European events was bearing on American policy not in psychological channels, but in material ones, and was having precisely the opposite effect. The exports of the United States, which in 1913 amounted to 2,466 millions of dollars, rose in 1916 to 5,481 millions! Of course the lion's share of this export fell to the lot of the war industries. The sudden breaking off of exports to the allied nations after the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare meant not only the stoppage of a flow of monstrous profits, but threatened with an unprecedented crisis the whole of American industry, which had been organized on a war footing.
It was impossible for this thing to go on without some resistance from the masses of the people. To overcome their unorganized dissatisfaction and to turn it into channels of patriotic co-operation with the government was therefore the first great task for the internal diplomacy of the United States during the first quarter of the war. And it is the irony of history that official "pacifism," as well as "oppositional pacifism," should be the chief instruments for the accomplishment of this task: the education of the masses to military ideals.
Bryan rashly and noisily expressed the natural aversion of the farmers and of the "small man" generally to all such things as world-policy, military service and higher taxes. Yet, at the same time that he was sending wagonloads of petitions, as well as deputations, to his pacifist colleagues at the head of the government, Bryan did everything in his power to break the revolutionary edge of the whole movement. "If war should come," Bryan telegraphed on the occasion of an anti-war meeting in Chicago last February, "we will all support the government of course; yet at this moment it is our sacred duty to do all in our power to preserve the nation from the horrors of war." These few words contain the entire program of petit bourgeois pacifism: "to do everything in our power against the war" means to afford the voice of popular indignation an outlet in the form of harmless demonstration, after having previously given the government a guarantee that it will meet with no serious opposition, in the case of war, from the pacifist faction.
Official pacifism could have desired nothing better. It could now give satisfactory assurance of imperialistic "preparedness." After Bryan's own declaration, only one thing was necessary to dispose of his noisy opposition to war, and that was, simply, to declare war. And Bryan rolled right over into the government camp.
