JAMES SPEYER

here at this time if peace was proposed upon terms that would have any chance of acceptance. Those in civil authority that I have met are as reasonable and fairminded as their counterparts in England or America, but, for the moment, they are impotent. I hear on every side the old story that all Germany wants is a permanent guaranty of peace, so that she may proceed upon her industrial career undisturbed..

I have talked of the second convention,1 and it has been cordially received and there is a sentiment here, as well as elsewhere, to make settlement upon lines broad enough to prevent a recurrence of present conditions.

There is much to tell you verbally, which I prefer not to write.

Faithfully yours,

E. M. HOUSE.

March 26, 1915.

Colonel House's next letter is most important, for it records the birth of that new idea which afterward became a ruling thought with President Wilson and the cause of almost endless difficulties in his dealings with Great Britain. The "new phase of the situation" to which he refers is "the Freedom of the Seas" and this brief note to Page, dated March 27, 1915, contains the first reference to this idea on record. Indeed, it is evident from the letter itself that Colonel House made this notation the very day the idea occurred to him.

no direct move can be made toward peace. The Civil Government are ready, and upon terms that would at least make an opening. There is also a large number in military and naval circles that I believe would be glad to begin parleys, but the trouble is mainly with the people. It is a very dangerous thing to permit a people to be misled and their minds inflamed either by the press, by speeches, or otherwise.

In my opinion, no government could live

'It was the Wilson Administration's plan that there should be two peace gatherings, one of the belligerents to settle the war, and the other of belligerents and neutrals, to settle questions of general importance growing out of the war. This latter is what Col. House means by "the

second convention."

Col. Edward M. House to Mr. Page.

Dear Page:

I have had a most satisfactory talk with the Chancellor. After conferring with Stovall,' Page, and Willard3, I shall return to Paris and then to London to discuss with Sir Edward a phase of the situation which promises results.

I did not think of it until to-day and have mentioned it to both the Chancellor and Zimmermann, who have received it cordially, and who join me in the belief that it may be the first thread to bridge the chasm.

I am writing hastily, for the pouch is waiting to be closed.

The "freedom of the seas" was merely a proposal to make all merchant shipping, enemy and neutral, free from attack in time of war. It would have automatically ended all blockades and all interference with commerce. Germany would have been at liberty to send all her merchant ships to sea for undisturbed trade with all parts of the world in war time as in peace, and, in future, navies would be used simply for fighting. Offensively, their purpose would be to bombard enemy fortifications, to meet enemy ships in battle, and to convoy ships which were

'Mr. Pleasant A. Stovall, American Minister in Switzerland.

2Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, American Ambassador to Italy.

3Mr. Joseph E. Willard, American Ambassador to Spain.

transporting troops for the invasion of enemy soil; defensively, their usefulness would consist in protecting the homeland from such attacks and such invasions. Perhaps an argument can be made for this new rule of warfare, but it is at once apparent that it is the most startling proposal made in modern times in the direction of disarmament. It meant that Great Britain should abandon that agency of warfare with which she had destroyed Napoleon, and with which she expected to destroy Germany in the prevailing struggle the blockade. From a defensive standpoint, Colonel House's proposed reform would have been a great advantage to Britain, for an honorable observance of the rule would have insured the British people its food supply in wartime. With Great Britain, however, the blockade has been historically an offensive measure: it is the way in which England

HERR VON BALLIN

The great German ship owner, who was one of the men with whom Colonel House discussed peace in the spring of 1915. The Wilson Administration believed that Germany would have ended the war on satisfactory terms at that time. It afterward blamed Great Britain for not meeting the situation in a conciliatory spirit

has always made war. Just what reception this idea would have had with official London, in April, 1915, had Colonel House been able to present it as his own proposal, is not clear, but the Germans, with characteristic stupidity, prevented the American from having a fair chance. The Berlin Foreign Office at once cabled to Count Bernstorff and Bernhard Dernburg-the latter a bovine publicity agent who was then promoting the German cause in the American press-with instructions to start a "propaganda" in behalf of the "freedom of the seas." By the time Colonel House reached London, therefore, these four words had been adorned with the Germanic label. British statesmen regarded the suggestion as coming from Germany and not from America: and the reception was worse than cold.

And another tragedy now roughly interrupted President Wilson's attempts at mediation. Page's letters have disclosed that he possessed almost a clairvoyant faculty of foreseeing approaching events. The letters of the latter part of April and of early May contain many forebodings of tragedy. "Peace? Lord knows when!" he writes to his son Arthur on May 2nd. "The blowing up of

ALFRED ZIMMERMANN

a liner with American passengers may be the prelude. I almost expect such a thing." And again on the same date: "If a British liner full of American passengers be blown up, what will Uncle Sam do? That's what's going to happen."

"We all have the feeling here," the Ambassador writes on May 6th, "that more and

more frightful things are about to happen." The ink on those words was scarcely dry when a message from Queenstown was handed to the American Ambassador. A German submarine had torpedoed and sunk the Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale, and one hundred and twenty-four American men, women, and children had been drowned.

VER the ancient realms of Ireland, so famous for faith and fight and art and song, there now dawns a day, new and uncertain. For a generation, Ireland has been a country where the body-the material well-being of the nation-has risen from the dead while the soul within the body, with its memories and yearning, still suffers the distresses of the tomb. And the question is, even now, whether England, too long irresolute as Hamlet, has uttered the effective word-Rest, rest perturbed spirit. The reckless, landlordridden, impoverished Ireland of Charles O'Malley, which Lever described in his novels, passed away forever with the famine, vanishing in that strange white mist which in a night rotted the potatoes and so destroyed the one food of the people. The Irish were then eight millions. Despite the rise of Belfast they are now scarcely four and a half millions. Looking back on those terrible years, 1845 and 1846, when the peasants collapsed by hundreds on the very roadside and had to be picked up for burial, when a million emigrated and a quarter of them succumbed to the journey, one can see the folly of permitting a population to depend for food on a single crop, and that, like potatoes, one of the least reliable of all crops. Ireland is now in touch with the markets of the world. A glance at her agricultural statistics will show that she need feed no longer on the potato alone. She has a purchasing power which can commandeer, if need be, the harvests of Canada and the Middle West. In fact, she has never been in all her history, either absolutely or comparatively, so prosperous as she is to-day. When the world wanted food, Ireland had it to sell at war-prices and on the profits of the farmer there was usually no excess tax. As a purchasing owner, the Irish farmer was also secure against the rent being raised or the farm being sold over his head. At last, it was worth while for the young folks to remain in the country. At last it could be hoped that Ireland, out of

her savings, would finance her own development without dependence on a deeply indebted London. Economically, the nation has felt its feet. Give Ireland a respite from politics and the time has passed "When Labor seeks the Poorhouse and Innocence the Prison."

The trouble now with Ireland is that sorrow has been her one luxury, the theme of her poets, the melody in her music, the eloquence of her orators; and to leave sorrow behind, to withdraw the eye from Erin crucified, and to substitute satiety, seems a sacrifice of Ireland's essential individuality. essential individuality. An Ireland reconciled with England ceases to be the Ireland with which we are familiar. An Ireland with nothing of which to make complaint, loses her empire over the sympathies of mankind. It was not of a liberated Greece that Byron sang but of a Greece enslaved. It was not for the Bulgaria of King Ferdinand that Gladstone thundered against atrocities. The small nation that is set free loses its grievance; for its own short comings it can no longer blame the oppressor; it enters upon a new era of duty to itself and mankind; it must face as well as arouse public opinion; it appears at the bar of history no longer as plaintiff but as defendant. In eastern Europe there are many small nations, thus on trial, and to Ireland will now be applied the same test.

Her situation is peculiar. By emigration she has become more than herself. Beyond the seas her sons and her daughters still dream of the old, sad. Ireland. What they like is to listen to the lilt of Macushla; and, as the tears start to eyes which have never seen the land where Macushla was written, it would seem like sacrilege to remark that in Limerick-the city of the broken treaty and of priceless lace— there is now a most lucrative trade in bacon. The evacuation of Ireland by British troops has now been conceded, but it will become evident that British troops did not always burn and harry and slay; they also spent British money for Irish commodities. At last, Dublin Castle