The penetrating memorandum addressed by the New York Reform Club to President Wilson has sketched broadly but with sure insight the commercial and colonial questions which helped to lead up to this war. None of these issues appeared in the negotiations which preceded the war, but most of them were latent in the consciousness of the statesmen and even of the peoples. The curse of our unorganized Europe has been that fundamental change has rarely been possible save as a sequel of war. Diplomacy was always busied with a pathetic conservatism in bolstering up the _status quo_, or in arranging those little readjustments which might just avail to stave off war. We shall not banish war from Europe until we are civilized enough to create an organization that can make and impose fundamental changes without war. The best we can do in the meantime is to prepare to avail ourselves of the brief moment of settlement during which the structure of Europe will still be fluid under the shock of war, to bring our idealistic and democratic forces to bear upon these larger issues. [Sidenote: Free trade would remove incentive for colonies—and for concessions and monopolies.] The Reform Club’s memorandum deals with three of these questions: the abolition of capture at sea in wartime, the freedom of the world’s straits and highways in time of war, and the exploitation of colonies under a system of protection. The system of legalized piracy which permits navies to prey on commerce in wartime is undoubtedly the most potent incentive to swollen armaments at sea. So long as it survives, the opinion of the mercantile classes will never effectively back the demand for economy in armaments, for it is bound to regard navies as an insurance. The question of the ownership of straits stands high among the many competing causes of bloodshed. It explains the German struggle for Calais no less than the Allied expedition to the Dardanelles. One may doubt, however, whether a proposal to neutralize any of the more vital of these straits—the Straits of Dover or Gibraltar, for example—would stand a chance of calm consideration on the morrow of such a war as this. It will be feasible when war is no longer an ever-present terror; and when that day comes it will have lost its importance. Far more central in our problem is the general question of colonialism. It is a commonplace to say that modern industrial peoples desire colonies almost solely for economic reasons, and that one of the chief motives for this expansion would disappear with any approach to free trade. If the British colonies had not granted a preference to the mother country, and if French colonies were not hedged about with an impenetrable tariff wall, the feeling among German industrialists that their expansion was “hemmed in” would have been less acute, and the pressure for “places in the sun” would have been less powerful.