STAND UP AND CHEER

The Crimson's stand on American Neutrality this spring has not been an easy one to uphold. With every German victory in Europe the cry against un Americanism has grown louder. The President now has declared America's "non-belligerency." The pressure groups of 1917 have marshalled their strength, with his explicit approval, and the college presidents and prominent citizens have joined the newspapers in the campaign "of education."

It is true that we are still allowed to reply to criticism. When we are accused of schoolboy skepticism, we can affirm our faith in democracy and freedom. We question the efficiency of a means, not the validity of those ends. We can still maintain that our disillusionment is only in war as an instrument of democracy.

And we are still permitted to call this not idealism blinking at reality, but realistic opinion soundly based on historical fact. When we condemn preparedness as leading straight to war, we are thinking only of 1916 and 1917. When we say war attains none of the ideals to which it pretends, we are thinking only of American intervention once before. Then there were the same ideals and the same fears. In a stunningly brief interval, all that seems to have been forgotten. The "inexorable logic of events" has driven the American people to "gratifying" new realism-a logic and a realism given edifying exemplification in the editorial columns of the "Traveler" and its ilk.

This June morning we can still declare that coercive militarism in America bears no different stamp; from militarism in Germany, that it will fruit in no more lasting security or real democracy than in the past. But next September we may well be Americanized. The determined efforts of patriotic men in influential positions, the old hates, and the fallacies we thought we understood after the first World War will have swung public opinion over A new enthusiasm and healthy faith in the good old American ideals of democracy will have united the discordant elements, and youth will be freed by definite action from skepticism and disillusionment.