The actual catastrophe proves that secret negotiations like those habitually conducted on behalf of the "concert of Europe," and alliances between selected nations, the terms of which are secret, or at any rate not publicly stated, cannot avert in the long run outrageous war, but can only produce postponements of war, or short truces. Free institutions, like those of the United States, take the public into confidence, because all important movements of the Government must rest on popular desires, needs, and volitions. Autocratic institutions have no such necessity for publicity. This Government secrecy as to motives, plans, and purposes must often be maintained by disregarding truth, fair dealing, and honorable obligations, in order that, when the appeal to force comes, one Government may secure the advantage of taking the other by surprise. Duplicity during peace and the breaking of treaties during war come to be regarded as obvious military necessities. The second great evil under which certain large nations of Europe--notably Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary--have long suffered and still suffer is the permanent national Executive, independent of popular control through representative bodies, holding strong views about rights of birth and religious sanctions of its authority, and really controlling the national forces through some small council and a strong bureaucracy. So long as Executives of this sort endure, so long will civilization be liable to such explosions as have taken place this August, though not always on so vast a scale. Americans now see these things more clearly than European lovers of liberty, because Americans are detached from the actual conflicts by the Atlantic, and because Americans have had no real contact with the feudal or the imperial system for nearly 300 years. Pilgrim and Puritan, Covenanter and Quaker, Lutheran and Catholic alike left the feudal system and autocratic government behind them when they crossed the Atlantic. Americans, therefore, cannot help hoping that two results of the present war will be: (1) The abolition of secret diplomacy and secret understandings, and the substitution therefor of treaties publicly discussed and sanctioned, and (2) the creation of national Executives--Emperors, Sultans, Kings, or Presidents--which cannot use the national forces in fight until a thoroughly informed national assembly, acting with deliberation, has agreed to that use. Opposite Tendencies.