In politics, as in literature and art, realism is abhorrent to the Anglo-Saxon temperament. Wherever the English language is spoken there is implanted the tradition of moral and intellectual compromise. Revolutions are blanketed with reforms, unless, as happened in 1641, they can assume the dignity of a religious crusade. Social problems are discreetly shelved by Acts of Parliament, and the facts of life delicately obscured by a literature unique in its emasculation. Thus America condemns as unpleasantly improper the only honest record of actual warfare in the trivial mass of Bairnsfatherly war books, _Le Feu_, by Henri Barbusse, a Frenchman unspoiled by the cult of anaemia. Sanctimonious reflections upon the superiority of Anglo-Saxon morals are the response to the urgent question of venereal diseases as a by-product of war. The sexual problems arising out of militarism are the commonplaces of all literature dealing with the subject, but when the English-speaking world becomes for the first time conscripted, and is faced with the military system on a broad scale, the characteristic stampede to fact-proof shelters takes place. The half-world is not to be made safe for democracy, but must be declared taboo. So man becomes chaste by prohibition. That the present war is at bottom a struggle between two cultures, the Anglo-Saxon and the German, is indicated by the remarkable way in which the ideals of the former have permeated the Allied world, strengthening the natural preponderance, linguistic and material, of the element represented by the United States and the British Empire. The hands that are fighting may be the hands of France, Belgium, Italy, Roumania, Serbia, Japan, China, America, and San Marino, but the voice is the voice of Britain, whose most admirable mouthpiece is Dr. Woodrow Wilson. The result is the reaction of the world to the stimuli of recent history in the perfect British manner. When the Russian Revolution occurred there was but little response to the revolutionary contagion, which had, nevertheless, affected Europe on the previous occasions of similar social upheavals. England, of course, was the great buttress of reaction against the French Revolution, which could not recommend itself on religious and moral grounds to the great Empire of respectability. Yet, France did succeed in infecting Europe with revolutionary ideas. Russia, on the other hand, has evoked only the response of the strikes in Germany and Austria. Elsewhere the reception of this dramatic transition from official words of freedom to popular action has been mixed and lukewarm. Nobody who understood the fundamental abhorrence of real liberty in the English-speaking countries could have been surprised at England's unconcealed chagrin, and the subsequent hostility of all but a handful of the people to the progress of revolutionary government and diplomacy. What a relief when Germany finally imposed silence--and her terms--on Russia!