This is the issue between the warring powers and each claims that it is defending itself against the aggression of its opponents. Each claims to be fighting for democracy. In the face of these claims, history has the deciding voice. Now, historically, England, more than any other power, has stood for the democratic and coöperative idea. Her colonies have autonomy, her more backward dependencies are encouraged toward autonomy. Since the Boer war, when imperialism passed away, she has moved toward the position of Switzerland. Even Ireland has obtained home rule. "We are a great world-wide, peace-loving partnership," said Mr. Asquith,[D] has reiterated again and again the principle for which all the Allies are fighting: believing that "the preservation of local and national ties, of the genius of a people which has a history of its own, is not only not hostile to or inconsistent with, but on the contrary, fosters and strengthens and stimulates the spirit of a common purpose, of a corporate brotherhood," the Allies seek to defend public right, to find and to keep "room for the independent existence and free development of the smaller nationalities, each with a corporate consciousness of its own . . . and, perhaps, by a slow and gradual process, the substitution for force, for the clash of competing ambitions, for groupings and alliances and a precarious equipoise, of a real European partnership, based on equal right and enforced by a common will."[E] It is hard to believe that Russia can be fighting for such an end. Fear of Russian barbarism is what brought Germany into the lists, the Germans declare, to defend western ideals and western democracy. Yet Russian government is Prussian in its organization, and it is on the side of the ideal of western democracy that she is explicitly aligned. The contradiction is striking, and it is still more striking when we recall that in her armies are over a quarter of a million of Jews, and that in the other armies there are half as many more. For the Jews the war is more than civil; it is fratricide. On the face of it they have no inevitable personal or political stake in the war's fortune. England has acknowledged their "corporate consciousness" and given them maximal opportunity for "free self-development"; so has France. Russia has oppressed and horribly exploited them; Germany, though infinitely better than Russia, has set them conditions in which "free development" is synonymous with complete Germanization. Austria and Turkey have dealt with them somewhat after the manner of England and France. The contradiction of the Jewish position outdistances that of the Russian. But both contradictions are resolved in the fact that the ideal in question concerns not Russia alone, nor England alone, nor the Jews alone, but the whole of Europe, the whole world. What is at stake is not something local, personal, political, but a universal principle, the goal toward which mankind has been so slowly and