The question that has fatigued the human mind since time immemorial, "What shall man do that he may live again?" is for the hour replaced by another more likely to be answered, "What kind of a world will the one just wrought be in which to live, and when will it be habitable?" The old world has been delivered of a promising offspring. Its travail was terrible and sanious. The accoucheur had to call to her aid the counsel and service of many nations, but the new-born world gives promise of great tidings. Grief for the old world that yielded its existence in the agony of deliverance is engulfed by the joy that has come in contemplation of the beauty, purity, and immaculateness of the new world, in which liberty shall be as free as the air in which it is suspended.
What will this new world that is arisen from the destruction of empires and from the ashes of tyrannical inst.i.tutions be like? In what way will it be better and more satisfying than the one that existed previous to the war? What are the benefits that will flow from the sacrifices that have been made? What are the rewards that will follow the labor and effort expended to win the war? What are the mercies that will be vouchsafed us for our deeds of commission and of omission? How shall things be ordered that man, mere man, without other possession than intelligence, without other aspiration than to be permitted to display his dominant instincts,-love and constructiveness,-without other ambition than to enjoy life and make others enjoy it, may be worthy of his mission and deserving of its reward? These are the questions that are occupying the mind of every thinking person in the whole world to-day.
Before any one of them can be answered the fate of the former Central Empires must be settled, because the Allies must know with whom they are dealing and how much they are deserving of confidence and trust, and how much they can be relied upon to carry out the terms of any agreement. We may be absolutely certain that recent advantageous treaties will be abrogated and that territories appropriated in the last half-century will be restored. That which we cannot feel reasonable a.s.surance of is what form of government the former Central Empires will have, or whether that which they bring forth will not be, in reality, a resurrected Trojan horse, the Teuton"s contribution to political camouflage.
The spokesmen of these newly formed governments say they will be democracies. But who are the spokesmen? Are they not of them who until yesterday were fighting for the preservation of the country and government which had been selected by G.o.d and by themselves to thrust "Kultur" upon the world, and which had been wantonly attacked by its neighbors on the north, the south, the east, and the west? Did they admit until that fateful yesterday that their government was not perfect, or at least possessed of only such trifling imperfections that they, the Socialists of one kind or another, could readily remove them? Nothing has transpired in Germany since the abdication of the Kaiser, so far as we have been informed, that permits us to say with anything like a.s.surance what form of government Germany hopes to have. All that we really know is that the government has fallen into the hands of the German Socialists, the deeply dyed-in-the-wool Socialists and the Socialistic Democrats. So far as one can predicate judgment on the reported sayings of the spokesmen of either of these two parties, the purpose of the present government is to save as much as it can of the previous regime and to continue it, minus the Kaiser and the war lords.
In none of the addresses or communications of any of these spokesmen is there any real admission of defeat, any intimation of humility, any indication of having been lessoned, nor, indeed, of anything that can be interpreted as recognition of the fact that Germany has been the victim of Grossenwahn, megalomania, which prompted and compelled her to a line of conduct which conditioned her destruction. On the contrary, everything that has been said has a note of determination to rehabilitate herself in order that she may take the leading position, morally, intellectually, commercially, in the world. At the very moment when admission that she had lost the war was forced from her, and while she was prostrate on the field of battle and in a state of collapse in every acre of her territory, instead of silence and of resignation, instead of an indication of that humility which tauts the heart-strings of the conqueror, there was clamor of exultation setting forth the virtues of the people and their ineradicable potentialities. Having been denied victory on the field of battle, if that Gott who was their Feste Burg does not desert them, they will now win a greater victory-they will show the world that they can conquer themselves and convert defeat into victory. They are without shame and without modesty. They ask for succor from the nation which less than eighteen months ago was a negligible quant.i.ty and which four years ago was made up of drivelling idiots and men mad with l.u.s.t for wealth. "You will not let countless thousands of women and children die of starvation." No, we shall not let them starve, but we shall have adequate care that never again will it be within your power to thrust the mailed fist of one extremity upon the honest, G.o.d-fearing people of the world while with the other you s.n.a.t.c.h the food from the mouths of those unable, because of age or infirmity, to provide for themselves.
One does not fail to detect the ring of exultation with which they say that they will win the greatest of all victories-that of showing that, though defeated in arms, they can be masters of themselves. They have no recognition whatsoever that the destruction of mediaeval imperialism and the unfurling of the flag of liberty have been due to valor and sacrifice of the peoples of the whole world, who have accomplished it without other motive than to make the world a fit place in which an honest man can live. In short, they are endeavoring to make it seem that their defeat in the material control of the world by the German sword is to be an opportunity for a great German triumph.
At this distance it is impossible to distinguish between the arrogance of the German Kaiser and his supporters and the arrogance of the German Socialists. They have every appearance of being born of the same monstrous mother made big of Satan. That which the latter are now stating they can do is the same as the Kaiser and his cohorts of authority, founded in divine rights, thought they could do and set out to do a quarter of a century ago. The Germans are as intoxicated with their own vanity, their own self-sufficiency, their own divine mission and potentialities to-day as they have been at any time in the twentieth century.
No one denies that Germany defeated may make any attempt at government which she chooses. At the same time no one can abrogate the right of the conquerors to see to it that the form of government which she inst.i.tutes and which she attempts to carry into operation shall not be one that militates against the success of the ideals for which the Allies have striven, not for themselves alone but for the whole world. It needs no prophetic vision to discern in the expressions of dictatorial arrogance of those who have taken the government in hand in Germany the same a.s.sumption of superiority which led to their defeat, the greatest the world has ever seen. In brief, as we see it to-day, the effort in Germany at the present time is to subst.i.tute one kind of cla.s.s interests for another which was admitted by the world"s best judges to be not only pernicious but destructive of liberty. If the former was of such a nature, why does not the latter partake of it? If there were any indications of sincere desire to establish an honest form of democratic government in Germany, there is no doubt that its originators and the whole German people would soon realize that they were dealing with a magnanimous conqueror, but in view of the fact that the wild beast has now in its agonal days the same snarl, the same venom, and the same sharp teeth that it had when it was l.u.s.ty and well-nourished, it is necessary that the conquerors should harden their hearts and judiciously guard the springs and cisterns of their generosity.
Promises of Germans should no longer be adequate. We should demand deeds, and not only that but that they should be backed by the sentiment and determination of the whole people and not of those who in maintaining that they speak for them speak only for themselves and their malignant ambitions. Teutonic tradition and authority must be replaced by Jeffersonian, Mazzinian, Wilsonian liberty and justice.
It would be well for the whole world to realize that we are on the threshold of the most fundamental transformation that the human mind can conceive. We have been so long accustomed to the inst.i.tutions and conventions that const.i.tute authority and privilege that it is almost impossible for any one to realize that they are about to cease to exist. Not only has the death-knell of such cla.s.s privileges been rung, but likewise that of inst.i.tutions which have stultified intellectual growth and moral supremacy, and amongst them none has more importance than organized religion, that is, religion which claims to be authoritative in so much as its directors or trustees-call them what you may-formulate a dogma to the teaching of which all others must conform in order that they may have life everlasting. People"s religion must be left to the free choice of the people.
Few of us realize that the curtain rung down on the 11th of November, 1918, was the closing of the second act in that great drama of which the first act was the French Revolution and of which the third and closing act will be devoted to social and political reconstruction. The majority have some ill-defined notion or thought that we shall go back to the kind of world that existed previous to August, 1914. There isn"t the smallest chance of it. I doubt whether even those who have had a vision of the impending transformation realize, however, how great or far-reaching the change will be. The time has come when the people are going to rule the world. They are going to administer its affairs in such a way that every man and woman capable of taking thought will have opportunity to be heard and will be privileged to live without authority, whose purpose it is to make the ma.s.ses conform to a line of conduct that will make for the advantage of the few, favored by birth or fortune which may have been their birthright or their acquisition. For years the word socialism and that for which it stands have been redolent of bad odor. This war has purged it of its disagreeable connotation, and to-day that which is meant by socialism is equivalent to the rights of man. In the minds of many socialism and anarchy are synonymous, but in reality the socialism which the war just finished has nurtured to a l.u.s.ty youth is much freer from anarchy and from the potentialities of destruction than the reign of autocracy, of capital and of bosses, which it supplanted.
I realize that it is difficult to defend this position in view of what is happening in Russia. To-day the bugaboo to the world"s children is Bolshevism; that is what will "get us if we don"t look out." When a riot breaks out anywhere nowadays it is Bolshevism. It has become a shibboleth, a name to conjure with, this social and political experiment in organized and carefully planned violence that has been carried out by the Jews in Russia since the conclusion of the peace of Brest-Litovsk. The word has suddenly come into wide-spread use and it is being given the connotation of socialism. In truth it is the socialism of the young Russia. Its theory is a perverted Marxism and its practice is an envenomed Hindenburgism. The etymology of the word Bolshevism as a name for a pseudopolitical party finds its origin in the programme of the party itself, that is, in the ultraradical tendencies of "Maximilist extremists" professed by the party leaders, Lenine, Trotzky, and Sinowjew. The leader Lenine said of the Bolsheviks in a moment of frankness: "For every genuine Bolshevik of my party there are sixty idiots and thirty-nine rascals," and no one can doubt his fitness to judge. We should not forget that the Russian public that looks on Lenine as its idol is honeycombed with deserters, ruffians, and at least three hundred thousand common criminals who were liberated from the prisons and from exile in Siberia by the revolution.
The Bolsheviks are neither a party nor are they the expression of democratic and revolutionary Russia, as a great many persist in believing. They are a mob drunk with ultraradical doctrines, who from exceptional circ.u.mstances have become able to seize the power, dominating with methods ferociously reactionary a hundred and twenty million individuals. And the world is witnessing in astonishment the spectacle offered by these bandits who, illegally holding the state power, arbitrarily decide the fortunes of a whole people after having allured them with fallacious promises, betraying them before the enemy.
The absolute unpreparedness of the Russian people-eighty per cent is illiterate-to pa.s.s into a regime of democracy and social autonomy has facilitated the successes of the Bolsheviks, whose "ideas" or conceptions, as expressed in the programmes of Lenine, Trotzky, et al., consist in carrying "persuasion" to the majority of the ignorant ma.s.ses. Such "ideas" are first of all that the "proletariat has not and must not have a country." "The issue of the World War is of interest to the proletariat only from the point of view of the possibility for them to take advantage of the general situation, doing everything in order to turn the war of the states into a war of cla.s.ses."
The b.a.s.t.a.r.d Bolshevism of present-day Russia professes, furthermore, the conception formerly considered as purely anarchic that "the property of others does not exist"; theft and violence are the normal means of exchange; liberty of speech is non-existent; neither press liberty nor a free literary production exists, because the Bolsheviks are exercising a censorship more tyrannical than the ill-famed imperial censorship. Their methods of coercion are to bring about financial exhaustion by means of fines and indemnities; physical exhaustion by means of enforced labor and confiscation of food supplies, and moral exhaustion by removing the foundations upon which individual life is integrated, removing all dominant objects, such as desire for scientific or artistic creation, religious principle, or strong and lasting affections. It is not only the dictatorship of proletariat which the Bolsheviks are trying to establish but a dictatorship of tyranny, and they use every conceivable means, showing themselves especially rabid against the well-to-do cla.s.ses, against the intellectuals, against capitalism and militarism.
The application of all this "programme" carries with it, as a first consequence, the complete dissolution of every state form, in the political sense as well as in the economic sense. The disorganization is complete; hunger, by which the ma.s.ses see themselves threatened, increases the spread of every form of criminality and violence. The destruction of every sentiment of individual responsibility and the abolition of religious faith contribute to take away from the cla.s.s of those who are better fitted to resist morally every obstacle and restraint in the choice of their actions. It is the "universal destruction," it is the madness of the apres nous le deluge!
The position of the Jews, radically changed after the revolution of the spring of 1917, which gave them equal rights with the rest of the population of Russian origin and religion, has had its triumph in the recent manifestations of Bolshevism. In fact, besides Trotzky, whose real name is Braunstein, there is a high percentage of Jews among the mob leaders and dictators of the "soviet" (councils) by which every city is administered, forming in this way an infinite number of "small social republics" in every part of the vast Russian territory.
The words of one of the most profound connoisseurs of the Russian soul, Dostoievsky, words which, alas, are prophetic not only of the concrete facts, but also of the general dangers which threaten his country, portray the condition that has come to pa.s.s.
"Our people, in the immense majority, adapt themselves cheerfully to the hardest discipline, and it is the easiest thing in the world to drag them toward the most n.o.ble deeds or toward the most ign.o.ble crimes. I tremble to think of what these good people are capable of doing if they are left, even for a moment, without discipline. Alas, side by side with them there are always some evil spirits, full of envy, thirsty of power, with their soul filled with selfish pa.s.sions and bad instincts; it is they who always exercise a mysterious and nefarious influence on the Russian mobs. I had a striking example of this when the whole population of a prison, about four thousand persons, was supinely submitting to the will of one of these demons who took advantage of them. n.o.body dared to murmur. The Russian needs an idol; he feels the need of bending, of being guided, of obeying. Free the Russian people of a leading power which they willingly followed and they will immediately create for themselves another dominator more obnoxious and nefarious. Let G.o.d preserve us when the crowd of the weak ones will follow under the power of the wicked ones. What a horrible spectacle we shall witness then! What atrocities! What useless slaughter! We shall see the country and religion betrayed; we shall see Russia fall the prey to external enemies; we shall see material servitude, the loss of all our acquisitions, the oblivion of all the affections. Let G.o.d save me from seeing this turning-point in Russian history!"
G.o.d saved him, but this mercy was not extended to us. We shall have to be witness of Russia groaning under the system of bloodless terror, but it will not be for long. In theory the Bolsheviks desire the same thing as the Socialists; in practice they want it plus revenge, that which has been the motivating characteristic of the Jew since time immemorial. Their power is founded in resources which I suspect are largely in America, and their agents have been granted citizenship and protection in practically every country of the world. So soon as the motives of their supporters then shall be widely known, and so soon as their monstrous practices shall be revealed to the whole world, this malignant exuberance that has developed upon the healthy growth of Liberalism and Socialism will be removed by a giant cautery wielded in a hand more powerful than that of Hercules.
A decree recently issued by the Bolsheviks of Vladimir, published in that official Soviet organ Izvestija, and now beginning to be widely published by European papers, will be relished by many in the U. S. A., where unquestionably the Bolsheviks have largely been financed.
"Every girl who has reached her eighteenth year is guaranteed by the local Commissary of Surveillance the full inviolability of her person.
"Any offender against an eighteen-year-old girl by using insulting language or attempting to ravish her is subject to the full rigors of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
"Any one who has ravished a girl who has not reached her eighteenth year is considered a state criminal, and is liable to a sentence of twenty years" hard labor unless he marries the injured one.
"The injured, dishonored girl is given the right not to marry the ravisher if she does not so desire.
"A girl having reached her eighteenth year is to be announced as the property of the state.
"Any girl having reached her eighteenth year and not married is obliged, subject to the most severe penalty, to register at the Bureau of Free Love in the Commissariat of Surveillance.
"Having registered at the Bureau of Free Love, she has the right to choose from among men between the ages of nineteen and fifty a cohabitant-husband.
"Remarks: (1) The consent of the man in the said choice is unnecessary; (2) the man on whom such a choice falls has no right to make any protest whatsoever against the infringement.
"The right to choose from a number of girls who have reached their eighteenth year is given also to men.
"The opportunity to choose a husband or a wife is to be presented once a month.
"The Bureau of Love is autonomous.
"Men between the ages of nineteen and fifty have the right to choose from among the registered women, even without the consent of the latter, in the interests of the state.
"Children who are the issue of these unions are to become the property of the state."
The "decree" states further that it has been based on the excellent "example" of similar decrees already issued at Luga, Kolpin, and elsewhere.
A similar "Project of Provisional Rights in Connection with the Socialization of Women in the City of Hvolinsk and Vicinity" was published in the Local Gazette of the Workers" and Soldiers" Deputies.
I am not sure that this lurid conduct of the Bolsheviks will do the cause of social reconstruction harm. I recall the conduct of the promoters of woman-suffrage in England in the few years preceding 1914. Their campaign seemed to be founded in insanity, and yet something of the kind was necessary to concentrate the world"s attention on their rights, and the Bolsheviks have got the world"s attention and thought to-day-and will have them to-morrow.
Socialism is adverse to imperialism and capitalism. Imperialism has been conquered, but capitalism has not yet been throttled. One will be able more safely to prophesy how much it has been weakened, potentially and actually, after labor has had its next chance at the bat in Great Britain. This war was not undertaken to overcome capitalism. It was undertaken to overcome imperialism and the tyranny of foreign domination, but its success has been dependent upon the people, who will now a.s.sert their rights, and the most fundamental of their rights is that they shall not be oppressed by money. It is not sufficient that the principles of nationality defined by Mazzini shall be upheld-that is, that the peoples of one nationality shall not be dominated by the peoples of another. It is necessary, if such peoples are going to live in freedom, that they must not be dominated or enslaved by any mastodonic power which is protected from attack, such as capital. Had it not been for the determination of the people to have the right to live in freedom, the miracle that transpired in the closing months of 1918 in Europe would not have been wrought. The factors that sustained the peoples of the conquering nations in these long, dark months of tragedy and of carnage, the thing that made them go on stubbornly and steadfastly with the war when the odds seemed to be all against them, may be summarized in one sentence: "Their determination to have their inalienable right, the right to live in freedom." One may perhaps say that in different countries of the world they have had such right, but the person who says this would have great difficulty in naming the country. Any one who contended that in republics such as ours capital has not been privileged and arbitrary, that it has not been the dominant factor in making and adopting the laws to which the people are beholden, would be laughed at by any sane man.
And now that the people who have lived and died, toiled and wrought, suffered and supplicated through fifty-two months of agony have won, there will arise from those who have survived a dominant chorus which will insist upon the fulfilment of the promises that were made them to incite them to victory. Their hopes and desires and aspirations must be satisfied. I am one of those who believe that they will make their demands orderly and insistently, and not by means of revolution or serious disturbance of order. They will work out their salvation by mutual co-operation, not only amongst themselves but with those who are the leaders of the world"s thought, many of whom have been heretofore of the privileged cla.s.ses, but they will insist upon certain fundamental things which I have previously enumerated, and the foremost of which is the dispersion of great wealth, particularly hereditary wealth. The revolutionary Socialist sees an easy solution of the matter in the giving of the wealth to the ma.s.ses and of recognizing no other source of wealth except labor, but that is not the kind of Socialist who will have to do with the reordering of the world that is now being born. It is the Socialist who is to-day frequently called the individualist, who believes that the dissipation of individual property and initiative will spell a greater ruin for the ma.s.ses than for the individual and who believes in harmonizing the principles of individual liberty with those of solidarity, who will be the Socialist of the New Era.
The future state will be arbitrary only in so far as it is the expression of the collected, united force of its citizens. They will really make its laws, not have them made for them by capital or privileged interests; they will enforce them impartially, and it is devoutly to be hoped the external force of such peoples will be conventionized in such a way with other peoples that armies and navies will practically cease to exist. The basis of such hope is in the League of Nations, for then we shall have a world-state which shall make international law or convention subject to law and enforcement. Once the fear of invasion of a country is overcome and once the principles of nationality can be established and put into operation, there will be no reason for the existence of armies and navies.
The beneficences subsumed under the name liberty that must flow from the sacrifices that we have made for the welfare of the people must a.s.sure their health, contribute to their happiness, and promote their efficiency. Disease must be prevented, not by personal effort as on the part of physicians who do it for gain or fame, but by the state, which shall devote adequate sums for research, investigation, propaganda, and enforcement of the principles of sanitation. It shall likewise devote adequate sums for the education of all the people and thrust such education upon them in order that they may make use, not only for themselves but for the state, of the talents with which they have been endowed, so that liberty and personal initiative may be made running mates, and no closely knit organization as the church shall be permitted to stand in the way of such education. It shall permit them to worship G.o.d as they, educated, see fit and proper, and it shall not attempt, or tolerate the attempt of others, to thrust a religion founded in authority upon them, non-conformation to which is followed by punishment, often in condign form, such as social ostracism, refusal of the ministration of paid priests, refusal of burial in consecrated grounds, or threat of punishment. It shall not enforce upon them a conduct at variance with the laws of nature in s.e.x relations; therefore, it shall solve the marriage and population questions, or at least make an attempt to do so. It shall give the same freedom to woman as it does to man and not have one written or unwritten law for the former and another for the latter. It shall replace our present economic system by a better one; in other words, money must be given a new valuation.
When everything has been said, the state is the thing. What const.i.tutes a state or a nation? We know what has const.i.tuted it in the past, but when we read history we realize that it has never been stable, always has been in transformation. Some have been more stable than others-England more than Italy, France more than Austria, the United States more than France. When a nation does not change it is dead like Spain, strangled by the parasite, arbitrary authority, the church.
A new order of state-formation is about to be inst.i.tuted-that of nationalism. Comparatively few people appreciate what is meant by nationalism. Until the wide-spread discussion of the aspirations of the Czecho-Slovaks in America, I doubt whether any one, except students of history and statesmen, gave any attention to it whatsoever. And yet, despite this, no one has elaborated the fundamental facts of nationality as clearly as has President Wilson. Nearly a third of all the peoples of Europe have been obliged to submit to governments to which they were antipathic by birth, sympathy, or tradition. In other words, Italians living beyond a certain arbitrary geographic line have been obliged to subscribe to the laws of Austria; French living beyond a certain geographic line have been obliged to subscribe to the laws of Germany; Slavs to those of Hungary. Patriotism, that indefinable quality made up of primitive instincts, intellectual convictions, and religious feeling, which is supposed to be the greatest of all the virtues, has been an artifice for a third of all the peoples of the European continent. If they were really patriotic, their hearts and minds were with their mother countries, and therefore their conduct toward the ruler to which they bowed the knee must have been that of the hypocrite. One of the things on which all the Allied nations are agreed is that in the remaking of the map of Europe every man shall be free to elect his nationality and that no one shall be coerced to be a citizen of another nation. He may elect to be a citizen of another nation, but that is his concern.
It is more than probable that there will be very great difficulty in rearranging the map of Europe satisfactorily in order that this principle of nationality may be fulfilled, and nowhere will it be so difficult as in Italy. The agreement of Italy with the Allies previous to her entering the war, and which is known as the Pact of London, gave her, in event of victory, large sections of the Dalmatian coast of which she has great need in order to facilitate the development of her commerce and to provide her with certain essentials which her territory does not furnish. This Dalmatian coast and the territory contiguous to it to the east-Istria, Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina-are not populated by Italians to any considerable extent. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of the people are Slavs, and it is this country which many people believe and hope will eventually become Jugoslavia. There is no doubt whatsoever that Italy will get all her unredeemed territory, but whether or not she will get much more than that on the continent of Europe is doubtful in the minds of many, including her well-wishers.
The question of nationality is not going to be an easy one for Austria-Hungary to settle. In reality, German-Austria const.i.tutes an important hinge upon which all the problems that are connected with the reconstruction of Central Europe swing. Aside from the Czecho-Slovak nation, which is Bohemia and the territories that were lopped off from it previous to the time when it was absorbed by Austria-Germany, the smaller nations that have come to the surface and have been differentiated in this waterspout that has disturbed the waters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire will have to wait a long time for their rights and differentiation, but the status of German Austria will have to be settled very promptly. It has been said repeatedly in the newspapers that these people have expressed a desire to unite themselves with a German confederation, probably Bavaria. A great many people see in this accession to Germany of ten or twelve millions of people a potential menace in so far as this added number might make for a disturbance of the equilibrium of power. But one cannot say whether or not this fear is groundless until we see what form of government Prussia and Bavaria and the other states of Germany are eventually going to have. If the principles of nationality are not going to be invalidated by any future settlements, the Germans of Austria would have only two choices-to const.i.tute an independent government of their own or to link themselves with one of the Prussian states. As a matter of fact, it is most unlikely that the Allies will attempt to give them any advice in this matter, which means they will not attempt to direct or coerce them.
France may not have an easy time with Alsace-Lorraine. In the two generations that have elapsed since Germany took them, it is not at all unlikely that many of their people have become a part of the national consciousness of that country. The just way would be to let the adults of Alsace-Lorraine decide at the end of another forty-eight years, during which time it is united to France, by universal vote of its adults, men and women, whether they want to have French or German nationality. I should think France would be taking no risks in such a plebiscite.
England will have Ireland to deal with after the war even more than before the war. There is only one way that she can do it successfully and that is on the principles of nationality. The Irish are no more like the English than the Czechs are like the Austrians; in fact, they are less so. They are different emotionally, intellectually, morally, and physically, and England will not much longer be allowed to coerce them. Her one privilege in Ireland is to force universal education upon her people. If this had been done before, England would have long ere this brought about that instinctive liking and common purpose which is the basis of all sound union, whether it be between individuals or between components of a nation.
Italy"s chief difficulty is going to be with the Jugoslavs, as the southern Slavs are called, and already these difficulties have begun. The southern Slavs have not, so far as I can learn, formulated a definite programme, and they were never recognized as belligerent allies by the Entente. Italy had a hesitating recognition of southern Slav aspirations forced from her, but there is no trust or confidence reposed in the Slavs by the Italians. The Croatians, the Bosnians, the Montenegrins, the Albanians do not know what they want, save change, and that they have wanted since time immemorial. They have no specific programme and there is no definite interlacement of their desires with Serbia. So far as their plans can be gleaned, realization of them, even in the most fundamental one of establishing a plebiscitary area, would find itself in violent conflict with Italy"s pre-bellum agreement with the Allies known as the Treaty of London.
All things come to him who waits. If while waiting things do not come to us that make life forever after unlivable, we shall be fortunate, and forever grateful.
November, 1918.