FOREWORD
Mr. Lewis Einstein is one of the men whose work has kept alive the fine tradition of the union between American diplomacy and American letters which is illustrated by such names as those of Lowell and Motley, of John Hay and Maurice Egan. In the two chapters of this little book he gives proof of a prescience in world politics very rare among American statesmen. He foresaw the war. He foresaw our entry into the war. He sees clearly the need that our association with the British Empire shall be one of the closest friendship because it would be an unspeakable calamity for us if the British Empire succumbed to Germany; and after the war Germany will once more begin her campaign to render America the dupe and tool of European militarism by breeding hostility to England; and with this end in view she will employ everybody, from organizers of German-American Alliances to editors of German-American papers; and of course she counts in advance on the support of politicians like Senators La Toilette and Stone and editors like Messrs. Hearst and Viereck. Under such conditions it is well to have Americans like Mr. Einstein—who, like myself, is not of English blood—point out why England is now what a century ago she was not, our natural ally; and why Germany, in view of the appalling results of her sordid and brutal soul-training for the last forty years, cannot be anything but our enemy until the whole moral and political attitude of her people is fundamentally changed. The pacifists of the Norman Angell type, whether in England or America, and the silly men and silly women who listen to them, are, as they have been, the potent enemies of the peace of justice and the tools of alien militarism. Unfortunately in this country, while there has at times been a repulsive social anglo-mania among United classes, the political danger has always been from the appeal of demagogic politicians to the anti-English vote. This manifested itself in the cautious meekness with which our governmental authorities protested against the repeated wholesale murders of our men and women by German submarines, compared with the hectoring attitude assumed towards Great Britain over mere property rights—a striking inversion of Abraham Lincoln's insistence on putting the man above the dollar. Mr. James Brown Scott, in his "Survey of International Relations between the United States and Germany," justly remarks:—"The reader experiences a shock, on turning from the German to the British correspondence, to note the cold and unyielding terms in which American rights concerning property were insisted upon. It would seem as if the American Government feared a rupture with the Imperial German Government . . . and that the President and his advisers had determined that no act on the part of the United States, that no unguarded word or expression in correspondence with Germany, should give the Imperial Government a pretext, much less a cause, to turn against the United States if it should seem to stand in the way of the realization of the purpose (the destruction of England and the enslavement of Belgium) upon whose realization the German Government had bent its energies and upon which the German people had set their heart. . . . The neutrality which the President impressed upon his fellow countrymen was not merely the neutrality of action; it was the neutrality of thought and expression." This neutrality was neutrality between right and wrong; we persevered in it for two years and a half, and then the President, on April 2 last, announced that "the wrongs against which we now array ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life . . . Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be. The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind," and again on August 27 last:—"the object of this war is to deliver the free peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment controlled by an irresponsible Government which, having secretly planned to dominate the world, proceeded to carry the plan out without regard either to the sacred obligations of treaty or the long-established practices and long-cherished principles of international action and honor . . . which stopped at no barrier either of law or of mercy; which swept a whole continent within the tide of blood—not the blood of soldiers only but the blood of women and children also and of the helpless poor . . . the American people have suffered intolerable wrongs." All of this was absolutely true; and it was exactly as true when the Lusitania was sunk as it was two years later. It was true throughout the period of our neutrality.
Under such conditions it is well to have a conscientious and highminded American citizen, who is also a trained and able diplomat, write such a little book as this.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT