THE GREAT LOOKER-ON

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVI, Issue 16749, 2 January 1915, Page 8

THE GREAT LOOKER-ON

As often, as the belligerents in Europe can afford a glance from the supreme and immediate task of battering each other . into dust, that glance is anxiously directed towards America. There is something half pathetic, half ludicrous in the determined attempt to court America made by the principals in this colossal struggle. One is irresistibly reminded of some vast tourney of the Middle Ages, in which the victor’s gage is poised in the hand of the Queen of Beauty, throned at the upper end of the lists. (Certainly it is not primarily for America’s beautiful eyos that the wooing proceeds, though a strangely personal element unwittingly betrays itself in theso efforts to attract a curiously feminine and elusive national intelligence. We have not Mr Winston Churchill’s somewhat splenetic outburst of jealousy when he discovered at the outset that America, his own mother’s country, meant to steer a middle course. And this not overdignified heat is still smouldering in less intelligent quarters of Britain, though in others thq touchstone of a perfect sympathy and a keener intuition has reconciled the British to the seeming quiescence of President Wilson’s “ Taihoa” policy. The detachment from all ombroglios, which is the object of that policy, is not to be interpreted now as a danger to the higher civilisation which Britain stands for, with France and Belgium; there is a neutrality which hides a dagger in its sleeve, but the benevolent neutrality of America leaves open the door for a score of good offices no personal belligerent could render. Tho dislocation of American political and social machinery, tho closing of American markets, would mean an aggregate loss, it may bo argued, to Europe in the main for which the co-operation of her rusted armaments and comparatively puny forces could not compensate to either side. There is no pretence that her policy is one of pacifist altruism; in doing good to herself in evpry line of legitimate advantage she is but promoting a body of health in a temporarily debilitated and degenerate world. ' But while the Anglo-Saxon bond is tightening in the very hour of the deferred but unforgotten peace centenary between mother and daughter, the anxiety of Bolgium to show the full wretchedness of her case for America’s pity is touching and natural. France, whose racial affinities throb north of the St Lawrence, is satisfied with the arbitration treaty newly arranged between herself and her great sister republic. But there is grim comedy in tho siege laid to the heart of America by German statecraft. Beyond all hope of material advantage, it would seem, is the desperate attempt of Kaiserism to justify itself iu the eyes of America. Too confidently did the Fatherland reckon upon old animosities and tho power of that undigested mass of Transatlantic Germanism, eleven million strong. The animosities are healed; the Germanic host within the gate has done its best to buy America’s soul and failed. It would be fatuous, certainly, that there is, outside the vernal yellow Press, a body of cultured American pro-Germanism that must be reckoned with in places—an academic shadow of the truculence of the Prussian professors—but it is not a native growth. The spirit of the great republic, whether expressed in the abstract logic of New England or the magnetic self-consciousness of California, is dead against the culture of the mailed fist. Where the voice of diplomacy is coldly judicial, the voice of the truly representative Press is sternly minatory. The Kaiser is a fallen idol across the Atlantic.

The position of America at the present moment is one that compels interest, admiration, and a measure of sympathy. The war has shaken her finance and threatened her trade, besides accentuating the perennial delicacy of her relations with Japan. It has faced her with an inadequate army and navy, and let loose every prophetic jingo between the two oceans upon the administration. On the ethical side, it has exposed her to the fiery propaganda of militants like Ex-President Roosevelt, on the one hand, and to the mortification of a seemingly shattered ideal on the other. For if the peace idea was cradled at the Hague, under the »gis of the Czar, it was in America, under the banner of International Conciliation at Washington and Chicago, that it came to its fullest development. .Is that growth to be arrested or destroyed at the will of one bandit power across the Atlantic? Lastly, the diplomatic fabric of ninety years is questioned and strained. The Monroe doctrine, that great principle which was to America what the Balance of Power meant to Europe, is impugned by the tragic possibilities lurking beneath * the shadowed surface of the situation. Yet, up to the present, America’s confidence- is given to the far-sighted and spiritually uncompromising President Wilson and his pacifist Secretary of State, W. J. Bryan, who are cautiously following up the peace trail of the still more revolutionary arbitrationist, Ex-President Taft. So far the present attitudo of the American Cabinet is averse from rushing into schemes of extended defenoe. It is still relying upon America’s vast civil power and the grandeur of the moral idea, which, as we have seen, has made her a tribunal for the nations. We know that America waits for the hour when she may become the peacemaker for the warring eastward empires, and from the safe trend of her own recent thrice duplicated ’arbitration treaty with Britain, France and Spain wo infer the tenor of 1 her diplomacy when the desired day comes.