I made a mistake and said something stupid?"

I have attached this discussion of the lecturer's temptation by the crowd to this reference to the preservation of free speech for this reason: it is too easily assumed that freedom from the financial and social control of special privilege alone insures freedom of speech that will mean a release of forward-looking and creative thought; but what is said by the free man is as important as his freedom to say it.

A BLAZER OF TRAILS

IN the fourth place, the lecturer should be a blazer of intellectual and social trails. Because he enjoys a freedom relatively greater than that of the average public servant, the lecturer should justify his possession of that freedom by marching in advance of the majority in his thinking. In retailing the accepted truths of society, he may do much good, but he is not assuming his real function. The lecturer has no right to deal in platitudes. When society has adopted a principle, it is time for the lecturer to drop it. Macaulay says of John Milton:

He always selected for himself the boldest literary services. He never came up in the rear when the outworks had been carried and the breach entered. . . . When his opinion seemed likely to prevail, he passed on to other subjects. There is no more hazardous enterprise than that of bearing the torch of truth into those dark and infected recesses in which no light has ever shone. But it was the choice and pleasure of Milton . . . to leave. . . to others the credit of defending and expounding the popular parts of his religious and political creed. He took his stand upon those which the great body of his countrymen reprobated as criminal or derided as paradoxical.

That a thing is true is not justification for giving it place in a lecture. The raw materials for lectures should be those truths that may never reach a community, or certainly not reach the community for some time, through the channels of the press, the pulpit, and

the school. The professional lecture platform is to-day creaking under a tonnage of platitudes; but on all hands, among lecturers and their managers, there is going on a definite searching of mind, and there is an increasing aspiration to turn the platform to the best possible account in these potential days of revaluation. Out of this the times demand that there come a group of lecturers who will spend their time, not so much in exhorting in behalf of the Golden Rule as in devising ways and means for making the Golden Rule work in politics and industry.

PROPHET OF THE IMPENDING

IN the fifth and last place, the lecturer should be an interpreter of dawning con ditions. That every lecturer should live a century ahead of his time is neither possible nor desirable. Trails must be blazed, but there must also be guides to lead the masses over these trails. Equal in value to the pioneer is the lecturer who, not so far ahead of his time as to make sympathy with him difficult, succeeds in giving voice to the dumb aspirations of the multitude, interpreting and reducing to intelligent form thoughts and purposes that have been unconsciously forming in the mind of the race. These unvoiced convictions and formless aspirations are the raw materials out of which the peaceful revolution of progress is made; but they need to have held before them a forceful interpretation to magnetize them in the right direction.

This interpretation of dawning conditions requires a more judicial type of mind and even greater self-mastery than does the blazing of trails. Certain men are endowed with an intellectual recklessness that predisposes them to pioneer service, hilarious nonconformists who, in hacking their way into new territory, really enjoy the opposition they encounter. It is no hardship to such men to be hissed. The stake is as much a luxury to some men as the spotlight is to others. But to be true to oneself and to the truth, and yet keep the sympathetic attention of the crowd, demands the best a man may have of mind and morals.

HERE, then, are the capacities in which the lecturer may, in my judgment render an essential service in the inspiring and informing of American public opinion during the next few years when public issues will involve the personal future and fortune of every citizen:

(1) A painter of mental backgrounds, giving to American communities in simplified statements a comprehensive survey of the facts and principles involved in the fundamental questions of our current life.

(2) A mediator between the specialist and the layman, translating into the vernacular the current results of modern scholarship and scientific research.

(3) A conservator of free speech, keeping, in the interest of democratic progress, his thought and utterance unfettered.

(4) A blazer of intellectual and social trails, playing a pioneer rôle that, to men of other professions, is more difficult and in many cases impossible.

(5) An interpreter of dawning conditions, standing nearer the crowd than does the pioneer, reducing to intelligent form feelings and convictions that have existed in the minds of the masses for a long while, but which have not yet found expression.

Acting in these capacities, the lecturer will become a talking publicist who will be able to go into communities and do more than deliver a lecture as a singer might sing a concert; he will be able to introduce the community to the facts and principles of some underlying problem of our national life; and, because he has mastered his field, he will be able to answer questions from the crowd and to stimulate a genuine community discussion, without which we shall never have in this country the intelligent public opinion that national safety and progress require.

These adaptations and developments of the platform and of the lecturer I conceive to be of national importance. Here is a machine that goes into communities in every portion of the United

States; it serves one out of every eleven persons in the United States every year. Shall we not utilize it and the open-forum movement to restore in this country the processes of common counsel and to set up the parliament of the people for which Mr. Wilson pleads in the paragraph quoted from him in this paper?

I may not close this paper without reference to another interesting project which has been evolved by Professor H. W. Rolfe, who has personally organized in several of the Eastern seaboard States lecture weeks for discussion of America's new international relations and responsibilities. He has made use of the open-forum plan of lectures, followed by questions and discussion. A lecture is scheduled for every evening of a week, and the topics are intelligently selected and coördinated in a manner that gives the community a fairly comprehensive review of the problem considered. The value of this plan is that it makes for sustained and thorough consideration of a problem by the community. The plan is susceptible to varied adaptations and wide use.

Government by discussion breaks down the tyranny of fixed custom; continuous public debate on public problems is the root of change and progress; community discussion breeds tolerance; it makes for steady instead of intermittent progress. In fact, common counsel, public debate, community discussion, call it what you will, underlies the constructive solution of all the vexed situations that a nation faces in a time of readjustment and change. It is the narrowing control of policy that breeds illbalanced radicalism. It is not the strong man with his catch-phrase that democracy needs. The fate of the democratic experiment lies in the hands of Everyman; and Everyman needs to have his judgments tried in the fires of common counsel, no less than does the autocrat. Can we afford to overlook any possibility of adapting existing institutions to the furtherance of this end?

XV.

THE BUILDING OF THE ALLIANCES

FTER the smoke of the Franco-Prussian War had rolled away, Europe found herself facing a new diplomatic situation. France was fallen from her old post as the preeminent power. Germany had taken her place, and for long statesmen hardly knew what to make of it. The power of the new Hohenzollern Empire was obviously so great that any blundering attack upon it was likely to be resented with fearful results. Bismarck, however, did nothing to make the powers which had stood neutral in 1870 repent of their inaction. With Russia for some time he was friendly, with England and Italy reasonably cordial, with Austria at least correct. He realized keenly, perhaps too keenly, that by taking AlsaceLorraine he had relegated any genuine reconciliation with France to a distant future. Henceforth, whenever Germany found herself in difficulties, right across the Vosges lay a nation of illwishers whom Teutons at least believed to be always ready to stab or strike. In view of this "French mortgage" Bismarck's policy therefore seemed dictated along rather simple lines. worked on three plausible hypotheses:

He

I. That after the lessons of 1870-71 it was not likely France, without allies, would attack Germany unless Germany foolishly reduced her armaments. Therefore the new Hohenzollern Empire must remain armed to the teeth.

II. A Republican system of government in France was likely to keep the country faction-rent and on bad terms with the various great monarchies, especially Russia, which might possibly

help her. Therefore to keep France weak and isolated, Bismarck deliberately discouraged attempts, very natural for Prussian monarchists, to undermine the Third Republic. When Arnim, the German ambassador at Paris in the early seventies, seemed coquetting with the French royalists, Bismarck had him recalled and disgraced.

III. To prevent any other power from giving comfort to France, the Iron Chancellor studiously avoided all incidents that might give them offense. England was treated with marked consideration by him. Italy was praised and cajoled. As to Russia and Austria, the great minister soon went much further.

England, Italy, and France had each, after their manner, liberal constitutions. In Germany, Austria, and Russia, although the first two empires had the forms of constitutions, the personal influence of the monarchs was still, to state it mildly, tremendous. These three empires were therefore the bulwarks of militarism, autocracy, and anti-liberalism against all the rest of the civilized world. Their rulers had very many interests in common, and every reason to work together. Austria had been beaten roundly by Prussia in 1866, but she was already getting over the effects of a defeat which Bismarck had taken pains should not be humiliating. The relations of William I and Czar Alexander II were excellent.

The chancellor was speedily to turn this community of interest into something tangible. In Austria in 1871 the old violently anti-German foreign minister Beust had been replaced by the Hungarian Andrassy, who was on far better personal terms with Bismarck.

The results of this change manifested themselves in the early days of September, 1872, when Francis Joseph the Hapsburg, Alexander II the Romanoff, and their gold-braided suites simultaneously visited Berlin, to be received by their Hohenzollern friend and rival, and to congratulate him in turn upon his new imperial honors. Of course behind the elaborate state banquets, reviews, fêtes, and spectacular ceremonies the ministers of the three greatest conservative monarchies in the world were mapping out a program. Naturally the Austrian representatives were somewhat reserved, in view of the happenings of 1866, but they were practical men who did not cry too much over the spilled milk of the past. As a consequence, the "League of the Three Emperors" was admitted before Europe. It was not a formal alliance. The three monarchs simply agreed not to attack one another, and to work for the common peace with good comradeship and harmony. It was, as Englishmen or Americans would say, merely "a gentleman's agreement." But Bismarck desired nothing more. He knew that France would hardly attack Germany single-handed, and as for England or Italy turning upon the expanded Hohenzollern Empire, the thing was almost out of the reckoning.

In 1873 Bismarck accompanied William I and Moltke to St. Petersburg. The chancellor was lionized in the most distinguished Russian society. No one could compliment him enough, and in return he made profuse acknowledgment of the great debt Germany owed to Russia by her attitude in 1870. "If I should admit merely the thought," said Bismarck, "of ever being hostile to the czar and to Russia, I should consider myself as a traitor." All through 1874 this spirit of happy unity among the three empires seemed to continue. Then in 1875 came the first rift.

France had recovered from her humiliation with a most disconcerting

was setting up an orderly system of government and was reorganizing her army on a strictly scientific basis. There were plenty of angry spirits in the officers' messes at Berlin to rail at the chancellor for not having exacted a more pitiless ransom and for not driving home the original blow so as to prevent forever a war for revenge. There was also a feeling akin to alarm and anger in influential German circles at the rapid rehabilitation of their old enemy. It was freely alleged that the new French Army was not, as announced in Paris, "purely defensive," but had a deliberately aggressive intention.

Then followed a serious war scare. On April 8, the influential "Post" of Berlin published an ominous article headed "War in Sight!" Three days later the "North German Gazette," virtually a semi-official organ, republished the article without comments. The French Government, made anxious already by several happenings, now began to feel real alarm. Its ambassador sent word to Paris that at a banquet Radowitz, one of Bismarck's prime lieutenants, had talked ominously of "preventive wars" and of how Germany would be justified "on the grounds of humanity" in attacking France instead of waiting for the latter to recover further from the effects of 1870. There were stories, too, of threats in military circles from Moltke and others, and on May 5 the German ambassador at Paris told the French ministry formally that "his government was not entirely convinced of the inoffensive character of the French armaments," and that "the German general staff considers war against Germany as the ultimate object of these armaments, and so looks forward to their consequences."