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 THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 
 
 AN INTERVIEW WITH 
 
 NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD MARSHALL 
 
 Reprinted from The New York Times of October i8, 1914 
 
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 FILE COPY 
 
 COLUMOUi ictlOSIAi. LIBRARY 
 
 r:3 1 - 1915 ' 
 
 U. S. A. 
 
 By Transfer 
 
 JUL 12 1917 
 
 ADDITIONAL COPIES MAY BE HAD ON APPLICATION TO 
 
 DIVISION OF INTERCOURSE AND EDUCATION 
 
 CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE 
 
 407 WEST I I7TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY 
 
THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 
 
 AN INTERVIEW WITH 
 
 NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD MARSHALL 
 
 Reprinted from The New York Times of October i8, 1914- 
 
 The United States of Europe. 
 
 Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia 
 University, firmly believes that the organization of 
 such a federation will be the outcome, soon or late, 
 of a situation built up through years of European 
 failure to adjust government to the growth of 
 civilization. 
 
 He thinks it possible that the ending of the present 
 war may see the rising of the new sun of democracy 
 to light a day of freedom for our transatlantic neigh- 
 bors. 
 
 He tells me that thinking men in all the contend- 
 ing nations are beginning vividly to consider such a 
 contingency, to argue for it or against it ; in other 
 words, to regard it as an undoubted possibility. 
 
 Dr. Butler's acquaintance among those thinking 
 men of all shades of political belief is probably wider 
 than that of any other American, and it is significant 
 of the startling importance of what he says that by 
 far the greater number of his European friends, the 
 men upon whose views he has largely, directly or 
 indirectly, based his conclusions, are not of the 
 socialistic or of any other revolutionary or semi- 
 revolutionary groups, but are among the most con- 
 
 [3] 
 
servative and most important figures in European 
 political, literary and educational fields. 
 
 This being unquestionably true, it is by no means 
 improbable that in the interview which follows, fruit 
 of two evenings in Dr. Butler's library, may be 
 found the most important speculative utterance yet 
 to appear in relation to the general European war. 
 
 Dr. Butler's estimate of the place which the United 
 States now holds upon the stage of the theatre of 
 world progress and his forecast of the tremendously 
 momentous role which she is destined to play 
 there must make every American's heart first swell 
 with pride and then thrill with a realization of 
 responsibility. 
 
 The United States of Europe, modeled after and 
 instructed by the United States of America! The 
 thought is stimulating. 
 
 Said Dr. Butler: 
 
 *'The European cataclysm puts the people of the 
 United States in a unique and tremendously impor- 
 tant position. As neutrals we are able to observe 
 events and to learn the lesson that they teach. If 
 we learn rightly we shall gain for ourselves and be 
 able to confer upon others benefits far more impor- 
 tant than any of the material advantages which may 
 come to us through a shrewd handling of the new 
 possibilities in international trade. 
 
 " I hesitate to discuss any phase of the great con- 
 flict now raging in Europe. By today's mail, for 
 example, I received long, personal letters from Lord 
 Haldane, from Lord Morley, from Lord Weardale, 
 and from Lord Bryce. Another has just come from 
 Prof. Schiemann of Berlin, perhaps the Emperor's 
 most intimate adviser; another from Prof. Lammasch 
 of Austria, who was the Presiding Judge of the 
 British-American arbitration in relation to the New- 
 
 [4] 
 
foundland fisheries a few years ago, and who is a 
 member of the Austrian House of Peers. Still others 
 are from M. Ribot, Minister of Finance in France, 
 and M. d'Estournelles de Constant. These confi- 
 dential letters give a wealth of information as to 
 the intellectual and political forces that are behind 
 the conflict. 
 
 " You will understand, then, that without disloyalty 
 to my many friends in Europe, I could not discuss 
 with freedom the causes or the progress of the war, 
 or speculate in detail about the future of the Euro- 
 pean problem. My friends in Germany, France, and 
 England all write to me with the utmost freedom and 
 not for the public eye ; so you see that my great 
 difficulty, when you ask me to talk about the mean- 
 ing of the struggle, arises from the obligation that I 
 am under to preserve a proper personal reserve 
 regarding the great figures behind the vast intellec- 
 tual and political changes which are really in the 
 background of the war. 
 
 "If such reserve is necessary in my case, it seems 
 to me that it also is necessary for the country as a 
 whole. The attitude of the President has been 
 impeccable. That of the whole American press and 
 people should be the same. 
 
 ** Especially is it true that all Americans who hope 
 to have influence, as individuals, in shaping the events 
 which will follow the war, must avoid any expression 
 which even might be tortured into an avowal of 
 partisanship or final judgment. 
 
 " Even the free expression of views criticising 
 particular details of the war, which might, in fact, 
 deserve criticism, may destroy one's chance of 
 future possible usefulness. A statement which might 
 be unquestionably true may also be remembered to 
 the damage of some important cause later on. 
 
 [5] 
 
** There are reasons why my position is, perhaps, 
 more difficult than that of some others. Talking is 
 often a hazardous practice, and never more so than 
 now. 
 
 " The world is at the crossroads, and everything 
 may depend upon the United States, which has been 
 thrust by events into a unique position of moral 
 leadership. Whether the march of the future is to 
 be to the right or to the left, uphill or down, after 
 the war is over, may well depend upon the course 
 this nation shall then take, and upon the influence 
 which it shall exercise. 
 
 " If we keep our heads clear there are two things 
 that we can bring insistently to the attention of 
 Europe — each of vast import at such a time as that 
 which will follow the ending of the war. 
 
 "The first of these is the fact that race antago- 
 '^nisms tend to die away and disappear under the influ- 
 ence of liberal and enlightened political institutions. 
 This has been proved in the United States. 
 
 " We have huge Celtic, Latin, Teutonic and Slavic 
 populations all living here at peace and in harmony ; 
 and, as years pass, they tend to merge, creating new 
 and homogeneous types. The Old World antago- 
 nisms have become memories. This proves that such 
 antagonisms are not mysterious attributes of geogra- 
 phy or climate, but that they are the outgrowth 
 principally of social and political conditions. Here 
 a man can do about what he likes, so long as he does 
 not violate the law ; he may pray as he pleases or not 
 at all, and he may speak any language that he chooses. 
 
 "The United States is itself proof that most of 
 
 V the contentions of Europeans as to race antagonisms 
 
 '' are ill-founded. We have demonstrated that racial 
 
 antagonisms need not necessarily become the basis 
 
 of permanent hatred and an excuse for war. 
 
 [6] 
 
"If human beings are given the chance they will 
 make the most of themselves, and, by living happily 
 — which means by living at peace — they will avoid 
 conflict. The hyphen tends to disappear from 
 American terminology. The German-American, the 
 Italo-American, the Irish- American all become 
 Americans. 
 
 " So, by and large, our institutions have proved 
 their capacity to amalgamate and to set free every 
 type of human being which thus far has come under 
 our flag. There is in this a lesson which may well 
 be taken seriously to heart by the leaders of opinion 
 in Europe when this war ends. 
 
 "The second thing which we may, with propriety, 
 press upon the attention of the people of Europe 
 after peace comes to them, is the fact that we are not 
 only the great exponents, but the great example, of 
 the success of the principle of federation in its appli- 
 cation to unity of political life regardless of local, 
 economic and racial differences. 
 
 " If our fathers had attempted to organize this 
 country upon the basis of a single, closely unified 
 State, it would have gone to smash almost at the 
 outset, wrecked by clashing economic and personal 
 interests. Indeed, this nearly happened in the civil 
 war, which was more economic than political in its 
 origin. 
 
 " But, though we had our difficulties, we did find 
 a way to make a unified nation of a hundred million 
 people and forty-eight commonwealths, all bound 
 together in unity and in loyalty to a common politi- 
 cal ideal and a common political purpose. / 
 
 " Just as certainly as we sit here this must and will ^ 
 be the future of Europe. There willbe a federation I 
 into the United States of Europe. 
 
 " When one nation sets out to assert itself by 
 
 [7] 
 
force against the will, or even the wish, of its neigh- 
 bors, disaster must inevitably come. Disaster would 
 have come here if, in 1789, New York had endeav- 
 ored to assert itself against New England or 
 Pennsylvania. 
 
 "As a matter of fact certain inhabitants of Rhode 
 Island and Pennsylvania did try something of the 
 sort after the Federal Government had been formed, 
 but, fortunately, their effort was a failure. 
 
 " The leaders of our national life had established 
 such a flexible and admirable plan of government 
 that it was soon apparent that each State could 
 retain its identity, forming its own ideals and shaping 
 its own progress, and still remain a loyal part of the 
 whole ; that each State could make a place for itself 
 in the new federation and not be destroyed thereby. 
 
 "There is no reason why each nation in Europe 
 should not make a place for itself in the sun of unity 
 \ which I am sure is rising there behind the war clouds. 
 Europe's stupendous economic loss, which already 
 has been appalling and will soon be incalculable, will 
 give us an opportunity to press this argument home. 
 
 " True internationalism is not the enemy of the 
 nationalistic principle. On the contrary, it helps 
 true nationalism to thrive. The Vermonter is more 
 a Vermonter because he is an American, and there 
 is no reason why Hungary, for example, should 
 not be more than ever before Hungarian after it 
 becomes a member of the United States of Europe. 
 
 '* Europe, of course, is not without examples of the 
 successful application of the principle of federation 
 within itself. It so happens that the federated State 
 next greatest to our own is the German Empire. It 
 is only forty-three years old, but there federation has 
 been notably successful. So the idea of federation 
 is familiar to German publicists. 
 
 [8] 
 
" It is familiar, also, to the English and has lately 
 been pressed there as the probable final solution of 
 the Irish question. 
 
 " It has insistently suggested itself as the solution 
 of the Balkan problem. 
 
 " In a lesser way it already is represented in the 
 structure of Austria-Hungary. 
 
 "This principle of nation building, of international 
 building through federation, certainly has in it the 
 seeds of the world's next great development — and 
 we Americans are in a position both to expound the 
 theory and to illustrate the practice. It seems to me 
 that this is the greatest work which America will 
 have to do at the end of this war. 
 
 ** These are the things which I am writing to my 
 European correspondents in the several belligerent 
 countries by every mail. 
 
 " The cataclysm is so awful that it is quite within 
 the bounds of truth to say that on July 31 the 
 sun went down upon a world which never will be 
 seen again. 
 
 " This conflict is the birth-throe of a new European 
 order of things. The man who attempts to judge 
 the future by the old standards or to force the future 
 back to them will be found to be hopelessly out of 
 date. The world will have no use for him. The 
 world has left behind forever the international poli- 
 cies of Palmerston and of Beaconsfield and even those 
 of Bismarck, which were far more powerful. 
 
 "When the war ends, conditions will be such that 
 a new kind of imagination and a new kind of states- 
 manship will be required. This war will prove to be 
 the most effective education of 500,000,000 people 
 which could possibly have been thought of, although 
 it is the most costly and most terrible means which 
 could have been chosen. The results of this educa- 
 
 [9] 
 
tion will be shown, I think, in the process of general 
 reconstruction which will follow. 
 
 " All the talk of which we hear so much about the 
 peril from the Slav or from the Teuton or from the 
 Celt is unworthy of serious attention. It would be 
 quite as reasonable to discuss seriously the red- 
 headed peril or the six-footer peril. 
 
 *' There is no peril to the world in the Slav, the 
 Teuton, the Celt or any other race, provided the 
 people of that race have an opportunity to develop 
 as social and economic units, and are not bottled up 
 so that an explosion must come. 
 
 "It is my firm belief that nowhere in the world, from 
 
 Y this time on, will any form of government be tolerated 
 
 which does not set men free to develop in this fashion." 
 
 I asked Dr. Butler to make some prognostication 
 of what the United States of Europe, which he so 
 confidently expects, will be. He answered : 
 
 " I can say only this : The international organiza- 
 tion of the world already has progressed much far- 
 ther than is ordinarily understood. Ever since the 
 Franco-Prussian war and the Geneva Arbitration, 
 both landmarks in modern history, this has advanced 
 inconspicuously, but by leaps and bounds. 
 
 "The postal service of the world has been inter- 
 nationalized in its control for years. The several 
 Postal Conventions have given evidences of an inter- 
 national administrative organization of the highest 
 order. 
 
 " Europe abounds in illustrations of the inter- 
 national administration of large things. The very 
 laws of war, which are at present the subject of so 
 much and such bitter discussion, are the result of 
 international organization. 
 
 "They were not adopted by a Congress, a Parlia- 
 ment, or a Reichstag. They were agreed to by 
 
 [lo] 
 
many and divergent peoples, who sent representatives 
 to meet for their discussion and determination. 
 
 " In the admiralty law we have a most striking 
 example of uniformity of practice in all parts of the 
 world. If a ship is captured or harmed in the Far 
 East and taken into Yokohama or Nagasaki, dam- 
 ages will be assessed and collected precisely as they 
 would be in New York or Liverpool. 
 
 " The world is gradually developing a code for 
 international legal procedure. Special arbitral tri- 
 bunals have tended to merge and grow into the 
 international court at The Hague, and that, in turn, 
 will develop until it becomes a real supreme judicial 
 tribunal. 
 
 ** Of course the analogy with the federated State 
 fails at some points, but I believe the time will come 
 when each nation will deposit in a world federation 
 some portion of its sovereignty. 
 
 "When this occurs we shall be able to establish an 
 international executive and an international police, 
 both devised for the especial purpose of enforcing 
 the decisions of the international court. 
 
 *' Here, again, we offer a perfect object lesson. 
 Our central Government is one of limited and defined 
 powers. Our history can show Europe how such 
 limitations and definitions can be established and 
 interpreted, and how they can be modified and 
 amended when necessary to meet new conditions. 
 
 "My colleague. Prof. John Bassett Moore, is now 
 preparing and publishing a series of annotated 
 reports of the decisions of the several international 
 arbitration tribunals, in order that the Governments 
 and jurists of the world may have at hand, as they 
 have in the United States Supreme Court reports, a 
 record of decided cases, which, when the time comes, 
 may be referred to as precedents. 
 
"It will be through gradual processes such as this 
 that the great end will be accomplished. Beginning 
 with such annotated reports as a basis for precedents, 
 each new case tried before this tribunal will add a 
 further precedent, and, presently, a complete inter- 
 national code will be in existence. It was in this 
 way that the English common law was built, and 
 such has been the history of the admirable work 
 done by our own judicial system. 
 
 "The study of such problems as these is at this 
 time infinitely more important than the consideration 
 of how large a fine shall be inflicted by the victors 
 upon the vanquished. 
 
 "There is the probability of some dislocation of 
 territory and some shiftings of sovereignty after the 
 war ends, but these will be of comparatively minor 
 importance. The important result of this great war 
 will be the stimulation of international organization 
 along some such lines as I have suggested. 
 
 " Dislocation of territory and the shifting of 
 sovereigns as the result of international disagree- 
 ments are mediaeval practices. After this war the 
 world will want to solve its problems in terms of the 
 future, not in those of the outgrown past. 
 
 "Conventional diplomacy and conventional states- 
 manship have very evidently broken down in Europe. 
 They have made a disastrous failure of the work 
 with which they were intrusted. They did not and 
 could not prevent the war because they knew and 
 used only the old formulas. They had no tools for 
 a job like this. 
 
 " A new type of international statesman is certain 
 to arise, who will have a grasp of new tendencies, a 
 new outlook upon life. Bismarck used to say that it 
 would pay any nation to wear the clean linen of a 
 civilized State. The truth of this must be taught to 
 
 [12] 
 
those nations of the world which are weakest in 
 morale, and it can only be done, I suppose, as similar 
 work is accomplished with individuals. Courts, not 
 killings, have accomplished it with individuals. 
 
 "One more point ought to be remembered. We 
 sometimes hear it said that nationalism, the desire 
 for national expression by each individual nation, 
 makes the permanent peace and good order of the 
 world impossible. 
 
 "To me it seems absurd to believe that this is any 
 truer of nations than it is of individuals. It is not 
 each nation's desire for national expression which" 
 makes peace impossible ; it is the fact that thus far 
 in the world's history such desire has been bound up 
 with militarism. 
 
 " The nation whose frontier bristles with bayonets 
 and with forts is like the individual with a magazine 
 pistol in his pocket. Both make for murder. Both 
 in their hearts really mean murder. 
 
 " The world will be better when the nations invite 
 the judgment of their neighbors and are influenced 
 by it. 
 
 "When John Hay said that the Golden Rule and 
 the Open Door should guide our new diplomacy, he 
 said something which should be applicable to the 
 new diplomacy of the whole world. The Golden 
 Rule and a free chance are all that any man ought to 
 want or ought to have, and they are all that any 
 nation ought to want or ought to have. 
 
 " One of the controlling principles of a democratic 
 State is that its military and naval establishments 
 must be completely subservient to the civil power. 
 They should form the police, and not be the dominant 
 factor of any national life. 
 
 ** As soon as they go beyond this simple function in 
 any nation, then that nation is afflicted with militarism. 
 
 [13] 
 
" It is difficult to make predictions of the war's 
 effect on us. As I see it, our position will depend a 
 good deal upon the outcome of the conflict, and 
 what that will be no one at present knows. 
 
 " If a new map of Europe follows the war, its per- 
 manence will depend upon whether or not the 
 changes are such as will permit nationalities to organ- 
 ize as nations. 
 
 " The world should have learned through the 
 lessons of the past that it is impossible permanently 
 and peacefully to submerge large bodies of aliens if 
 they are treated as aliens. That is the opposite of the 
 mixing process which is so successfully building a na- 
 tion out of varied nationalities in the United States. 
 
 "The old Romans understood this. They per- 
 mitted their outlying vassal nations to speak any 
 language they chose and to worship whatever god 
 they chose, so long as they recognized the sover- 
 eignty of Rome. When a conquering nation goes 
 beyond that, and begins to suppress religions, lan- 
 guages, and customs, it begins, at that very moment, 
 to sow the seeds of insurrection and revolution. 
 
 *' My old teacher and colleague. Professor Burgess, 
 once defined a nation as an ethnographic unit 
 inhabiting a geographic unit. That is an illuminating 
 definition. If a nation is not an ethnographic unit, 
 it tries to become one by oppressing or amalgamating 
 the weaker portions of its people. If it is not a 
 geographic unit, it tries to become one by reaching 
 out to a mountain chain or to the sea — to something 
 which will serve as a real dividing line between it and 
 its next neighbors. 
 
 " The accuracy of this definition can hardly be 
 denied, and we all know what the violations of this 
 principle have been in Europe. It is unnecessary 
 for me to point them out. 
 
 [14] 
 
" Races rarely have been successfully mixed by 
 conquest. The military winner of a war is not 
 always the real conqueror in the long run. The 
 Normans conquered Saxon England, but Saxon law 
 and Saxon institutions worked up through the new 
 power and have dominated England's later history. 
 The Teutonic tribes conquered Rome, but Roman 
 civilization, by a sort of capillary attraction, went up 
 into the mass above and presently dominated the 
 Teutons. 
 
 " The persistency of a civilization may well be 
 superior in tenacity to mere military conquest and 
 control. 
 
 "The smallness of the number of instances in 
 which conquering nations have been able success- 
 fully to deal with alien peoples is extraordinary. 
 The Romans were usually successful, and England 
 has been successful with all but the Irish, but per- 
 haps no other peoples have been successful in high 
 degree in an effort to hold alien populations as 
 vassals and to make them really happy and com- 
 fortable as such. 
 
 " One of the war's chief effects on us will be to 
 change our point of view. Europe will be more 
 vivid to us from now on. There are many public 
 men who have never thought much about Europe, 
 and who have been far from a realization of its actual 
 importance to us. It has been a place to which to 
 go for a Summer holiday. 
 
 " But, suddenly, they find they cannot sell their 
 cotton there or their copper, that they cannot market 
 their stocks and bonds there, that they cannot send 
 money to their families who are traveling there, 
 because there is a war. To such men the war must 
 have made it apparent that interdependence among 
 nations is more than a mere phrase. 
 
 [15] 
 
"All our trade and all our economic and social 
 policies must recognize this. The world has discov- 
 ered that money without credit means little. One 
 cannot use money if one cannot use one's credit to 
 draw it whenever and wherever needed. Credit is 
 intangible and volatile, and may be destroyed over 
 night. 
 
 " I saw this in Venice. 
 
 "On July 31 I could have drawn every cent that 
 my letter of credit called for up to the time the 
 banks closed. At 10 o'clock in the morning on 
 August I I could not draw the value of a postage 
 stamp. 
 
 "Yet the banker in New York who issued my 
 letter of credit had not failed. His standing was as 
 good as ever it had been. But the world's system 
 of international exchange of credit had suffered a 
 stroke of paralysis over night. 
 
 "This realization of international interdependence, 
 I hope, will elevate and refine our patriotism by 
 teaching men a wider sympathy and a deeper under- 
 standing of other peoples, nations, and languages. 
 I sincerely hope it will educate us up to what I have 
 called 'The International Mind.' 
 
 "When Joseph Chamberlain began his campaign 
 after returning from South Africa, his keynote was, 
 ' Learn to think imperially.' I think our keynote 
 should be, ' Learn to think internationally,' to see 
 ourselves not in competition with the other peoples 
 of the world, but working with them toward a 
 common end, the advance of civilization. 
 
 " There are hopeful signs, even in the midst of 
 the gloom that hangs over us. Think what it has 
 meant for the great nations of Europe to have come 
 to us, as they have done, asking our favorable public 
 opinion. We have no army and navy worthy of 
 
 [16] 
 
their fears. They can have been induced by nothing 
 save their conviction that we are the possessors of 
 sound political ideals and a great moral force in the 
 world. 
 
 " In other words, they do not want us to fight for 
 them, but they do want us to approve of them. They 
 want us to pass judgment upon the humanity and 
 the legality of their acts, because they feel that our 
 judgment will be the judgment of history. There is 
 a lesson in this. 
 
 " If we had not repealed the Panama Canal Tolls 
 Exemption act last June they would not have come 
 to us as they are doing now. Who would have 
 cared for our opinion in the matter of a treaty viola- 
 tion if, for mere financial interest or from sheer 
 vanity, we ourselves had violated a solemn treaty? 
 
 " When Congress repealed the Panama Canal 
 Tolls Exemption act it marked an epoch in the his- 
 tory of the United States. This did more than the 
 Spanish War, more than the building of the Panama 
 Canal, or than anything else I can think of to make 
 us a true world power. 
 
 " As a nation we have kept our word when sorely 
 tempted to break it. We made Cuba independent, 
 we have not exploited the Philippines, we have stood 
 by our word as to Panama Canal tolls. 
 
 "In consequence we are the first moral power in 
 the world today. Others may be first with armies, 
 still others first with navies. But we have made 
 good our right to be appealed to on questions of 
 national and international morality. That Europe 
 is seeking our favor is the acknowledgment of this 
 fact by the European nations and their tribute to it." 
 
 [17] 
 

LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 
 
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