Excerpt from War Aims Peace Ideals: Selections in Prose Verse

A table of contents is the best preface to such a collection as the editors here present, but one explanatory, and per haps clarifying, statement may be added to the evidence there included. It is no selection from state documents that we have proposed to publish under the title War Aims and Peace Ideals. State documents have their obvious historical value (and are in addition easy of access); but as a rule they are written to fit an occasion or to attain an objective, and present with complete sincerity neither the aims in war nor the underlying lssues at conflict of the peoples whose ideals they ostensibly express. When the reverse is true, as in the case of the Messages of President Wilson, the difference is widely recognized and the value of the utterance, whether for politics or for literature, is correspondingly increased.

In general, however, the truth about this war, and all wars, their aims and ideals, is more likely to be found in the franker utterances of private individuals, especially when the authors have the interpretative power that be longs to makers of literature. If this volume, then, has a distinguishing feature, it is to be sought in the effectiveness, the honesty, and the truth of the highly personal writings here transcribed. They are for the most part neither prop aganda, nor statements for the press. They possess not only historical importance but also a value as criticism and interpretation that justifies their republication.

Complete representation of the thought of all countries involved in this time of upheaval was of course impossible; sometimes, as with America and Great Britain, for lack of space, sometimes, as with Austria and the Balkan States, which on the whole have mutely fought and suffered, for lack of material. But we have chosen carefully from the writings of both friends and enemies those that seemed best to illuminate the ideals that caused or carried on the war.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.