inherited from another, or was earned by yourself — What are you doing with it? You man of power, whether personal power dependent on what you are, or official power dependent on the place you occupy — What are you doing with it ? You man of genius, or of special gift, or of attractive grace, you whose endowment enables you to do readily and well what others can do only with diffi- culty or not at all — What are you doing with it? You nation of privileged citizens, you 234 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA whose free citizenship is a heritage from all the ages of the past, you whose democracy was won for you by all the struggles of America and of Europe through those cen- turies up from despotism — What are you doing with it ? There is no dodging that question. The supreme moral question faces us and follows us and will not let us go. There is not an advantage in our modern life, whether in the United States or in Canada, but some es- sential element in it is ours because of the services and the sacrifices made by men in other lands who went our ways before us, and who made ready for our coming. If in very and in splendid truth we are " the heirs of all the ages," that inheritance also makes us the trustees for all who follow after. Every achievement which gives us superiority by so much makes us debtors. And that debt cannot be paid except by service for service and by life for life. Service is the measure of our civilization. Service for others is the key-note of our de- mocracy. IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 235 Crozvned for Service Service is indeed the key-note of democ- racy. And democracy, wiien it comes to it- self and comes to its own, is crowned for service. That was the message and the meaning for the people of Britain, and for all the British peoples over all the world, — the real meaning and the everlasting message of the coronation ceremonial in Westminster Abbey when George V and Queen Mary were crowned on June 22, 191 1. They were crowned for service. Their coronation struck the true key-note of democracy, not for themselves alone, or for their own sub- jects, but for all the citizens of democracy over all the world. That was indeed a great occasion, that crowning of Britain's young king in the midst of all the splendour and all the pomp and circumstance of world-wide imperialism and empire. But its real greatness was not marked by the emblems of world sovereignty which the occasion displayed, and the real meaning of that coronation was not ex- 236 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA pressed in the ritual of anointing and investi- ture approved in the historic symbolism of the Church. The abiding message of that coronation ceremonial and the pledge of its meaning for democracy everywhere and in all ages was in the text of the Coronation Sermon, the unforgettable words of Jesus as He drew near to His own Coronation in the infinite tragedy of His Passion : " I am among you as one that serves." On that coronation day in London all the people, not of Britain alone, but of all the British Dominions, of all the colonies and de- pendencies of the Crown, and of all the Brit- ish races and peoples that make up more than one-quarter of the entire human family, they all shouted as with one voice : " God save the King." That was in the year 191 1. Coronation seemed to mean sovereignty. It really meant service. And before the year 1914 was passed every British citizen had learned, and learned in the school of stern experience, and by the stripes of personal pain and sor- row, that, for the King, for all his nobles, for IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 237 his army and his navy, and for every subject who shared in his coronation, service means sacrifice. The heavy crown of Edward the Confessor, placed reverently on the youthful head of George V, had in it the inevitable thorns. No one saw them then. The blood- drops were not visible to our vulgar eyes. But the day came speedily, the great day of revealing, when the symbolism of Coronation was made plain, the day when the British army, the symbol of the presence of Britain's power, stood up by the side of little Belgium on the blood-anointed battle-ground of the world's democracy, and gave to all the little peoples of all the world the eternal interpre- tation of the Coronation symbol : " I am among you as one that serves." And from that day to this very hour British soldiers by the multiplying million, and British citizens by the uncounted millions, have been paying the price of sacrifice on the altars of the world's democracy. And Britain's pledge of 19 14 is now Amer- ica's pledge too. Coronation for service meant sacrifice for Canada from the begin- 238 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA ning. And now, and on to the very end, it will mean sacrifice for the United States. For both our nations and for all our peoples the key-note of our democracy is in the serv- ice that means sacrifice. The spirit of our sacrifice makes even the horror of war-service a sacred thing. And so, with a deepening sense of its sacredness, our two peoples, with a new sense of international brotherhood in our hearts, move forward on a scale that is conti- nental and with a courage nothing can ter- rify, to give reality in the history of all the world to the declarations of the North Amer- ican idea as expressed in the American Re- public, in the Canadian Dominion, and in the unique international achievement on this North American continent. This is my word to you American citizens in closing the Cole Lectureship for 191 7. Grateful am I for your unexampled response, night after night in these great audiences, to every appeal at all worthy either of the theme or of the occasion. As a Canadian I stand with you at every battle front of the world's mind, even as in every day of deadly conflict IN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONALISM 239 of the world's armies Canadian soldiers of the Union Jack will stand shoulder to shoul- der with your sons of the Stars and Stripes. Canadians to-day take up the words of Britain's great democratic Prime Minister, lyloyd George, and with him we, your neigh- bours on this continent, are proud and thank- ful to declare that : " The advent of the United States into the war gives the final stamp to the character of the conflict as a struggle against military autocracy through- out the world. '* The United States of America, of noble tradition never broken, would never have engaged in a war except of liberty. This is the greatest struggle for liberty your country has ever embarked upon. I am not at all surprised, when one recollects the wars of the past, that America took its time to make up its mind. Most of the great wars in the past were waged for dynastic aggrandizement and for conquest. It is no wonder that when this great war started some elements of suspicion still lurked in the minds of the people of the United States, and that many thought the 240 THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA kings were at their old tricks. But that the United States of America has made up its mind finally makes it abundandy clear that this struggle is a great fight for human lib- erty. America would not have come in were not this a great struggle for freedom." And as a Canadian, and speaking out of the heart of the Canadian people, in this last word of the Cole Lectures for this War year of 191 7, I welcome you, our Allies of the Blood and the Democracy. Together we shall stand, we shall fight, and, if needs be, we shall die, in defense of the North Amer- ican Idea, the inalienable and priceless right of a free people to govern themselves. Printed in the United States of America This book is DUE on the last date stamped below FIB 2 5 ]92ii OCT 2 9 1S?9 A.M. 2<^ J^ ,1- JAN 4 1965 A.M. 7|8I9I10IU(12!1I2 8 fi3^ Ai. ^^K^r 7-^ A UC SOUTHFRN REGIONAL LIBRARY f AGILITY AA 000 708 769 5 ■ ,.' tji^.^ li UNRr,