Germany by convincing the German people that they are fighting for their very existence and thereby forcing them to cling even more desperately to their military leaders. In announcing an American strategy of “conquer or submit,” the President virtually urges the German people to prolong the war. And not only are the German people, at the apparent price of their existence, tacitly urged to continue the fight to the uttermost, but the Allied governments are tacitly urged to wield the “knockout blow.” All those reactionary elements in England, France and Italy, whose spirits drooped at the President’s original bid for a negotiated peace, now take heart again at this apparent countersigning of their most extreme programmes. American liberals who urged the nation to war are therefore suffering the humiliation of seeing their liberal strategy for peace transformed into a strategy for prolonged war. This government was to announce such war-aims as should persuade the peoples of the Central Powers to make an irresistible demand for a democratic peace. Our initiative with the Allied governments was to make this peace the basis of an international covenant, “the creation of a community of limited independencies,” of which Norman Angell speaks. Those Americans who opposed our entrance into the war believed that this object could best be worked for by a strategy of continued neutrality and the constant pressure of mediation. They believed that war would defeat the strategy for a liberal peace. The liberal intellectuals who supported the President felt that only by active participation on an independent basis could their purposes be achieved. The event has signally betrayed them. We have not ended the submarine menace. We have lost all power for mediation. We have not even retained the democratic leadership among the Allied nations. We have surrendered the initiative for peace. We have involved ourselves in a moral obligation to send large armies to Europe to secure a military decision for the Allies. We have prolonged the war. We have encouraged the reactionary elements in every Allied country to hold out for extreme demands. We have discouraged the German democratic forces. Our strategy has gradually become indistinguishable from that of the Allies. With the arrival of the British Mission our “independent basis” became a polite fiction. The President’s Flag Day Address merely registers the collapse of American strategy. All this the realistic pacifists foresaw when they held out so bitterly and unaccountably against our entering the war. The liberals felt a naïve faith in the sagacity of the President to make their strategy prevail. They looked to him single-handedly to liberalize the liberal nations. They trusted him to use a war-technique which should consist of an olive-branch in one hand and a sword in the other. They have had to see their strategy collapse under the very weight of that war-technique.