So long as Executives of this sort endure, so long
will civilization be liable to such explosions as have taken place this
August, though not always on so vast a scale.
Americans now see these things more clearly than European lovers of
liberty, because Americans are detached from the actual conflicts by the
Atlantic, and because Americans have had no real contact with the feudal
or the imperial system for nearly 300 years. Pilgrim and Puritan,
Covenanter and Quaker, Lutheran and Catholic alike left the feudal
system and autocratic government behind them when they crossed the
Atlantic. Americans, therefore, cannot help hoping that two results of
the present war will be: (1) The abolition of secret diplomacy and
secret understandings, and the substitution therefor of treaties
publicly discussed and sanctioned, and (2) the creation of national
Executives--Emperors, Sultans, Kings, or Presidents--which cannot use
the national forces in fight until a thoroughly informed national
assembly, acting with deliberation, has agreed to that use.
Opposite Tendencies.
The American student of history since the middle of the seventeenth
century sees clearly two strong though apparently opposite tendencies in
Europe: First, the tendency to the creation and maintenance of small
States such as those which the Peace of Westphalia (1648) recognized and
for two centuries secured in a fairly independent existence, and,
secondly, a tendency from the middle of the nineteenth century toward
larger national units, created by combining several kindred States
under one executive.
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