ceremony; if any other country, for any reason, no matter what that reason may be, is in a better position than we to tender its good offices, it should not delay for a moment. It is for the belligerents to decide which offer, if any, they will accept. I am sure they will not complain if, following the promptings of our hearts, we beseech them to let us help them back to the paths of peace.

Will they object on the ground that they will not consent to any peace until they have assurances that it will be a permanent peace? That suggestion has been made-I think both sides have expressed a desire that the peace, when secured, shall be permanent-but who can give a pledge as to the future? If fear that the peace may not be permanent is given as the reason for refusal it is not a sufficient reason. While no one can stand surety for what may come, it is not difficult to adopt measures which will give far greater assurance of permanent peace than the world has ever known before.

Second-The treaty in which they join should provide for investigation by a permanent international commission of every dispute that may arise, no matter what its character or nature. The United States has already made thirty treaties embodying this principle, and these thirty treaties link our country to nearly three-quarters of all the inhabitants of the world. We have such a treaty in force between the United States and four of the countries now at warGreat Britain, France, Russia, and Italy. The principle of this treaty has been accepted by three other belligerentsGermany, Austria, and Belgium-although treaties with these nations have not yet been negotiated. These seven warring nations have indorsed the principle embodied in these treaties, namely, that there shall be no declaration of war or commencement of hostilities until the subject in dispute has been investigated by an international commission. Why cannot they apply the principle as between themselves? What cause of war is of such magnitude that nations can afford to commence shooting at each

other before the cause is investigated? A treaty such as those which now protect the peace of the United States would give a year's time for investigation and report, and who doubts that a year's time would be sufficient to reach an amicable settlement of almost every difficulty?

Does any one suppose that the present war would have been begun if a year's time had been taken to investigate the dispute between Austria and Serbia? It will be remembered that Serbia had only twenty-four hours in which to reply, and it will also be remembered that during this brief time the rulers of the Old World endeavored to find a means of preventing war. If they had only had some machinery which they could have employed to avert war, how gladly would they have availed themselves of it! The machinery provided by treaty can be resorted to with honor-yes, with honor-no matter how high a sense of honor the nation has. The trouble has been that, while the nations were abundantly provided with machinery for conducting war, they possessed no machinery for the promotion of peace. A year's time allows passion to subside and reason to resume its sway. It allows man to act when he is calm instead of having to act when he is angry. When a man is angry he swaggers around and talks about what he can do, and he often overestimates his strength; when he is calm he considers what he ought to do. When he is angry he hears the rumbling of earthquakes and the sweep of the hurricane; when he is calm he listens to the still small voice of conscience.

Third--While the period of investigation provided for in our treaties will go far toward preventing war, still even a year's deliberation does not give complete protection. In order to secure the investigation of all questions without exception it was necessary to reserve to the contracting parties liberty of action at the conclusion of the investigation. War is thus reduced from a probability to a mere possibility, and this is an immeasurable advance; but the assurance of permanent peace cannot be given un

til the desire for war is eradicated from the human heart. Compulsory periods of investigation supply the machinery by which nations can maintain peace with honor if they so desire; but the final work of the advocates of peace is educational-it is the cultivation of the spirit of brotherhood condensed into the commandment "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Is it impossible to imagine a civilization in which greatness will be measured by service and in which the rivalry will be a rivalry in doing good? No one doubts that the lot of each member of society would be infinitely better under such conditions; why not strive to bring about such conditions? Is it visionary to hope and labor for this end? "Where there is no vision the people perish.” It is a “death grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word." The old system has broken down; it can let loose the furies, but it cannot bind them; it is impotent to save. The question is not whether

the Word will triumph-that is certainbut when? And after what sufferings?

Thomas Carlyle, his voice rising clear and strong above the babble of Mammon, asked, in the closing chapters of his French Revolution:

"Hast thou considered how Thought is stronger than Artillery Parks, and (were it fifty years after death and martyrdom, or were it two thousand years) writes and unwrites Acts of Parliament, removes mountains, models the World like soft clay? Also how the beginning of all Thought worth the name is Love."

The truth which he uttered is still truth, and no matter who uttered it, the thought is the thought of Him who spake as never man spake; who was described in prophecy as the Prince of Peace; whose coming was greeted with the song of "Peace on earth; good-will to men," and whose teachings, when applied, will usher in the enduring peace of a universal brotherhood. W. J. BRYAN.

T

HE plain man of the prairie became Secretary of State when William J. Bryan did; the prairie then entered diplomacy, international controversy. The secret of all that has puzzled the land in his behavior lies in that fact. His hold on the West lies in the fact that he is in himself the average man of that country, with that man's ideals, aspirations, defects, and drawbacks. There seems nothing strange or funny in a Secretary of State who goes to New York and signs temperance pledges, or holds Billy Sunday's platform in Philadelphia, when you get a few miles away from the cities; and if it seems a little queer to New York to find

the Secretary of State undertaking to demolish the Darwinian theory, there are plenty of regions where the Darwinian theory is regarded as a device of the devil to upset the Mosaic cosmogony. Chesterton says that Dickens never wrote down to the mob, because he was himself the mob; and Bryan never talked down to the men of the prairie for the

same reason.

He is not a man of culture, nor of reading. He has been around the world, but when he came back the books and articles he wrote were such as might have been published as guide books or in encyclopedias; he could have written them without leaving home. Travel had

no broadening or polishing effect upon his mind.

The vast influence he still has is due to the fact that the common man, with all his mistakes and gaucheries, speaks in him, and that when the common man hears his own thoughts spoken in BryIan's voice he knows that the accent is sincere. Bryan may have taken up this or that particular issue because it sounded like a vote-maker, but none of them represented the least divergence from his course as a whole, which has always been honestly bent in a certain plain direction. He never hesitated to be in a minority and never dodged a fight. He is an innocent theorist, who frequently goes wrong because of the simplicity of his mental processes; but he acts upon his theories, right or wrong, with an intrepidity and a whole-hearted courage in which the ordinary man sees the qualities he himself would like to have, and dreams he has. His mind is not broad, but it is strong; he is always sure he is right, and always ready to fight for his beliefs, and he keeps his hold upon his followers because he is not below them, and not much above them, and because they know he is honest and sin

cere.

In 1906, the Democratic Party, picking itself out of the wreckage of Parker's defeat, was yearning to reunite. "Big business," assaulted and bruised and banged about by President Roosevelt, was ready to come into line. Roosevelt or his candidate could be defeated in 1908 only by Democratic harmony. Bryan was abroad, traveling, and somehow his distant figure looked less appalling than the near-by figure in the White House. The East did not ask him to recant his radicalism, but only not to talk about it. He arrived in New York, and business went to hear him make a harmony speech. If he made it, business would support him for President. He made the speech; he declared for Government ownership of railroads. Business, roaring with pain, fell back into the Republican arms, and Bryan was defeated for President. No, Bryan is not an opportunist-not in things that really

matter.

William Bayard Hale once accurately described him as

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essentially a preacher, a high-class exhorter, a glorified circuit rider." There are vast spaces of our country still populated by men and women of the old-fashioned kind; Chesterton describes them as "full of stale culture and ancestral simplicity." They are the descendants of the Puritansintellectually, at any rate-they look askance on cards, dancing, and the stage; they are the kind of folks who peopled the Mississippi Valley in Lincoln's day and Massachusetts in John Hancock's. Bryan does not talk down to that type for votes; he is that type. Colonel George Harvey, with sarcastic intent, alleged that Bryan became a white-ribboner after hearing a little girl recite "The Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine." There are regions which would accept that parable as Gospel truth, and much to Bryan's credit.

Salem, Ill., is a little town which fairly shrieks at you its pre-eminence as a picture of that type. As you pass through its orderly little streets, with its little frame houses, all of the same kind and all neat and unassuming, with its dirt roads and its typical Town Hall, set correctly back behind a correct little patch of grass in a neat square, you feel instinctively that the Darwinian theory must be avoided in your Salem conversation. You know at once that the same families have lived there for generations. So they have; one of them was Bryan's, and he was born there on March 19, 1860.

Of course, he was the valedictorian of his class-Illinois College, 1881. Of course, he became a lawyer; and, of course, in the Middle West, that involved politics. He lived now in Lincoln, Neb., in a Republican district, but he was a Democrat. There was a landslide in 1890. The whole country went Democratic, and many a forlorn hope leader in some hidebound Republican district was swept into Congress, Bryan among them. He made a great speech on the tariff, which won him instantly a national reputation; but Lincoln had recovered its Republican poise, and he did not go back to Con

gress. He added to his reputation in his own State, however, as editor of its chief Democratic organ, The Omaha WorldHerald, and went to Chicago as the head of its delegation to the National Convention of 1896.

At a moment when David B. Hill's masterly presentation of the gold-standard case and Tillman's failure in his effort at rejoinder had thrown a wet blanket over the silverites, Bryan came forward with his "Cross of Gold" speech. The cheering delegations carried him around the hall on their shoulders. None of the candidates before the convention was dominating or really of Presidential size; the convention was deadlocked for many ballots, and at last it turned to Bryan and nominated him.

His defeat by McKinley really marked the beginning of his career as a national leader. Despite the accident which had made him the Democracy's nominal leader, he demonstrated that he was the ablest of the radicals into whose hands it had fallen, and his nominal chieftainship became a real one. It was evident from the beginning that he would be renominated in 1900. When the Spanish war broke out he offered his services and became Colonel of the Third Nebraska Regiment. The Republican Administration was taking no chances on his getting any military glory, and it marooned him in Florida till after the war. He returned good for evil by going to Washington, uniform and all, and dragooning reluctant Democratic Senators into voting for the treaty with Spain whereby we acquired the Philippines. This was one of his incidental opportunisms; he believed it would give the Democrats a winning issue, that of imperialism. The cast of Bryan's mind is such that he always gets his winning issues on wrong end foremost; it gave the Republicans a winning issue, that of imperialism.

Bryan went down to defeat again in 1900, on this new issue, and as usual epitaphs were written over his political grave. It is a favorite parlor game; but Bryan never stays dead, because there is something enduring in him. What is it? That same spokesmanship for the aver

age man of many regions, the man of the little parlor with the melodeon or parlor organ, the plush-bound photograph album and the "History of the San Francisco Earthquake" bought by subscription from a book agent, and the grandfather's clock in the corner of the hall.

But in 1904 the Democratic leaders, tired of defeat, turned desperately to the opposite wing of the party. The radical leaders, really opportunists, forswore or hid their convictions for the sake of victory, tried to teach their unskillful tongues the language of conservatism, and joined in with the conservatives in the nomination of Parker. But Bryan did not yield; he forswore nothing, hid nothing, and he fought a lonely fight, the bravest of his life.

His fight was of one man against a multitude. Alone, he had to be everywhere; he was in the Committee on Resolutions, in the Committee on Credentials, on the floor of the convention, speaking, fighting, working, twenty hours a day. He had no one to help him; all his fellows were on the other side, strangling their convictions and fighting against him. He was insulted on the platform, even by fellow-radicals; he was elbowed aside and snarled at by men who had been more radical than himself; attempts were made to deny him a hearing. Nothing could daunt him until or perturb him; he fought on Parker was nominated, went to his hotel at dawn as the convention adjourned, and fell into his bed in utter collapse. A doctor was summoned, who said that Bryan must instantly give up all work and undergo treatment.

That evening the news came that Parker had refused to run unless the word "gold" was written into the platform; the convention was thrown into panic; the sick man rose from his bed and entered the wild and turbulent hall, white-faced, breathing with difficulty, sweat pouring down his face, and there took up the work again, single-handed still. He fought on all night, was defeated again, and went under the doctor's hands. Those speeches in that convention were really the greatest of his