Repository: UIHistories Project: Commencement - 1927 [PAGE 5]

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we engage in a war away from our own shores! No more, they cry, shall American life and wealth be poured out for an abstract principle, especially if the establishment of that abstract principle benefits other people! The discussion has been going on through the period of eight or nine years that have elapsed since the close of the war. New dislikes, and even hatreds, have developed, largely from attempts to apply the principle of so-called self-determination under conditions in which it is not practicable,—to give each nation or group all in the way of economic and political right and privilege which it thought it was entitled to. Perhaps the agitation is not so fierce as it was three or four years ago. Perhaps the time has come, or is near at hand, when the people of this country, at any rate, may consider with calmness just what our purposes were, how far they have been accomplished, and whether, after all, the world has not attained all that could be reasonably expected in the application of those purposes. We must remember that it is easv for a conflict to degenerate; easy for those that engage in it to forget high purposes and moral aims; but that in spite of such forgetting, in spite of fixing attention on smaller issues, the great principles underlying these smaller issues may yet show up in the long run as the main purpose and the main result of the conflict. Referring again to the address of President James, he points out that in spite of the announcement in the Declaration of Independence "which sounded a new note in the history of the world . . . it was nearly ninety years before we in this country were willing to draw the logical conclusion and to take the decisive step in our own policy so imperatively called for b> the sentiments and language of this declaration. Eightyfive years after the Declaration of Independence was given to the world, calling for sentiments and aspirations that seemed to have died out in the world's breast, a considerable proportion of the intelligent, liberty-loving, warmhearted Ann in citizens pledged their li\ A\K\ fortunes and sacred honor to a war in defense of this same instituI 5 )