It is idle to say that this is not a people’s war. The intensity of conviction in the righteousness of their several causes shown by the several peoples is a prime factor for consideration, if we are to take efficient means to try to prevent a repetition of this incredible world tragedy. History may decide in any war that one or the other party was wrong, and yet also decide that the highest qualities and powers of the human soul were shown by that party. We here in the United States have now grown practically to accept this view as regards our own Civil War, and we feel an equal pride in the high devotion to the right, as it was given each man to see the right, shown alike by the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray. The English feel that in this war they fight not only for themselves but for principle, for justice, for civilization, for a real and lasting world peace. Great Britain is backed by the great free democracies that under her flag have grown up in Canada, in Australia, in South Africa. She feels that she stands for the liberties and rights of weak nations everywhere. One of the most striking features of the war is the way in which the varied peoples of India have sprung to arms to defend the British Empire. The Russians regard the welfare of their whole people as at stake. The Russian Liberals believe that success for Russia means an end of militarism in Europe. They believe that the Pole, the Jew, the Finn, the man of the Caucasus will each and all be enfranchised, that the advance of justice and right in Russia will be immeasurably furthered by the triumph of the Russian people in this contest, and that the conflict was essential, not only to Russian national life but to the growth of freedom and justice within her boundaries. The people of Germany believe that they are engaged primarily in a fight for life of the Teuton against the Slav, of civilization against what they regard as a vast menacing flood of barbarism. They went to war because they believed the war was an absolute necessity, not merely to German well-being but to German national existence. They sincerely feel that the nations of western Europe are traitors to the cause of Occidental civilization, and that they themselves are fighting, each man for his own hearthstone, for his own wife and children, and all for the future existence of the generations yet to come.