path: root/76636-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76636 ***





MY COUNTRY’S PART


  [Illustration: General Pershing’s veterans direct from the trenches in
  France marching to the City Hall, New York City]




  MY COUNTRY’S PART

  BY
  MARY SYNON

  ILLUSTRATED

  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
  CHICAGO    NEW YORK    SAN FRANCISCO




  COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

  [Illustration]




  TO

  THOMAS S. ENRIGHT
  JAMES B. GRESHAM
  MARLE B. HAY

  PRIVATES IN THE RANKS OF
  THE AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCES
  WHO WERE THE FIRST TO DIE IN FRANCE
  IN OUR WAR AGAINST GERMANY

  THIS BOOK
  IS DEDICATED




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                             PAGE

     I. “MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF”                      1

    II. THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD WAR             40

   III. WHAT THE GREAT WAR REALLY MEANS                 53

    IV. HOW THE WAR CAME TO THE UNITED STATES           65

     V. HOW THE UNITED STATES WENT INTO WAR             77

    VI. WHAT THE UNITED STATES IS DOING IN THE WAR      85

   VII. REAR-LINE TRENCHES                              93

  VIII. THE AMERICAN’S PART                            110

    IX. THE UNITED STATES AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM       121

     X. THE UNITED STATES AND INTERNATIONAL PEACE      131




ILLUSTRATIONS


  General Pershing’s veterans direct from the trenches
    in France marching to the City Hall, New York City    _Frontispiece_

                                                             FACING PAGE

  Belgium refugees between Malines and Brussels                       66

  President Wilson delivering his war message                         80

  Recruits of the National Army waiting at the booths
    of a National Army cantonment                                     90

  Children selling thrift stamps                                     104

  Boys at work in their war garden                                   110

  The launching of the U. S. S. _Accoma_                             118

  An immigrant family qualified to enter the United States           128




CHAPTER I

“MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF”


What can an American boy or an American girl do for our country?

The ways are many. Every man, woman, and child in the United States has
the duty of defending the nation. In time of war every American must be
in spirit, if he cannot be in actual duty, a soldier. A soldier’s part
is to guard his nation. An American’s part is to guard America. The
guarding may be done by saving the food that the government asks its
citizens to save, by buying War Thrift Stamps, by buying Liberty Bonds,
by working for the Red Cross, or for other patriotic organizations; but
it must be done with the idea that our country is our first concern,
our first care.

Every American must be watchful for his country’s welfare. How may
he do this duty? By remembering always that he is, first of all, an
American. No matter what country his father or mother, or grandfather
or grandmother came from, he is American, with the rights and
privileges and obligations of his citizenship. And he must have no
divided allegiance.

The story of what one American boy could do for his country is told in
the story that follows. Some people call this a fiction story. But the
root of it is truth. For every boy and every girl in the United States
can hold to the love of country that John Sutton’s grandmother put into
his soul through the incidents that make up the tale of


“MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF”

My grandmother was at the basement window, peering into the street
as if she were watching for some one, when I came home from school.
“Is that you, John?” she asked me as I stood in the hall stamping the
snow from my boots. “Sure!” I called to her. “Who’d you think I was? A
spirit?”

She laughed a little as I went into the room and flung down my books.
My grandmother hasn’t seen any one in ten years, though she sits day
after day looking out on the street as if a parade were passing; but
she knows the thump of my books on the table as well as she knows the
turning of my father’s key in the lock of the door. “’Tis a lively
spirit you’d make, Shauneen,” she said, with that chuckle she saves for
me. “No, ’twas your father I thought was coming.”

“What’d he be doing home at this time?”

“These are queer days,” she said, “and there are queer doings in them.”

“There’s nothing queer that I can see,” I told her.

“I’m an old, blind woman,” she said, “but sometimes I see more than do
they who have the sight of their two eyes.” She said it so solemnly,
folding her hands one over the other as she drew herself up in her
chair, that I felt a little thrill creeping up my spine. “What do you
mean?” I asked her. “Time’ll tell you,” she said.

My mother came in from the kitchen then. “Norah forgot to order bacon
for the morning,” she said. “Will you go to the market, John, before
you do anything else?”

“Oh, I’m going skating,” I protested.

“It won’t take you five minutes,” said my mother. She seemed tired
and worried. The look in her eyes made me feel that there was trouble
hanging over the house. My mother isn’t like my grandmother. When
things go wrong, my grandmother stands up straight, and throws back her
shoulders, and fronts ahead as if she were a general giving orders for
attack; but my mother wilts like a hurt flower. She was drooping then
while she stood in the room, so I said, “All right, I’ll go,” though
I’d promised the fellows to come to the park before four o’clock.

“And look in at the shop as you go by,” my grandmother said, “and see
if your father’s there now.”

“Why shouldn’t he be?” my mother asked.

There was a queer sound in her voice that urged me around past my
father’s shop. My father was there in the little office, going over
blue-prints with Joe Krebs’s uncle and Mattie Kleiner’s father and a
big man I’d never seen before. I told my grandmother when I went home.
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew it. And I dreamed last night of my
cousin Michael who died trying to escape from Van Diemen’s Land.”

“You knew what?” I asked her, for again that strange way of hers sent
shivery cold over me.

“Go to your skating,” she bade me.

       *       *       *       *       *

There wasn’t much skating at Tompkins Square, though, when I found
the crowd. The sun had come out strong in the afternoon and the ice
was melting. “Ground-hog must have seen his shadow last week,” Bennie
Curtis said. All the fellows--Joe Carey and Jim Dean and Frank Belden
and Joe Krebs and Mattie Kleiner and Fred Wendell and the rest of
them--had taken off their skates and were starting a tug of war in the
slush. Mattie Kleiner was the captain on one side and Frank Belden the
captain on the other. Mattie had chosen Joe Krebs and Jim Dean and Joe
Carey on his side. Just as I came along he shouted that he chose me.
Frank Belden yelled that it was his choice and that he’d take me. “He
don’t want to be on your side!” Mattie cried. “He’s with the Germans!”

“Well, I guess not,” I said, “any more than I’m with the English. I’m
an American.”

“You can’t be just an American in this battle,” Frank Belden said.

“Then I’ll stay out of it,” I told him.

They all started to yell “Neutral!” and “Fraid cat!” and “Oh, you dove
of peace!” at me. I got tired of it after a while, and I went after
Mattie hard. When I’d finished with him he bawled at me: “Wait till
your father knows, he’ll fix you!”

“What for?” I jeered.

“For going against his principles, that’s what,” Mattie Kleiner roared.

“I’d like to know what you know about my father’s principles.” I
laughed at him.

“Well, I ought to know,” he cried. “I heard him take the oath.”

“What oath?” we all demanded, but Mattie went off in surly silence. Joe
Krebs and Joe Carey trailed after him. I stayed with the other fellows
until it was dark. Then I started for home.

Joe Carey was waiting for me at the corner. “Do you believe him, John?”
he asked me. “Do you believe Mattie about the oath?”

“How’s that?” I parried. I seemed to remember having heard a man who’d
been at the house a fortnight before whispering something about an
oath, and I knew that I’d heard my mother say to my grandmother: “I
pray to God he’ll get in no trouble with any oaths or promises.” I kept
wondering if Mattie Kleiner’s father and Joe Krebs’s uncle and the big
man with the blue-prints who’d been in my father’s shop had anything to
do with it. “Oh, Mattie’s talking in his sleep,” I said.

“Well, maybe,” said Joe Carey; “but he wasn’t sleeping the night they
had the meeting in his house. He was on the stairs going up to the top
floor, and he kept the door open a little way and he heard everything
they said, and nobody at all knew he was there.”

Joe Carey’s eyes were almost popping out of his head, and so I knew
that Mattie had been telling him a long story. “I guess he didn’t hear
very much,” I said.

“You bet he did,” Joe declared. “He heard them reading the letters
telling people not to go on the ships because they were going to be
sunk, and he heard them talking about bombs and munition factories. He
says that he heard your father say that he’d gladly lay down his life
for the sake of Ireland.”

“But Ireland’s not in this war!”

“Sure it is! Mattie says the Germans are going to free Ireland if they
beat England. That’s why the Irish ought to be with the Germans. Mattie
says your father’ll be awful ashamed that you wouldn’t go on his side.
Mattie says your father----”

“I don’t give a whoop what Mattie says about my father,” I told him. “I
guess I can take my own part.”

“I guess you’ll have to,” said Joe.

As I went up the street toward our house I had that queer feeling that
comes sometimes after I’ve been away for a while, a fear that something
terrible has happened while I’ve been gone and that I’ll be blamed for
it. It was dark on the street, for people hadn’t lighted the lamps in
the basement dining-rooms, and I was hurrying along when suddenly a
man’s voice came over my shoulder. I hadn’t heard his step behind me at
all, and I jumped when he spoke. “Where does Mr. John Sutton live?” he
asked me.

“Right there.” I pointed to our house.

“Do you know him?” he asked. Through the dark I could see that he was
a tall man with sharp eyes. I knew that I had never seen him before,
and that he didn’t look like any of the men who came to my father’s
machine-shop. “Don’t you know Mr. Sutton?” he repeated.

“Yes, sir.”

“Know him well, sonny?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How well?”

“He’s my father.”

He whistled softly, then laughed, turned on his heel, and strode down
the street. I watched him to see if he’d take the turn toward the shop,
but he turned the other way at the corner. I thought that I’d tell my
grandmother about him but my mother was with her in the dark when I
went in. They were talking very low, as if some one were dead in the
house, but I heard my mother say, “If I only knew how far he’s gone in
this!” and my grandmother mutter: “Sure, the farther he goes in, the
farther back he’ll have to come.” I stumbled over a chair as I went
into the room with them, and they both stopped talking.

I could hear the little hissing whisper my grandmother always makes
while she says the rosary, but I could hear no sound from my mother at
all until she rose with a sigh and lighted the gas-lamp. She looked at
me as if she hadn’t known I’d been there. “Have you any home work to do
to-night, John?” she asked me.

“No, ma’am,” I said. “It’s Friday.”

“Then I want you to come to church with me after your dinner,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t want to go to church,” I’d said before my grandmother
spoke.

“’Twill be a queer thing to me as long as I live,” she said, “that
those who have don’t want what they have, and that those who haven’t
keep wanting.”

The telephone-bell rang just then up in the room that my father used
for an office, and I raced up to answer it. A man’s voice, younger than
that of the man who’d spoken to me, came over the wire. “Say, is this
John Sutton’s residence?” it asked. “And is he home? And, if he isn’t,
who are you?”

“What do you want?” I called.

“Information. This is _The World_. We hear that there’s to be a meeting
of the clans to-night, and we want to know where it’s to be held.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Can you find out?”

“No,” I lied. “There’s nobody home.”

“Won’t your father be home for dinner?”

Even then I could hear his key turning in the lock, could hear him
passing on his way up to his bedroom, but a queer kind of caution was
being born in me. “No, sir,” I said.

“Who was that?” my grandmother asked me when I went down.

I told her of the call, told her, too, of the man who had stopped me on
the street. Her rosary slipped through her fingers. “I feared it,” she
said. Then the whisper of her praying began again.

At dinner my father was strangely silent. Usually he talks a great
deal, all about politics, and the newspapers, and the trouble with the
schools, and woman suffrage, and war. But he said nothing at all except
to ask me if the skating were good. My mother was just as quiet as he,
and I would have been afraid to open my mouth if my grandmother hadn’t
started in to tell about New York in the days she’d come here, more
than sixty-five years ago. She talked and talked about how different
everything had been then, with no tall buildings and no big bridges and
no subways and no elevateds. “Faith, you can be proud of your native
town, John,” she said to my father.

“I wish I’d been born in Ireland,” he said.

She laughed. “And if I’d stayed in Ireland I’d have starved,” she said,
“and little chance you’d have had of being born anywhere.”

“It might have been just as well,” he said bitterly.

“Oh, no,” she said; “there’s Shauneen.”

He rose from the table, flinging down his napkin. “I won’t be home till
very late,” he said to my mother.

She stood up beside him. “Do you have to go, John?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh, John,” she said, “I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of what may happen you.”

“Nothing’ll happen me,” he said.

I wanted to tell him of the strange man who had halted me on the
street, and of the telephone call, but my father’s anger was rising and
I feared to fan it to flame. My grandmother said nothing until after my
father had gone. Then she spoke to my mother.

“Don’t you know better,” she asked her, “and you eighteen years married
to him, than to ask John not to do something you don’t want him to do?”

My mother began to cry as we heard the banging of the door after my
father. “Well, if you can do nothing else,” my grandmother said, “you’d
better be off to church. Keep your eyes open, Shauneen,” she warned me
while my mother was getting her hat and coat.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a grand night, with the evening star low in the sky, like a
lamp, and the big yellow moon just rising in the east. The wind blew
sharp and salt off the water, but there was a promise of spring in the
air, saying that it must be almost baseball time. We went over to the
Jesuit church, walking slowly all the way. There we knelt in the dark
until I was stiff. As we came out my mother stopped at the holy-water
font. “John,” she said, “will you promise me that if you ever marry
you’ll never set any cause but God’s above your wife?”

“No, ma’am, I won’t,” I said, vaguely understanding that my father had
hurt my mother by his refusal to stay at home, and wondering what cause
he had set above her. As we walked toward the car-line I remembered
what Joe Carey had told me of Mattie Kleiner’s speech about my father.
“Do you have to go to Ireland to die for Ireland?” I asked her. She
clutched my hand. “My grandfather died for Ireland,” she said, “and he
wasn’t the first of his line to die for her. But I pray God that he may
have been the last.” She said no more till we came into our own house.

My grandmother was still at the window of the dining-room. There was
no light, and my mother did not make one. “There was another telephone
call,” my grandmother said. “Norah answered it. ’Twas the newspaper
calling again for John to ask about the meeting. She said she knew
nothing about it and that no one was here to answer.”

“Do you suppose,” I said, “it was detectives?”

They said nothing, and I could feel a big lump coming up my throat. I
thought they might not have heard me until my grandmother said: “Do you
know, Kate, where the meeting is.”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know,” my mother cried. She turned
to me sharply. “Go to bed, John,” she said.

“I know where the meetings are,” I blurted out, eager enough for any
excuse to put off the hateful order. “They’re at Mattie Kleiner’s
house, because he hides on the stairs when they come, and he heard them
take the oath.”

“Is that Matthew Kleiner’s boy?” my grandmother asked, so quietly that
I thought she had not realized the importance of my news.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Go to bed, Shauneen.” She repeated my mother’s order.

I went up-stairs, leaving the two of them silent in the dark. I
whistled while I undressed, but I shivered after I had turned out the
light and jumped between the sheets. I was going to lie awake waiting
for my father’s return, but I must have dozed, for I thought that it
was in the middle of the night that something woke me. I knew, as soon
as I woke, that some one was in my room. I could feel him groping. I
tried to speak, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Then I
heard a faint whisper. “Shauneen,” it said.

So far away it seemed that I thought it might be a ghost until my
grandmother spoke again. “Your mother’s in bed now,” she said. “Put on
your clothes as quick as you can.”

“What is it?” I whispered.

“We’re going to Matthew Kleiner’s, you and I,” she said. “I’d go alone
if I could see.”

“What time is it?”

“Between ten and eleven.”

I pulled my clothes on as fast as I could. Then stealthily as thieves
we crept out from my room and down the stairs. I held my grandmother’s
hand and wondered at its steadiness. When we had come outside the
basement door she halted me. “Look down the street for the tall man,”
she bade me. There was no one in sight, however, and we walked along
sturdily, turning corners until we came to Kleiner’s.

It was a red-brick house in a row, not a basement house like ours, but
with a cellar below and an attic above its two main floors. There was
no light on the first floor, but I thought that I saw a stream behind
the drawn curtains up-stairs. I found the bell and pushed on it hard.
No one came for a long time. I rang again. I could see shadows back
of the shades before Mattie Kleiner’s mother came. “What is it?” she
demanded before she opened the door.

“Tell her that your mother’s sick and that you’ve come for your
father,” my grandmother ordered me. I repeated what she’d said. Mrs.
Kleiner opened the door. “Oh,” she cried, “it is Mrs. Sutton and little
John. Oh, you did frighten me. Is the mother very sick? I shall call
the father.”

“Let me go to him,” my grandmother said. We were inside the hall then,
and I put her hand on the railing of the stairway. She had started up
before Mrs. Kleiner tried to stop her. “I’ve a message for him,” said
my grandmother. Mrs. Kleiner and I followed her. At the top of the
stairs I turned her toward the front room, for I could hear the murmur
of voices. I passed a door and wondered if Mattie Kleiner were hiding
behind it. “Oh, we must not go in,” Mrs. Kleiner pleaded. “The men will
not want us to go in.” She tried to stop us, but my grandmother turned,
looking at her as if she could see her. “I’ve always followed my own
conscience, ma’am,” she said, “not my husband’s, nor my son’s, nor any
other man’s.”

From within the front room came the sound of the voices, growing louder
and louder as we stood there, my grandmother alert, Mrs. Kleiner
appalled, I myself athrill. I could hear my father’s voice, short,
sharp. “It’s our great opportunity,” he was saying. “We have only to
strike the blow at England’s empire, and the empire itself will arise
to aid us. Twenty thousand men flung into Canada will turn the trick.
French Quebec is disaffected. What if soldiers are there? We can fight
them! We may die, but what if we do? We will have started the avalanche
that will destroy Carthage!”

There were cries of “Right!” to him. Then a man began to talk in
German. His voice rang out harshly. From the murmurs that came out to
us we knew that the men were applauding his words, but we had no idea
of what the words were. Mrs. Kleiner stood wringing her hands. “Who’s
in there?” my grandmother asked her.

“I do not know,” she insisted.

“Joe Krebs’s uncle is there,” I said. “I know his cough. And Mr.
Winngart who keeps the delicatessen-shop. And Frank Belden’s father;
and that’s Mr. Carey’s voice.”

“They just meet for fun,” groaned Mrs. Kleiner.

“Sure, I saw that kind of fun before,” said my grandmother, “when the
Fenians went after the Queen’s Own.”

My father’s voice rose again. “We are ready to fire the torch? We
are ready to send out the word to-night for the mobilization of our
sympathizers? We are ready to stand together to the bitter end?”

“We are ready!” came the shout.

Then my grandmother opened the door.

Through the haze of their tobacco smoke they looked up, the dozen
men crowded into the Kleiners’ front bedroom, to see my grandmother
standing before them, a bent old woman in her black dress and shawl,
her little jet bonnet nodding valiantly from its perch on her thin
white hair. She looked around as if she could see every one of them. My
father had sprung forward at her coming, and, as if to hold him off,
she put up one hand.

“_Is it yourself, John Sutton, who’s talking here of plots, and plans,
and war?_” she said. Her voice went up to a sharp edge. She flung back
her head as if she defied them to answer her. All of them, my father
and Joe Krebs’s uncle and Mattie Kleiner’s father and Mr. Carey and Mr.
Winngart and the big man who’d had the blue-prints in the shop, and the
others, stared at her as if she were a ghost. No one of them moved as
she spoke. “’Tis a fine lot you are to be sitting here thinking ways
to bring trouble on yourselves, and your wives, and your children,
and your country. Who are there here of you? Is it yourself, Benedict
Krebs, who’s going out to fight for Germany when your own father came
to this very street to get away from Prussia? Is it you, Matthew
Kleiner, who gives roof to them who plot against America, you, who
came here to earn a living that you couldn’t earn at home? Is it you,
Michael Carey, who’s helping them hurt the land that’s making you a
rich man? Shame on you; shame on you all!”

“Why shouldn’t we fight England?” Joe Carey’s father said with a growl.
“You’d be the last one, Mrs. Sutton, that I’d think’d set yourself
against that.”

“’Tis not England,” said my grandmother, “that you fight with your
plots. ’Tis America you strike when you strike here. And, as long as
you stay here, be Americans and not traitors!”

They began to murmur at that, and my father said: “You don’t know what
you’re talking about, mother. You’d better take John home. This is no
place for either of you.”

“No more than it’s a place for you,” she said. “Will you be coming home
with me now?”

“I will not,” my father said.

“Faith, and you’ll all be wishing you had,” she told them, “when the
jails’ll be holding you in the morning.”

“The jails!” The big man who had held the blue-prints came closer to
us. “What is it you say of jails? You have told the police, then?”

“I didn’t need to,” my grandmother said. “The government men have
been watching this long time. ’Twill be at midnight that they’ll come
here. But ’tis not myself they’ll be finding.” I saw the men’s glances
flash around the room through the smoky haze before she called: “Come,
Shauneen.” I took her hand again and led her out of the room. Just
before the door closed after us I saw that my father’s face had grown
very white, and that Mattie Kleiner’s father had dropped his pipe on
the floor.

Outside the house I spoke to my grandmother tremblingly. “Do the police
really know?” I asked her. She gave her dry little chuckle. “If they
don’t, they should,” she answered; “but I was born an O’Brien, and
I’ve never known one of them yet that ever told the police anything.
No, Shauneen,” she laughed, “’twas the high hill I shot at, but I’m
thinking that the shot struck. We’ll watch.”

We crossed the street and waited in the shadow of the house at the
corner. For a little while all was quiet at Kleiner’s. Then I saw the
tall man come out with Joe Krebs’s uncle. After a time my father came
out with Mr. Winngart and Mr. Carey. They walked to the other corner
and stood there a moment before they separated, “Shall we go home now?”
I asked my grandmother after I had told her what I had seen.

“Not yet,” she said. “I’ve one more errand to do this night.” I thought
it might have something to do with the tall man who’d spoken to me or
with the telephone call, and I wondered when she sighed. “I’m a very
old woman,” she seemed to be saying to herself. “I’ll be ninety-one
years come Michaelmas Day. Some of the world I’ve seen, and much of
life. Out of it all I’ve brought but a few things. I’d thought to give
these to my son. But--” She paused. “How old are you, Shauneen?” she
asked me.

“Fourteen,” I said.

“Old enough,” she nodded. She turned her head as if she were looking
for something or some one. Then: “Do you know your way to the Battery?”
she asked me.

“Sure,” I told her. “Are you going there?”

“We are.”

       *       *       *       *       *

It had been quiet enough in our part of town. It was quieter yet when
we came to Bowling Green and walked across to the Battery. Down there,
past the high buildings and the warehouses, we seemed to have come into
the heart of a hush. To the north of us the sky was afire with the
golden glow from the up-town lights. In front of us ran the East River
and the North River. Out on Bedloe’s Island I could see the shining of
the Goddess of Liberty’s torch. Every little while a ferry-boat, all
yellow with lights, would shoot out on the water. A sailing-vessel
moved slowly after its puffing tug. The little oyster-boats were coming
in from the bay. A steamer glided along past it as I walked with my
grandmother out toward the old Castle Garden.

On the Saturday before Joe Carey and I had come down to the piers,
prowling all afternoon on the docks, watching the men bringing in the
queer crates and boxes and bags while we told each other of the places
from where the fruits and spices and coffee and wines had come. There
were thousands and thousands of ships out there in the dark, I knew,
and I began to tell my grandmother what some of the sailors had told
us of how the trade of the world was crowding into New York, with the
ships all pressing the docks for room. “If you could only see it!” I
said to her. “I can see more than that,” she said. Then: “Take me to
the edge of the waters,” she bade me.

Wondering and a little frightened, I obeyed her, trying to solve the
while the mystery of her whim to bring me to the deserted park in the
middle of the night. “Is Castle Garden over there?” she pointed. “Then
I’ve my bearings now.”

She stood alone, a little way off from me, staring seaward as if she
counted the shadowy ships. The wind blew her thin white hair from under
her bonnet and raised the folds of her shawl. There in the lateness of
the night, alone at the edge of the Battery, she didn’t seem to be my
grandmother at all, but some stranger. I remembered the story I’d read
somewhere of an old woman who’d brought a pile of books to a King of
Rome, books that she threw away, one by one, as he refused them, until
there was but one book left. When he’d bought that one from her he’d
found that it was the book of the future of the empire, and that he’d
lost all the rest through his folly. As I looked at my grandmother I
thought she must be like the old woman of the story. Even her voice
sounded strange and deep when she turned to me.

“It was sixty-five years ago the 7th of November that I first stood on
this soil,” she said. “’Tis a long lifetime, and, thank God, a useful
one I’ve had. Burdens I’ve had, but never did I lack the strength to
bear them. Looking back, I’m sorry for many a word and many a deed, but
I’ve never sorrowed that I came here.”

I would have thought that she had forgotten me if she hadn’t touched
my arm. “You’ve heard tell of the famine, Shauneen,” she went on, “the
great famine that fell on Ireland, blighting even the potatoes in
the ground? We’d a little place in Connaught then, a bit of land my
father was tilling. We hadn’t much, even for the place, but we were
happy enough, God knows, with our singing and dancing, and the fairs
and the patterns. Then little by little, we grew poorer and poorer. I
was the oldest of the seven of us. My mother and myself’d be planning
and scraping to find food for the rest of them. Every day we’d see
them growing thinner and thinner. Oh, _mavrone_, the pity of it! And
they looking at us betimes as if we were cheating them of their bit
of a sup! Sometimes now in the dark I see them come to my bed, with
their soft eyes begging for bread, and we having naught to give them.
Brigid--she was the youngest of them all--died. Then my father went.

“I used to go down to the sea and hunt the wrack for bits of food.
There by the shore I would look over here to America and pray, day
after day, that the Lord would send to us some help before my mother
should go. You don’t know what it is to pray, Shauneen. Your father
cannot teach you and your mother hopes you’ll never learn. For prayer
is born in agony, _avick_, and grief and loss and sorrow. But because
you are the son of my soul I pray for you that life may teach you
prayer. For when you come to the end of the road, Shauneen, you’ll know
that ’tis not the smoothness of the way, but the height of it and the
depth of it, that measures your travelling. Far, far down in the depths
I went when I prayed over there on the bleak coast of Connaught.

“God answered my prayer. There came from America food to us. There
came, too, the chance for me to come here with the promise of work
to do. ’Twas a drear day when I left home. How I cursed England as I
looked back on the hills of Cork harbor, all green and smiling as if
never a blight had cast its shadow behind them!

“’Twas a long, dreary sailing. Nine weeks we were in the crossing. A
lifetime I thought it was between the day I looked on the western sea
from the Connaught mountains and the day when I stood here looking back
toward home. Sure life is full of lifetimes like those.”

She paused a moment, but I felt as if I were under a spell that I must
not break by word of mine. A cloud came over the moon and all around us
grew shadowy. The big throb that the city always beats at night kept
sounding like the thrumming of an orchestra waiting for the violin solo
to start.

“I’d plenty of them before many years.” My grandmother’s voice came
like the sound for which the thrumming had waited. “Did you ever think
what it means to the poor souls who come here alone for their living?
When you’ve a house of your own, Shauneen, with men servants and maid
servants, don’t forget that your father’s mother worked out for some
one. They were kind people, too, who took me to their homes. Don’t
forget that either. For ’tis my first memory of America. Kind they
were, and just. They helped me save what I earned and they showed me
ways of helping my folks at home. I’d brought out Danny and James and
Ellen and Mary before the war. I met each one of them right here at
Castle Garden. That’s why I always think of this place as the gateway
through which the Irish have come to America. Sure Ellis Island’s been
for the Italians and the Jews and the Greeks. We didn’t wait outside
the door. We came straight in,” she chuckled.

“My mother wouldn’t come from the old place. Long I grieved over her
there in the little house where my father and Brigid had died, but
after a while I knew she was happier so. Sometimes, Shauneen, I think
of Ireland as an old woman, like my mother, sitting home alone in the
old places, grieving, mourning, with her children out over the world,
living the dreams of her nights by the fire. ’Twas here we found
the freedom the Irish had been fighting for. ’Twas here, away from
landlords and landholding, away from famine and persecution, that we
found that life need not be a thing of sorrow. ’Twas here I met your
grandfather.

“I’d nothing of my own, and your grandfather had but a trifle more when
we married. I suppose ’tis brave that people would call us now. We
didn’t think that we were. We were young and strong and we loved each
other. And we were getting along fairly well--we’d started the payments
on a bit of a house of our own after your father was born--when the war
came down on us.

“Your grandfather went with the brigade. Not twice did we think whether
or not he should go. We knew that he owed his first duty to the
country that had called him, and sheltered him, and given him work and
hope and freedom. For he was a boy from home as I was a girl from home.
I stood on the curbstone the day he marched by, with your father in my
arms, and I cheered for the flag. ‘Sure he’ll be walking to meet you
when you come back!’ I called, lifting up the child. Your grandfather
never came back. He fell at Marye’s Heights.”

When she spoke again her voice had changed more to her every-day tone.
“Well, I raised your father,” she said, “and I thought I was raising
him well. My arms were strong. I worked at the wash-tub morning, noon,
and night. It wasn’t long till I had a laundry of my own. I thought to
give my son all that I’d ever wanted for myself. Perhaps that was where
I made my mistake. I thought too much of the things that money can buy
in those years when money was so hard to earn. Perhaps ’twas myself and
no other who taught your father the cold, hard things of life, though,
God knows, I’d no thought to do it. He’s a good man in many ways, but
he’s not the man I want you to be. He’s a good hater but he’s not a
good lover. And, faith, what’s there in life but love?”

I moved a little then, and my grandmother swung me around, with her two
hands on my shoulders, and, blind as she is, stared at me as if she
were looking right down into my heart. “Shauneen,” she said, “I have
prayed, day and night, that your father might be to America the good
citizen his father was. I have prayed that if America should ever need
him he would stand ready for her call. I have prayed that he’d love
America as I have loved America. I love Ireland, _mavrone_. Always in
my heart do I see her hills as they looked on the morning I looked back
on them from the sea. But I love America, too, and I wanted my son to
love her even more than I do. I’ve wanted him to love this land as my
fathers and their fathers loved Ireland. ’Twas not that I wanted him
to forget my land; when he was a lad like you I’d tell him tales of
Ireland’s glory and of Ireland’s woe. How was I to know that all it
would do for him was to rouse the black hate for England? I taught him
love for Ireland, but never did I teach him to set my land above his
own.

“For ’twas America gave us our chance, Shauneen, when we’d no other
place on earth to seek. Hard days we’ve known here, too, days when
even the children jeered at us, but we’ve never felt the hand of the
oppressor upon us since we touched our feet on these shores. We’ve been
free and we’ve prospered. Fine houses we have and fine clothes; and
’tis a long day since I knew the pinch of hunger. This is our debt.
Tell me again, Shauneen, what you see out there?”

I told her of the shining lights, of the funnels of the steamers,
of the piled piers, of the little oyster-boats, of the great liners
waiting the word for their sailing.

“’Twould be a fine sight,” she sighed. “Do you think me a madwoman to
bring you here?” she went on, as if she had read my thought. “Perhaps
I am that. Perhaps I’m not. For you’ll remember this night when you’ve
forgotten many another time, just as I remember the day when my mother
took me to the shrine at Knock. For this is the shrine of your country,
Shauneen, this old Castle Garden, where your people set foot in the
land that’s given them liberty. Here it was that I told my brothers and
my sisters of the future before them. Here it is that I’m telling you
that your country will be the greatest nation of all the world if only
you lads stay true to her. That’s why I’ve brought you here to-night,
Shauneen. I’m an old, old woman. I’ve not long for this earth. But I’ve
this message for you; it’s yours; this duty that your father shirks
when he plots with black traitors who’d drag us into wars that are not
of our choosing. Raise your hand, Shauneen. Say after me: ‘_As long as
I live, God helping me, I shall keep my country first in my heart and,
after God, first in my soul!_’”

Through the misty moonlight there came to me the memory of my mother’s
plea at the door of the church, my mother’s cry: “Promise me that
you’ll set no cause but God’s before your wife!” Some battle of spirit
struggled within me. For an instant I was silent. Then, suddenly, as if
the moon had ridden above the cloud, I saw the right. “Since all true
causes come from God,” I said to myself, “it is right to set my own
country above anything else that may ever come.” And I said the words
after my grandmother.

She took my face between her hands and kissed me. “God keep you,
Shauneen,” she said, “for the woman who’ll love you, and the children
you’ll teach, and the land you’ll serve!”

Then through a sleeping city my grandmother and I went home.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our country’s part is to keep the flame of freedom burning above the
darkness of the world. Our part is to feed that flame with the oil of
our love of our country. No matter what our duty may be, whether it be
great or small, let us do it as our country asks; that we may keep our
land the place where men may live in freedom, in justice, in peace.

We have come upon troubled times. We have enemies at home as well as
abroad. We have those who would cry “Peace at any price,” when our
country knows that the only enduring peace is one which is won with
honor. We have those who would barter American ideals for immediate
comfort, those who would sell the future for the present. It is our
part, the part of each and every American, to stand firm for those
principles which America has cherished and for which she fights to-day.
It is our part to be American, to think American, to pray American. It
is our duty to remember what America does for us. It is our privilege
to do what we can for America. Every man, woman, and child in the
United States, not in active war service in army or navy, is nothing
less than a licensed pilot, steering the ship of his patriotism
among rough waters. It is his part to steer it straight, and, as the
President said of the nation, “God helping him, he can do no other.”




CHAPTER II

THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD WAR


In the last days of April, 1918, fifty men in the khaki of the army
of the United States of America landed at an Atlantic port. Their
coming, unheralded and almost unwelcomed, marked one of the most
important events in the history of our country. For they were the first
homecoming veterans of the American Expeditionary Forces, men who had
fought under Pershing on the soil of France for the principles that
inspired our nation’s entrance into the world war.

There was the man who had fired the first American gun in the battles.
There was the man who had stood beside the first man killed in action.
There was the man who had brought five German prisoners back into camp
after the rush on the trenches. Wounded, disabled, made unfit for
further immediate service, they had been sent home; and they came back
to their country, the advance-guard of the greatest army the United
States has ever assembled and one of the greatest armies the world has
ever seen, to bear witness to the fact that America has actually taken
her place in the world struggle.

They had fought under German fire. They had stood beside French
soldiers and British soldiers in the attack. They had received their
baptism of blood. They had set the flag of the United States of
America on the battle-fronts in the standard that bears the flags of
those nations which are defending the rights of democracy against the
invasion of autocracy. They are of the first division of an American
army to fight a battle for America in the fields of Europe; and they
had come home to give testimony of what America’s part in the great war
really is. For they are the first of the millions of fighters whom the
nation has gathered for the winning of the war.

Even when the United States entered the great war on the 6th of April,
1917, the part that we would take in the conflict was not clearly
defined. Would we send an army abroad? Would our navy fight? Or would
we merely defend our own shores against possible attack, and supply
the other nations at war with Germany with food, munitions, and other
supplies? The question was soon answered by American honesty which
thundered that the only way to wage war was to send soldiers to the
scene of battle. Preparations never equalled in the history of the
world went into effect for the purpose of conveying our soldiers over
the ocean, of supplying them and equipping them, and of standing back
of the troops and peoples of the Allies who were already at war with
Germany.

Not, however, until more than a year after the beginning of our part in
the war was the issue of exactly what the United States would do on the
battle-fronts settled. Then the President of the United States, Woodrow
Wilson, gave the order that General John Pershing, in command of the
American Expeditionary Forces, should place the American force at
the disposition of General Foch of France, commander-in-chief for the
armies of the Allies. The American Expeditionary Forces slipped into
place, and American soldiers began the actual fighting of America’s war.

For the war into which our nation has entered is, in spite of the fact
that it is being fought on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, as
much America’s war and a war of defense as if it were being fought
along our own Atlantic seaboard against an invading army. It is being
fought for the same principles which are the only ones great enough to
force our country to war, principles of freedom for the individual,
freedom for the free-governed nations, and of ultimate, lasting peace
for the world. It is being fought against the forces of aggression,
of greed, of injustice. It is being fought against the intention of
Germany to dominate the world.

In every war there are two great issues battling against each other.
Men fight for one or the other. Nations fight for one or the other.
There have been wars of conquest waged by strong nations against
weaker ones, wars of religion, wars of territorial aggression, wars of
defense, wars of trade, wars of high moral ideals. This is a war where
the issue is sharply set. It is a war where democracy fights against
autocracy, where liberty fights against bondage, where freemen fight to
keep their freedom against men who strive to take it away from them.

There are two kinds of nations in the world, those nations which
believe that governments derive their just powers from the consent of
the governed and those other nations which believe that power comes
from God to Kings to be used over people who have nothing to say about
its use. The first is a democracy, even though it have a monarch
nominally as its head. The other is an autocracy. And, since this is
a war of democracy against autocracy, it is really a war of the free
people of the world against the bondsmen and their masters.

There was a time when all the great nations of the world had Kings. It
was part of the evolution of the social system. Nations need leaders,
and there were men so strong that they were able to seize and hold
leadership, keeping it for their sons so that the people came to accept
one family as its rulers. But in time some nations began to emerge from
the yoke that these rulers set upon them. The people, who had been
serfs and slaves, began to demand a voice in the government. Kings
and nobles began to lose power in these nations with the awakening of
the people. The signing of the Magna Charta in England by King John
marked the transfer of power from the King. Bit by bit in those nations
tending toward liberal government the shift of power took place.

It was not until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, however,
that the theory of free government flowered and bore fruit. Then the
Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain, situated along the western Atlantic
seaboard, revolted against the imposition of a tax that the colonists
considered unjust, went to war, and won the war. They established the
United States of America, a nation which has been from that day to this
a genuine democracy, a free republic based absolutely on the doctrine
that power came from the people, and that government exists merely as
the steward of that power.

It was through the aid given to the Colonies by France, brought by
Lafayette and Rochambeau, that the War of the Revolution was won.
The French soldiers, returning home at its close, took with them
reinforcement of the spirit of desire for freedom that was already
animating France and which in time brought about the beginnings of the
French Revolution, a war which changed France from a monarchy where the
King said with truth “I am the state” to a real democracy.

The example of the United States of America inspired other nations of
Europe toward the ideal of a government in which the people should
have a voice. Our republican institutions have had a reflex upon
English institutions so that to-day Great Britain, in spite of having a
nominal King, is one of the most democratic governments in the world.
The King of Italy holds his power as a result of a war in which the
people of Italy wrested freedom from Austrian domination. And Russia,
at the time when it went into war, was moving toward a more elastic
form of government. That it failed in the experiment was due to
German intrigue, and not to lack of desire of the Russian people for
self-government.

On the other hand, the people of the Central Powers, Germany and
Austria-Hungary, have accepted--sometimes with mutterings of revolt,
but eventually with resignation--the idea that their rulers derived
authority from some divine source. Few nations in modern times have
had less voice in the government of their country than the people of
Germany. For, under the German constitution, Germany is governed by its
Emperor, with its legislative power in two bodies, the _Bundesrat_
and the _Reichstag_. Now, the United States puts its legislative
power into two bodies, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
France puts power into the Chamber of Deputies, England into the
House of Commons and the House of Lords. But England is shearing the
power of the House of Lords, and in our country the Senate and the
House of Representatives are elected by and are directly responsible
to the voters of the country. Here, as in France and in England, the
vote is not restricted by wealth or by class. In Germany the vote is
so arranged that 370 rich men have the same voting power as 22,324
poor men in one district, Cologne; while the _Bundesrat_ is merely a
diplomatic assembly, representing the kingdoms of the German Empire, an
assembly which the King of Prussia absolutely dominates, and through
which he becomes, as Emperor of Germany, absolute ruler of the empire.
For the _Reichstag_ has no power to make or unmake ministries, or to
control the Emperor in any way. The Emperor appoints the chancellor,
and the chancellor is answerable only to him. So that in the long run,
although it has a constitutional form, the government of Germany is the
Emperor of Germany and the military group known as Junkers with whom he
has surrounded himself.

The Emperor of Germany and the Junkers of his Prussia forced the
present war. They prepared for it during years while the rest of the
world was keeping peace. They justified it to their people on the
ground that Germany needed new territory, new trade, new markets.
Although she was gaining the trade and markets without war, Germany’s
leader made this their excuse to their people, and when they were ready
they went to war for the purpose of imposing their form of government
upon peoples who did not want it, of forcing their rule upon nations
opposed to their ideas. Serbia lay in their path of conquest into
Asia, and so they caused Austria, their tool, to make an excuse of the
assassination by a Serbian of an Austrian archduke, and declare war on
the small nation. Then Germany invaded Belgium, with which it was not
at war, to get to France, against which war had been declared. Belgium
resisted. England entered the conflict. The struggle was on.

Month after month the aggressions of Germany caused new nations to
break off relations with her. Italy and Japan entered the war. China,
most peaceful of nations in her relations with the outside world,
broke off relations. One after another of the South American republics
were forced to do the same. The United States, after a long period of
patient endurance of German insults, attacks on our commerce, intrigues
and plots in our own country, restriction of our maritime activities in
defiance of international law, was finally driven to announcement of
the existence of a state of war. The lines were drawn. Democracy was
making a stand for its life against autocracy, the freemen of the world
against the bondsmen.

It is right and fitting that the United States of America should take
her place in a war which is being fought for those principles for
which she has stood since her coming into nationhood. For more than a
century and a quarter she has been, like the Statue of Liberty in the
harbor of New York, a symbolic figure to the world beaconing men to
freedom. It is in line with her history that she should go to Europe
for the same cause for which she has fought all her wars--defense of
the weaker against the stronger, the right of people to determine their
own governments, the right of all to be free.

There is a story told of General Pershing’s entrance into Paris. He was
taken to the tomb of Lafayette. His hosts crowded about him, waiting
for his speech. But, like all American soldiers, Pershing is no orator.
“Well, Lafayette,” he said, “we’re here!” That was all. But France,
hearing, understood. America was there, to fight side by side with
them, to suffer with them, to die with them, that the cause of liberty
for which Lafayette had fought on two continents might live. The world
war had menaced the United States in its sacred institution of freedom,
and the United States had met the challenge, and had come to fight for
that which is dearer than life--honor, and right, and justice.




CHAPTER III

WHAT THE GREAT WAR REALLY MEANS


The history of the human race has been the history of man’s struggle
toward freedom. Because certain nations have seen the light sooner
than others, they have been the object of attack by these others,
primarily because the rulers of the latter have been shrewd enough
to see that revolution is contagious. A free neighbor threatens the
existence of a monarch who derives his power from the force with which
he has surrounded himself and from the blindness of his own people. A
free neighbor is therefore a menace to autocracy, and something to be
crushed.

When the people of France, inspired by the example of the United
States, arose in revolution against their monarch, the revolution
shook the thrones of Europe. The King of France was closer in blood
to other royal families of Europe than he was to the people whom he
had governed. The Queen of France was a Hapsburg, of the royal family
of Austria, whose representatives were in almost every royal house of
the Continent of Europe. The success of the French Revolution was the
handwriting on the wall; and every Belshazzar on a throne had a Daniel
of statesmanship to tell him what it meant.

Almost at once the Kings of Europe rallied against France, because free
France threatened the existence of the Kings. France fought valiantly.
The military establishment which she had to assume to protect her
rights, however, swung her out of the republican form of government
she had set up, and Napoleon Bonaparte, who won her wars, became her
Emperor. The change, however, did not swing back the French people into
any slavish acceptance of royalty. They held, in spite of Bonaparte’s
court, their fundamental democracy; and it was a democratic army which
France sent across Europe. Napoleon himself said that every private
carried a field-marshal’s bâton in his knapsack. Every man had a
chance for promotion. Every man had a chance to better his life. And,
because France remained fundamentally democratic, the Kings battled
against Bonaparte. They defeated him, finally; but they did not defeat
France, for its spirit remained free.

Germany, nearest neighbor to France, had never known democracy.
Once part of the vast kingdom known as the Holy Roman Empire,
she had disintegrated into little states, kingdoms, duchies, and
archbishoprics, each ruled by one-man power. Sometimes a King, stronger
than the others, drew the kingdoms together for purposes of warfare
against other countries. Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, fought
against Austria. With him the power of Prussia rose. After his death
it declined so that Napoleon found the conquest of Prussia easy, and
went about it so thoroughly that he made the French conquest a profound
humiliation to the Prussians. Even his defeat at Waterloo failed to
pay the debt Prussia cherished against the French.

It was in the time of Napoleon that the German people came nearer to
freedom of spirit than they had been before or have been since. For
in fighting a foreign enemy who sought power even as the Hohenzollern
ruler of Germany seeks it to-day, the youth of Germany glimpsed the
truth of democracy. With Napoleon’s defeat they stood ready to move
forward toward it. But again the Kings intervened.

There was formed in Europe at that time the Holy Alliance, that same
group of Kings and Kingmakers who sought to restore to Spain its
revolting colonies in South America, and who held firmly to the idea of
the divine right of Kings. This Holy Alliance throttled free thought
in Germany. By 1848 revolutions for the right of freedom surged up
throughout the German states and kingdoms and principalities. They were
beaten down by the ruling powers, one helping the other. It was at this
time that the German emigration toward the United States began, for
the leaders of the revolution sought a land where they could be free.
Those who stayed came in time to accept the system which the rulers
imposed upon them.

The putting down of the revolution of 1848 gave Prussia increased
power. She had a disciplined standing army, and a military
establishment. In 1862 William I became King. He made Bismarck his
prime minister, and the march of Prussia toward world conquest began.

Bismarck made the whole Prussian nation into an army. Then he made
alliance with Austria to secure the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein from
Denmark. Then he provoked a quarrel with Austria so that Prussia might
deprive her of all influence over the other German states. He won his
object in a six-weeks’ war in 1866. But he was not satisfied with
the power he had won, for democratic France--democratic for all her
acceptance of another Napoleon for her throne--still threatened the
power of Kings who claimed that their power came from God, and not from
their people.

Prussia waited its chance. When France was unprepared, a quarrel was
brought on, and the blow struck. Prussia took Alsace and Lorraine from
her. Then the King of Prussia was made Emperor of Germany.

The territory which Prussia had acquired for the German Empire, for
Alsace and Lorraine are the richest mineral districts of France,
gave Germany opportunity for that industrial development which has
marked her history since the Franco-Prussian War. Germany’s population
overcrowded her territorial space. Germany grew rich and prosperous.
Germany became highly efficient in mechanical arts. German trade
reached out over the world, but found the barriers of the establishment
of other nations. The German army remained a great machine, officered
by Prussian nobles. Germany grew so mighty that she grew to believe
that might makes right. She had the might, and she made ready to
exercise it.

First of all, she needed trade routes. She needed a way to the sea more
open than the Hamburg harbors. She wanted a road to Asia. She wanted
to control the gateway to the rich Orient. She wanted an empire that
would contain Austria-Hungary as well as Germany proper. And she set
out to win it all.

In 1914 the situation was this: Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria,
was an old man, a sick man. His empire, composed of scores of
nationalities, held together by a thin thread. If he died, it might
disintegrate into groups of free peoples. Serbia, its near neighbor,
had won independence. The Balkan wars had shifted power to small states
that stood between Germany and the Orient. Russia was disaffected. A
revolution might come at any time that would dethrone the Czar. Unless
a war, and a great war, was started, many and great free nations would
soon surround Germany, cutting her off from the way to the Orient.
France, her hated neighbor, flaunted her free institutions in her
face and remembered Alsace and Lorraine. England cut her off from
unrestricted rule of the sea. To be sure, she was not eager to force
war with England, since the German navy had not arrived at the point
of preparedness of the German army. England could wait until Germany
had conquered the rest of Europe. Then, when England was conquered,
too, Germany would punish the United States for our “international
impertinence” as Bismarck called our policy of the Monroe Doctrine. It
was the time to strike. Germany, as usual in the Bismarckian policy,
made the occasion.

Down in Bosnia, a Balkan state which Austria had seized and held
against the will of its people, an anarchist threw a bomb which killed
an Austrian archduke in June, 1914. For a time no action came of the
happening. Then Austria announced that she had discovered that the
assassination was the result of a Serbian plot, known to the Serbian
Government, Bosnia’s neighbor and the friend of her freedom. Therefore
she declared war on Serbia. Germany gave her consent to the ultimatum.
She was taking her opportunity.

Knowing that a war of Austria against Serbia would open a way for her
own progress toward the East, Germany, being prepared to the last
gun and last man, forced the issue. She knew that Russia would rise
against her, but she knew, better than the Russian Government did, how
unprepared Russia was. On the first day of August, 1914, she declared
war against Russia. On the fourth day of August the _Reichstag_, the
people’s legislative body of Germany, met and for the first time
learned officially of what had been done. By that time the German
Government had put itself in a position of war against Russia, France,
Great Britain, and Belgium, a fact which proves how little the German
people had to say about the making of actual warfare.

In utter contempt of a treaty which had been signed Germany invaded
Belgium on the way to France. Belgium resisted the invasion. A Chinese
schoolboy, writing of the event in a school in western Canada months
afterward, phrased the story better than any historian has done.
“Germany,” he wrote, “said to Belgium: ‘Let me through.’ Belgium said:
‘I am not a road. I am a nation.’” And Belgium proved to the world how
strong a small nation may be in courage. For she resisted Germany so
well that France had time to gather her forces for defense. The drive
to Paris was stopped. Prussia had announced that its armies would be in
Paris in an almost incredibly short time.

In the meantime Germany made alliance with the Sultan of Turkey. The
war on the eastern front began. Hordes of Austrians and Germans swarmed
over Poland into Russia, and back again as Russia beat them back,
then forward again as Russia collapsed. In Egypt, in Palestine, in
Mesopotamia war has raged. Japan joined. China broke off relations with
Germany. Japan holds troops at the eastern end of the Russian-Siberian
railway, waiting for the word of the Allies to strike westward.

In the west the war has remained almost stationary since the initial
sweep of the German hordes; but eastward Germany has driven her
armies toward her goal. Russia has disintegrated, pulled apart by the
insidious forces of German intrigue. Germany has the open way to the
East. She has the resources of Austria-Hungary, of Russia, of Asia
Minor at her command.

Had it not been for Germany’s idea that she could conquer the world
in one war, an idea supported by her eastward conquests, she might be
nearer to ultimate success than she is to-day. For the entrance of the
United States into the war, provoked by German measures of attack on
American commerce, has materially changed the issue. It has put heart
into the Allies, as well as opening up the field of supplies of men and
munitions for them. Our country has barely begun to fight, for it has
taken a year to bear to France the necessary troops and equipment.

However long the war may be, it is one that must be fought to the end.
For, as a river purifies itself as it flows, so has the issue of the
war defined itself as it has progressed. In its beginning Germany
strove to make the world believe that it was a trade war between
Austria and Serbia which Russia had entered for the injury of Austria
and which had been forced on Germany in Austria’s defense. Then she
claimed that she fought England “for the freedom of the seas.” The
war against Belgium was “a military necessity,” the submarine warfare
against neutral nations “a retaliatory measure against blockade.” But
in the long run Germany’s war is the war of the military caste of the
world against the free peoples, the war of government holding power
by force against government holding power by popular vote, the war of
military establishment against peaceful ideals; and until it is won by
those who fight Germany there can be no lasting peace in the world.




CHAPTER IV

HOW THE WAR CAME TO THE UNITED STATES


The great war, beginning in 1914, brought to most Americans no idea
that our country would ever be more than a watcher of it. That we
ourselves would one day become part of it--and one of the greatest
parts of it--was something beyond the imagination of most men. America
had lived apart from other nations. For, although our government had
made treaties with foreign nations, and become part of The Hague
Conference, and been drawn to some extent into international politics,
we had none of the ambitions which draw nations into ordinary wars. We
had no desire for colonies, we had no jealousy of other nations, we had
no fear of neighboring governments. In fact, Americans believed that
wars were going out of fashion, and that western Europe, any more than
ourselves, was not likely to go to war. The coming of the conflict was
therefore a shock to us, but not one that brought us to realize that we
were likely to take part in it.

When Germany invaded Belgium with no excuse other than that progress
through that nation afforded the quickest way to France the people of
the United States awoke to their first knowledge of what militarism
may mean. Although people of German birth or parentage in America
were inclined to accept Germany’s attempted justification of military
necessity, the sympathies of most Americans went to Belgium and became
one of the important factors in determining the country’s attitude
toward the war. For the United States had always stood for principles
of justice and humanitarianism. The stories of how Germany treated the
civilian population of Belgium, stories which were verified by the
later reports of such non-partisan investigators as Brand Whitlock,
American minister to Belgium, aroused American sentiment against German
military methods.

  [Illustration: _Copyright Newspaper Illustrations, Ltd._

  Belgium refugees between Malines and Brussels

  When Germany invaded Belgium ... the people of the United States awoke
  to their first knowledge of what militarism may mean]

There were people in the United States who believed that our country
should go to war in defense of Belgium, just as we had gone to war to
free Cuba from the dominion of Spain when the rule of Spain on that
island became cruelly oppressive. But our government, believing that
the war was not a parallel instance, since it had not yet violated
those fundamental principles of our national life that had been struck
at by Spain, refused to consider such action, and the people fell back
into consideration of the causes and progress of the war abroad.

It began to be clear, as German forces crossed Belgium and plunged
into France, while at the same time German forces swept eastward, that
Germany had evolved the definite scheme of world conquest which her
later demands and movements have proven. The American people, however,
were slow to believe this intention of Germany. Bit by bit only our
country began to see that Germany was pushing forward a gigantic plan
of territorial aggression, and with all that we heard and some that
we believed, we were slow to see how this plan could affect the United
States.

Because we had lived apart from the rest of the world we would probably
have continued to feel that, terrible as the war which Germany had
begun was, it was not our war, and that all we were expected to do
was to remain genuinely neutral and to give such assistance as the
international law permitted neutral nations to give the wounded and
stricken. But Germany would not allow us to remain apart. The ruling
class of Prussia, headed by the Kaiser, grown mad with power and the
desire for more power, put into operation methods that forced us toward
war.

Germany’s progress into this war had, as we have seen, struck blows at
those principles for which America had struggled, the principles of
individual freedom, of international peace, of the freedom of the seas.
For any one of these ideals the republic might have rushed into war;
but it was only when the American people came to know that Germany was
plotting not only to overthrow the Monroe Doctrine but actually against
the American Government here in the United States that we were roused
to desire for conflict to uphold our national honor.

“It is plain enough how we were forced into war,” President Wilson
declared in his Flag Day Address of June 14, 1917. “The extraordinary
insults and aggressions of the Imperial German Government left us no
self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights as
a free people and of our honor as a sovereign government. The military
masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They filled
our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and
sought to corrupt the opinions of our people in their own behalf.
When they found that they could not do that, their agents diligently
spread sedition amongst us and sought to draw our own citizens from
their allegiance; and some of those agents were men connected with the
official embassy of the German Government in our own capital.

“They sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest our
commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to take up arms against us
and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance with her; and that, not
by indirection, but by direct suggestion from the Foreign Office
in Berlin. They impudently denied us the use of the high seas and
repeatedly executed their threat that they would send to their death
any of our people who ventured to approach the coasts of Europe.

“Many of our own people were corrupted. Men began to look upon their
own neighbors with suspicion and to wonder in their hot resentment
whether there was any community in which hostile intrigue did not
lurk. What great nation in such circumstances would not have taken up
arms? Much as we desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our own
choice. The flag under which we serve would have been dishonored had we
withheld our hand.”

The President of the United States stated America’s case against
Germany mildly. Evidence of the bad faith of the government of Germany
to the government of the United States is piled in the archives of the
State Department in Washington. The honest efforts of our government
to establish honest relations with them were met by German officials
with quibbles, misrepresentations, counter-accusations, and continuing,
deliberate delays. German high officials kept us in humiliating waiting
while German official agents in this country, protected by the rules
of diplomatic immunity from criminal prosecution, used their trust
to conspire against our internal peace. Agents of the German Embassy
placed spies through the length and breadth of our country. They put
their agents at work in Japan and in Latin America while they were
professing to be our friends. They bought newspapers and employed
speakers for the purpose of rousing distrust of us in those countries.
They incited insurrection in Cuba, in Haiti, and in Santo Domingo.
They did their best to arouse against us the Danish West Indies. They
spread suspicion of us and our motives in South America. They conducted
an attack upon the Monroe Doctrine such as no other nation had ever
attempted.

For a time the government of the United States tried to take the view
that this intrigue, plotting, spying, and insidious warfare was the
work of irresponsible agents, not countenanced by the Imperial German
Government; but the proof was too strong. The government finally had
to request the recall of the Austro-Hungarian ambassador and of the
German military and naval attachés, presenting proof of their criminal
violations of our hospitality. Their governments offered no reply to
us, issued no reprimands to them.

In spite of all this the temper of the American people was that we
should keep out of war as long as it was possible to maintain our
national honor without war. The President even began the preparation of
a communication to the warring nations, asking them to define their
war aims, as this would be a step toward peace. Before this note was
completed, the German Government sent out a communication, asking the
same definition. But the German Government issued this document on the
idea that the German armies had triumphed, and incorporated in it a
threat to neutral governments. From a thousand sources, official and
unofficial, word came to our government that unless the United States
used her influence to end the war on the terms dictated by Germany,
Germany and her allies would consider themselves free from obligation
to respect the rights of neutrals. The Kaiser was frankly ordering the
neutral nations of the world to force those Powers which fought him to
accept the peace he offered. If they failed to do this, Germany would
resume her submarine warfare on neutral commerce with new ruthlessness.

The President, continuing his own purpose, finished his note to both
sides, sending it on the 18th of December, 1916. Both sides replied,
the Powers who resisted Germany declaring that their principal
end in the war was the lasting restoration of peace. Germany and
her associates refused to state their terms, and merely proposed a
conference--another method of delay. The President, in an address to
the Senate on the 22d of January, 1917, outlined the terms of the peace
which the United States could honorably join in guaranteeing.

“No peace can last,” he stated, “or ought to last, which does not
recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their
just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right
anywhere exists to hand people about from sovereignty to sovereignty as
if they were property....

“I am proposing government by the consent of the governed; that
freedom of the seas which in international conference after conference
representatives of the United States have urged with the eloquence of
those who are the convinced disciples of liberty; and that moderation
of armaments which makes of armies and navies a power for order merely,
not an instrument of aggression or of selfish violence.”

Six days earlier, on the 16th of January, the German secretary of
foreign affairs had secretly despatched a communication to the German
minister in Mexico, informing him that Germany intended to repudiate
its pledge made to the United States to discontinue submarine warfare
on neutral ships, and instructing him to offer to the Mexican
Government New Mexico and Arizona if Mexico would join with Japan in
attacking the United States.

On the last day of January, 1917, the German ambassador to the United
States, Count Bernstorff, brought to the secretary of state a note
in which Germany announced her purpose of intensifying her submarine
warfare. The German chancellor stated in Germany that the reason that
this policy had not been put into force earlier was simply because his
government had not been ready to act.

On the 3d of February, 1917, the President announced to both houses of
Congress the complete severance of our relations with Germany. Count
Bernstorff went to Berlin, and James W. Gerard, American ambassador to
Germany, was recalled to this country. Count Bernstorff had begged that
no irrevocable decision of war be made until he had the chance to make
one final plea for peace to the Kaiser. If he made the plea, he failed.
The submarine warfare began again in greater violence. And on the
twelfth day of March our government ordered the placing of armed guards
on our merchant ships.

With the Sixty-fourth Congress dissolved on the 4th of March, we had
come to the door of the greatest war in the history of the world.




CHAPTER V

HOW THE UNITED STATES WENT INTO WAR


One hundred and thirty years before the great war of Europe came
to the threshold of the United States a group of wise, far-sighted
statesmen met in the city of Philadelphia to make a constitution for
the governing of the Colonies whose independence had just been won.
They desired, above all things, to establish a government which would
stand the test of time and remain a government of the people, by the
people, and for the people. For months they deliberated, bringing to
the meetings all the wisdom, all the ideals, all the visioning they
had acquired from long study, and from victorious, righteous warfare.
Finally they--the fathers of our republic--completed a document that
has governed the United States of America and become to the world a
model of democratic government.

In this document, which was ratified by the States then existing and
which became the law of those States which were admitted to the nation,
its makers set down certain rules governing the making of war.

The Constitution divided the government into three branches: the
executive, the legislative, and the judicial. In order that no one of
them might have too much power, the duties of each were determined
and divided. The executive, of which the President is chief, could do
certain deeds and duties. The judicial had the final determination of
the right of enacting certain laws, saying whether or not later laws,
made by Congress, conformed to the original Constitution. But to the
legislative, represented by two houses of Congress, the Senate and the
House of Representatives, the Constitution granted certain very clear
powers.

Among these powers was the power to declare war. In autocracies
monarchs declare war; but in a democracy such as ours it is right and
just that the power of declaring war should rest with that body most
directly responsive to the people of the nation. The Congress is such
a body. The Constitution therefore gave to Congress the right of war
declaration; and nothing better illustrates the difference between
autocracy and democracy than the fact that the Emperor of Germany had
thrust his country into war three days before the German _Reichstag_,
which is the limited popular assembly of the empire, knew officially of
its existence, while the President of the United States had to summon
Congress into special session for consideration of the war problem.

On the second day of April, 1917, the President went before the
Congress which he had summoned. Beneath the dome of the white Capitol
in the city of Washington, while a world waited breathlessly for
the verdict of the great nation, he read his message to the men who
represent the people of the United States. In that message he set down
the case of the United States against Germany. Only twice before in
the history of America--at the beginning of the War of the Revolution
and at the beginning of the war between the States--had there been so
momentous an occasion. Upon the men assembled in the Senate and the
House of Representatives depended the honor, the future of the nation,
and the honor and the future of democracy.

“It is a war,” the President read to them, “against all nations.... The
challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how
it will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a
moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting our
character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feelings
away. Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the
physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of
human right, of which we are only a single champion.”

In that spirit the Congress listened. In that spirit they heard the
voice of the man who was speaking not for himself but for our United
States, not for our generation alone but for the generations who
have passed and the generations who will come, when he said:

  [Illustration: _From a photograph by G. V. Buck, Underwood & Underwood._

  President Wilson delivering his war message

  On the second day of April, 1917 ... while a world waited breathlessly
  for the verdict of the great nation, President Wilson read his message
  to the men who represent the people of the United States]

“The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted
upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish
ends to serve. We desire no conquests, no dominion. We seek no
indemnities for ourselves, no material compensations for the sacrifices
we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights
of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as
secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.”

With the weight of the gravest responsibility an American Congress has
ever raised falling upon their shoulders, they gave heed as the chief
executive brought to them the issue:

“It is a distressing and oppressive duty, gentlemen of the Congress,
which I have performed in thus addressing you. There are, it may be,
many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful
thing to lead this great, peaceful people into war, into the most
terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to
be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we
shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our
hearts--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority
to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties
of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert
of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make
the world itself at last free.

“To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything
that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those
who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend
her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and
happiness, and the peace which she has treasured.

“God helping her, she can do no other.”

The Congress of the United States deliberated, through three days and
three nights, while the world waited, upon the question of war. On
the 2d of April, the very day of the President’s message, the war
declaration passed the Senate with a vote of 82 yeas and 6 nays. On
the 5th of April, it passed the House of Representatives with a vote
of 373 yeas and 70 nays. America had spoken, and the voice of America
thundered this message to Germany:

“Whereas the Imperial German Government has committed repeated acts
of war against the Government and the people of the United States of
America: Therefore be it

“_Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United
States of America in Congress assembled_, That the state of war between
the United States and the Imperial German Government which has thus
been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared; and
that the President be, and he is hereby, authorized and directed to
employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States
and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the
Imperial German Government; and to bring the conflict to a successful
termination all the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the
Congress of the United States.”

The United States of America had gone into its greatest war.




CHAPTER VI

WHAT THE UNITED STATES IS DOING IN THE WAR


When a military nation of the type of Germany goes into war the
entrance is but a step forward out of the preparations which it has
been making for years; but when a peace-loving, peace-observing nation
of the type of the United States goes into war the entrance is a
revolution in the thoughts, habits, and intentions of the people.

The declaration by Congress of the existence of a state of war with
Germany found the United States with the greatest resources of any
nation in the world but without the sort of military machinery
necessary for prosecution of the conflict. The readjustment of the
nation from ordinary occupations into war-making occupations has been
a gigantic task, and one that has been accomplished only through the
intelligent patriotism of the citizens of the nation, co-operating
with the government.

The first concern of the nation was the increase of our army and
navy to a size commensurate to the part we were about to take in the
conflict. Neither the army nor the navy came near to the strength
which the nation knew to be imperative for the winning of the war.
For, although the exact part which the United States would take in
the struggle was to be determined later by conferences with the war
councils of the other nations fighting Germany, it was certain that we
would require a vast army and an adequate navy.

Congress having voted that the United States should undertake extensive
military preparation, the duty of providing that preparation fell upon
the executive branch of our government. It was provided that the army
of the United States should consist of the Regular Army, the National
Guard, and the National Army. The law provides that, when these armies
are assembled, there shall be no difference between the Regular Army,
the National Guard, and the National Army. Every man in the army, no
matter in what service, is equal in dignity, in responsibility, and in
opportunity to every other man of the same rank in the army.

The first year of the conflict has been largely occupied with the
assembling of these armies, and in the despatch of those trained for
battle duty to France. To insure this despatch in safety the navy has
been greatly increased in size and efficiency, although it stands to
the honor of America that her navy proved itself instantly worthy of
her trust.

With the beginning of the war there was a rush of men to enlist in the
Regular Army and in the National Guard, which was to be part of the
army of the United States. The government, however, decided upon a
method of service, known as selective service and sometimes called “the
draft,” which would be more democratic and fair than the enlistment
method, and which would supplement the other methods.

The selective-service law, passed by Congress on the 18th of May,
1917, established a class of men between the ages of twenty-one
and thirty-one from which the President may draft soldiers. All
men between those ages were enrolled on the 5th of June, 1917. The
administration of the draft is in the hands of the War Department under
the supervision of the President. Every voting district has a local
draft board, and every congressional district a board of appeal, which
decides contested cases. All men between the ages given are subject
to service, unless they are exempted for reasons allowed by law. No
exemptions can be bought. No substitutions can be made. The richest man
in the country of draft age is as subject to service as the poorest
man. Exemptions are permitted those men who are supporting dependants
who cannot support themselves, those men who are working in occupations
necessary for the winning of the war, such as ship-building and the
making of munitions of war, and those men who are physically unfit for
war service.

In the registration 9,659,382 men enrolled. By a drawing system
conducted publicly in the Capitol of the United States at Washington
the order by which these men were to go in the army was determined by
lot. The President issued instructions to the exemption boards on the
2d of July, and the first National Army of 687,000 men was called to
service on the 5th of September, 1917.

Following this call every man in the rest of the nearly 10,000,000 men
received a document, known as a questionnaire, which gave a number of
questions to be answered, and which he filled out. According to his
answers the local board determined to what class he belongs. There
are five groups of selective service, ranged according to a man’s
obligations and his occupation. Single men without dependent relatives
head the first class. Licensed pilots, who are so necessary to
navigation as to be almost indispensable, end the last class. No fairer
system of military service was ever devised.

For the training of this army arrangements had to be made. The
government set about the building of camps, called cantonments, for the
use of the National Guard and the National Army while their various
units were being prepared for service abroad. Most of these camps
are in the South so that the men may have less hardship during the
winter season. Some of the camps were completed in September, 1917.
The construction of every camp was a great engineering achievement.
Camp Meade is the second largest city of Maryland, and every camp is
in itself a great community. There are thirty-three of these camps,
or cantonments, extending from Atlantic to Pacific and from the Gulf
of Mexico to the Canadian border in their locations. Here the men are
trained into service, and cared for in various ways while they are
being trained.

Training-camps for officers were also established where men were taught
the science of warfare and the leading of other men. In addition to
the army, training-camps for the United States marines, who are in the
naval service, were established. Special branches of service, such
as aviation, had special camps.

  [Illustration: Recruits of the National Army waiting at the booths of
  a National Army cantonment]

On the fourth day of July, 1917, the news came to the United States
that the first division of the American Expeditionary Forces, under
the command of General John Pershing, had landed in France. American
troops began intensive training with French and British soldiers, and
when they were judged ready, took their places on the battle-lines. Day
after day the casualty lists have recorded the deaths and injuries of
American soldiers in the war. Our country is paying the price for the
liberty we have enjoyed, and which we struggle to hold.

Every day sees new divisions sailing eastward on their way to Europe.
The shipyards of the country are busy night and day in the building of
ships to convoy troops and supplies to the battle-fronts, and to the
countries of the peoples who fight with us against Germany.

For upon the United States has fallen the task, not only of supplying
men for fighting with the men of France and Great Britain on the
western front, but of supplying food, clothing, and ammunition.
Depleted by the years of devastating warfare, our fellow fighters look
to us for sustenance. And we are not failing them.

One of the sinews of war is money. Nations must raise vast sums to keep
up armies. Soldiers must be fed and clothed, and given guns and bullets
with which to defend themselves. If they have families at home, their
families must be supported. The government of the United States does
all this for the men in its army and navy. And the people of the United
States stand back of the government to pay for these needs. Besides
the government, certain private enterprises are aiding the soldiers,
sailors, and all the victims of war abroad, as well as those needing
aid at home for various reasons connected with the change that war
brings. Only a certain percentage of our population may go overseas to
fight, but to every American is given the opportunity of standing back
of the lines and doing the part asked of him.




CHAPTER VII

REAR-LINE TRENCHES


Back of the firing-lines of battle are other lines which must be held
by the fighting nations, if a war is to be won. These lines, which
may be called the rear-line trenches of conflict, are the means of
supply by which the armies at the front are fed and clothed, and given
ammunition, and cared for in every way that will make them better
soldiers. It is on these lines that the civilian population of a nation
gives help to the fighting men. It is in these trenches that the men,
and women, and children of a country may do their part for the soldiers
and sailors who have to go into the actual battles.

Because the United States is a democracy, fighting in a great struggle
for the principles of democracy, it follows that our country has
enlisted the service of every American to win the war. There is no
one in the nation who may not help, since every one may do something
to give actual, immediate, necessary aid to the men at the front, and
those who are on their way to the front.

This aid has been given, and is being given, in many ways. Through
food conservation, Liberty Loans, War Thrift and Savings Stamps and
Certificates, the Red Cross, the Young Men’s Christian Association,
the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, the Knights of Columbus, the Young
Women’s Christian Association, and various other organizations which
are working for the welfare of the soldiers, sailors, and marines,
almost every person in the United States old enough to understand that
the country is at war has helped toward the winning of the war.

Some of these methods, such as food conservation, and the raising of
money through Liberty Loans and the sale of War Thrift Stamps, have
been used directly by the government. Others have been semi-private
enterprises with governmental sanction. All of them have been for the
purpose of helping the men who have been doing the actual fighting,
so that every one in the nation who has done what he could for these
causes has been fighting his country’s battles in the trenches back of
the front.


FOOD CONSERVATION

Napoleon, the one-time Emperor of the French and the greatest general
of modern warfare, said that “an army travelled on its stomach.” He
meant that no army could go faster than its food-supply. Although the
method of warfare has changed since the century ago when he fought, the
truth of his statement remains. No army can win battles unless it is
properly fed.

When the United States went into the great war the government of our
country knew that a vast amount of certain kinds of food must be
shipped abroad to feed those soldiers whom we would send across and
those soldiers of the nations on whose side we were to fight against
Germany. France and Belgium, devastated by the invading armies of the
Germans, could not raise food enough for their own populations, to
say nothing of the defending armies. England, with her men fighting
abroad, and with only a comparatively small area of farming land, could
not do much more. Canada was sending millions of bushels of wheat and
thousands of tons of other food-supplies monthly to the Allies, but the
need was infinitely greater than the supply. It therefore became the
first duty of our country to send to those nations which were fighting
in the same cause all the food which we could possibly spare, in order
that their soldiers, and our soldiers when they came, would be properly
fed.

Although the United States produces great quantities of food products
every year, only certain kinds of food could be sent abroad. It was
necessary to send the kind of food that would take up the least space
in shipment and have the greatest nourishment. The greatest demand was
for wheat, and even our country could not--without saving at home--send
to Europe as much as was required. In order that the people of the
United States might be taught how to save wheat and other foods needed
for our troops and the Allies, the government established a food
administration for the double purpose of taking over this instruction
and of devising other methods of food saving. The success of both
branches of service has been due to the intelligent co-operation of the
American people with the officers of the food administration; but it
has been in the actual savings by individual Americans that the sum of
sacrifice has been attained.

It may not seem a soldier’s duty to refrain from eating white bread
on certain days designated by the government. It may not seem a
patriot’s duty to keep from eating sugar or pork on other days; but it
is none the less a duty as certain as that one which his commanding
officer assigns to the soldier in the ranks, and one which should be
as carefully followed. The following of it has enabled the United
States to ship abroad wheat, pork, sugar, and other foodstuff in
quantities sufficient to keep fed the people who are actually fighting
the enemy. The man, woman, or child who has saved at home the kind of
food that the government has needed to send abroad, and who has used
the substitutes, has done a patriotic duty and his share of keeping the
rear-line trench where he is placed.


FUEL CONSERVATION

Coal is one of the essential means of making war. Without coal ships
cannot cross the seas, bearing soldiers. Without coal the great
factories where guns and bullets, powder and cannon, uniforms and
equipment are made for our army and navy could not run. Because of many
reasons there was during 1917 a shortage of 50,000,000 tons of coal.
The government therefore appointed a fuel administrator for the purpose
of finding ways to make up this shortage so that ships would not be
delayed nor factories stopped where munitions for our soldiers and
sailors were being made.

The fuel administrator ordered the shutting down of the use of
electric lights where these were not absolutely needed, and also, when
the shortage was most acute, the shutting down of all factories not
employed in munitions-making for a certain period of time. This was why
there were so-called “lightless” nights and “coalless” days. The people
were also asked to save fuel in their homes as much as possible. The
result was a saving of fuel that was used for war purpose directly.


WAR FINANCE

In the old days, when Kings hired men of other nations to help their
own armies fight their wars, it used to be said that the victory went
to that side which had the most money. Some wars where countries with
practically no money fought against rich nations and defeated them,
because of superior valor and courage of their men, proved that it
was not money, but men, which won wars. The fact remains, however,
that money is absolutely necessary for any country to carry a war to
success. Soldiers must be fed and clothed, and given guns and bullets
and cannon, as well as proper care. All this takes money.

A government has two ways of raising money. One of these ways, the
older way, is by taxation. The government says to the citizen: “You
have property worth so much money. We shall require you to give us
a certain percentage of that money. You have an income of so many
dollars. We shall take from you part of it, according to your wealth.”
Or the government may put a tax on tea, or coffee, or clothes, or any
other article which people use. All this is perfectly right and legal
as a means of raising money for the prosecution of a war in which the
government must direct the people, to win.

The other method of raising money by the government is the sale of
bonds. Bonds are really promises made by a corporation to pay at a
certain stated time, with interest, the amount which the purchaser
gives for them. For instance, when a railroad company wants to get
money enough to make some necessary improvements, it issues bonds
at a certain rate of interest, payable at a certain time. If the
improvements help the railroad, and the company makes money by having
done this, the person who buys the bond usually finds that his purchase
has increased in value because of the certainty of the interest
payments. It is this certainty of payment, both principal and interest,
which has always made United States bonds such good investments. It is
not hard for a man who has good property to secure a mortgage upon it.

The United States is the richest country in the world. The government
of the United States has at its command the greatest resources of any
nation. Therefore, the government could raise more money than any other
agency.

When the war came to our country, the government had the choice of
raising money by taxation or by the sale of bonds. In order to make
the task as easy on the people as possible the government, through its
officers, decided to combine the systems. Through the Internal Revenue
Bureau of the Treasury of the United States the government set about
the collection of taxes imposed by Congress, and designed to raise
money for the winning of the war. And the secretary of the treasury
announced the opening of the first Liberty Loan.

The Liberty Loans are really bond sales. Through them the government
sells to the people bonds, which are promises to pay the money which
the government borrows. These bonds are promises to pay the purchasers
at the end of a certain number of years the amount which they pay for
them. In the meantime they pay semi-annual interest. These bonds are
investments. Buying them is not making a gift to the government. It is,
rather, letting the government make a gift to you.

In order to have money enough to purchase bonds, however, hundreds of
thousands of people have had to make sacrifices during the course of
the Liberty Loans; and it is only when they have made sacrifice, when
they have given up clothes they wanted, or vacations they thought they
needed, or pleasure they would have sought, that they are really doing
something for the country. But so many millions of men and women and
children have bought Liberty Bonds and are continuing to buy Liberty
Bonds that their purchase has become one of the great patriotic
movements of our country in this war.

In the War of the Revolution, Robert Morris, of Philadelphia, loaned
money to General Washington’s army. History has made famous his name
because he had faith enough in his country and love enough for his
country to loan money to her in the hour of her need. In this great war
every man, every woman, every boy, every girl in the United States has
the opportunity of becoming a Robert Morris.

For, although the lowest denomination of a Liberty Bond is fifty
dollars, the government has devised a method by which every one who
has any money at all can help in the war. The treasury has issued War
Thrift Stamps and War Savings Certificates so that any one who has
money at all--no matter how little--may do his share. The stamps may
be bought almost everywhere for twenty-five cents. In January, 1918, a
certificate cost $4.12. In every month which followed it cost one cent
more. But it will bring back to the holder of it in 1923 five dollars.
The stamps may be exchanged for certificates, as soon as the saver has
enough of them, with the odd amount added, to make the purchase.

Since every one in the nation who has twenty-five cents may buy a
Thrift Stamp, it is almost certain that every one in the United States
can help the government win the war by making the purchase. And it is
by the individual efforts that the money will be raised, and the war
won.

  [Illustration: Children selling Thrift Stamps

  The Treasury has issued War Thrift Stamps and War Savings Certificates
  so that any one who has money at all--no matter how little--may do his
  share]


THE RED CROSS

From an auxiliary branch of a great organization the American Red
Cross has become one of the great agencies of the war. Before the
United States entered the conflict, the American Red Cross had been
the great relief agency among the peoples of the stricken districts of
western Europe. Food, clothing, a new chance at life had been given
the stricken. Back of the battle-fields the soldiers, wounded in the
struggles, were cared for. Even in Germany the American Red Cross had
made easier the lot of the prisoners of war. With our entrance into the
war the organization became one of the great factors in our country’s
means of caring for the welfare of our fighters.

The American Red Cross, of which the President of the United States is
honorary chairman, is the means through which volunteer aid is given to
the sick and wounded men of the army and navy, to sufferers in the war
zones, and to the families of men in the service.

There are two classes of Red Cross service, civilian and military. The
civilian relief includes the care and education of destitute children
in the war zone, the care of mutilated soldiers, the care of sick and
wounded soldiers, the relief of the devastated districts of France and
Belgium, aid for prisoners of war and civilians sent back from bondage
in Germany to France and Belgium, and the prevention of tuberculosis.
It also includes care for the families of soldiers and sailors beyond
the aid given by the government. Military relief establishes and
maintains hospitals for sick and wounded soldiers in the American army
in France, and canteens, rest-houses, recreation-huts for American
soldiers and also for the soldiers of the other nations at war with
Germany.

In the equipment of the hospitals and in the other relief work done
by the Red Cross a very great number of special articles, such as
bandages, garments, and other articles requiring skill in the making
were needed. Almost every woman and child in the United States has been
at work since the beginning of the war in making something for the Red
Cross, so that this semi-governmental activity has become one of the
most wide-spread forces in providing comforts and necessaries for our
army and navy, as well as for the relief of conditions in the war zone.


WELFARE WORK

Both in the camps at home and in the trenches abroad the soldier needs
something besides the routine life provided for him by the government.
In order to give him recreation and pleasures, so that his life may be
normal even when he is away from home, several organizations have been
at work since the beginning of the war. The Commission on Training-Camp
Activities, the Young Men’s Christian Association, with its attendant
Young Men’s Hebrew Association, the Knights of Columbus, and the Jewish
Welfare Board have been among the many who have been working to make
the fighting men happier. These organizations have built rest-houses
and recreation-huts for the men. They have given entertainments for
them. They have supplied them with comforts, and have kept up a high
morality among them. The United Service Clubs have also been busy in
providing good lodgings for soldiers and sailors when they have been
out of the camps on leave. The Young Women’s Christian Association has
also done splendid work both for the men in the camps and for their
visiting relatives.

In addition to the large organizations smaller ones are busy all over
the country in aiding the soldiers. Almost every town has some group of
people who are giving service to the men in the camps. In every city
and town through which the troop-trains have passed on their way from
the camps to the harbors where the soldiers would be placed on board
the transports, women have fixed food for the men, and children have
aided them in carrying this food to the stations. Large sums have been
raised to carry on the recreation service in the camps, both here and
in France, and the response of the American people to any request for
the soldiers and sailors has been speedy and inspiring.

The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts of the United States have been
noteworthy in their work for our country. Three hundred and twenty
thousand Boy Scouts aided in the work of selling the bonds of the Third
Liberty Loan and of the sale of War Thrift Stamps. The Girl Scouts have
done all sorts of clerical and special work for the same cause, as well
as for various others. The children of every public school and almost
every private school in the United States have worked in some cause
or another for the winning of the war. With the men and women of the
country they have earned their place on the patriots’ roll.




CHAPTER VIII

THE AMERICAN’S PART


Entering the great war after it had already waged for nearly three
years, the United States learned many of the lessons that experience
had taught to the Allies, and outlined a programme that was designed
to promote speed and efficiency. Every programme that is dependent
upon human action is, of course, imperfect; but the programme of our
country in this war has, at least, given to the citizens of our land
opportunity for service in the prosecution of the war. No man, woman,
or child in the nation need be idle or useless. He has the chance now
of helping his country as he has had in no other time in her history.

  [Illustration: Boys at work in their war garden

  No ... child in the nation need be idle or useless. He has the chance
  now of helping his country as he has had in no other time in her
  history]

Why should the American help America?

There is, to begin with, in the soul of every human being a love of
country that should come next to a love of God. Love of country
is not only next to love of God, but is part of genuine love of God.
No man who loves his God sincerely fails to love his country. Even
those countries which have not been kind or just, or fair to their
peoples, countries where men are not given the chance for freedom or
opportunity, have their patriots. But the United States of America,
more than any other country in the world, has given to her people
liberty, justice, opportunity, freedom. It is, therefore, the grateful
duty of every American to do what he can to keep his country what she
has been.

For those men who are in the army or navy the duty is clear. They are
making the supreme sacrifice in standing ready to give their lives in
the defense of our nation. For those who stay at home the path may not
be as plain, but it is there, and no one should fail to find it and
travel upon it, for it is the road of patriotism, and patriotism is a
divine duty.

The United States, as we have seen, entered the war to uphold those
principles of right which all great Americans, from Washington and
Patrick Henry to Abraham Lincoln, have cherished. For freedom of the
seas, for the safekeeping of the Monroe Doctrine, for the right of
arbitration in international disputes, for the right of small nations
to govern themselves, for the preservation of those free institutions
of democracy which the autocracy of Germany strives to conquer, our
nation took up the burden of conflict. While it is the first war in
which we have sent our troops to foreign soil, it is a war in keeping
with the basic principles of our nationality. It is being fought for
the same freedom for which the thirteen Colonies fought in the War of
the Revolution. It is being fought for the same maritime right for
which the War of 1812 was fought. Both these struggles were, it is
true, against England, who is now our cobelligerent in the war against
Germany. By our winning of those wars the United States helped the
people of England to see that light for which they are now sacrificing
everything. There were men in England, even in the times of the War of
the Revolution and in the War of 1812, who believed America right, and
who proclaimed their belief in the halls of Westminster. Their courage
and our success set beacons on the hills of history for the lighting
of those who followed. The same spirit that inspired our nation in its
beginnings is the spirit that inspires not only ourselves but those
against whom we fought until they, too, are fighting for it now on the
fields of Flanders and France.

It is a war which is being fought for the same basic principles on
which the War of the States was fought in the sixties of the last
century. For while the North fought for the freedom of the slave,
the South fought, not for his continuation in bondage, but for the
rights of the separate States. Both issues were fundamentally right.
The greater--for the freedom of the individual is greater than the
constitutional right of a State--triumphed. But the spirit of both is
American, and part of our reason for entering this war.

Since it is a war in keeping with American traditions, it is the part
of the American, in service or out of it, to keep up the standard of
our country in it.

How shall he do it?

Every man sees his own duty clearest. But there are certain lines of
life in which this duty is so clear that it is easy to mark. One of
these lines is that of the American of foreign birth or parentage, now
a citizen of the United States. Another is that of the families of
officers and soldiers. A third is that of the industrial workers of the
country. The men, women, and children in any one of these zones have
definite standards to uphold. If they fail to do so, they are not less
traitorous than the sentry who falls asleep at his post and lets the
enemy in.

The American of foreign birth or parentage is a citizen of this country
because he or his parents saw that America offered an opportunity which
could not be secured in the old country. He is the recipient of favors
of freedom, liberty, and such wealth as he did not before enjoy. His
allegiance is doubly owed. It is therefore his part to do everything
in his power to prove his gratitude. It is his part to combat all
disloyalty, to uproot all treason, to stand firm for American
principles at home and abroad, to proclaim by word and deed his loyalty
to our country.

Because this is a war for democracy it is the part of every American to
maintain that democracy at home and in deed as well as abroad and in
word. Military organizations have a tendency to create distinctions,
unless the people of the country keep close watch on themselves.
Military discipline must be maintained, but any line drawn between
officer and private must end with discipline and not be carried into
private life. The private in the ranks is as great an American, if he
does his duty, as the general in command; and no one knows it better
than the general. It is not in the army or navy, but in the civilian
families of soldiers and sailors, that the danger lies. Therefore,
it is the part of every member of these to bear in mind constantly
and continuously that every man in the service is equal; that the
commissioned officer is giving no more than the man in the ranks; and
that both are giving up everything else in life for the one thing of
paramount importance, the winning of the war. “No snobbery” is as good
and as great an American watchword as “Give me liberty, or give me
death.” For snobbery is the death of liberty as surely as the will of
a tyrant. The “Junker” class of Prussia is the officer class who look
down upon all others, and who have come to believe the world to have
been made for their rule. We are fighting “Junkerism” in Europe. It is
the American’s part to fight the slightest trace of it at home.

Every war has its home heroes as well as its field heroes. Since this
war is, more than any other, a war of resources, it follows that the
part of labor is more important than it has been in any previous war.
If the working men and women of any one of the great warring nations
should refuse to continue at work, that nation would be defeated
as surely as if the armies had laid down their arms in the field.
American victory is as dependent upon American labor as it is upon
American manhood. And it is with pride that it may be said that
American labor has been found worthy of all American traditions.

The United States has been pre-eminently the nation of the working
man. Its legislation has continuously tended toward the betterment of
his condition. Nowhere else in the world has he enjoyed the lot that
has been his in America. Nowhere else has he the voice, the power, the
future that our nation accords him. And upon him in this war has fallen
the duty of speeding up the war production of the country, a task so
important that those men of draft age engaged in such occupations have
been exempted from military service in order that they may continue at
their work. For the making of munitions is as necessary as the firing
of guns.

It has become the duty of American labor to keep at the allotted tasks.
No one must shirk. No one must fail. No one must delay. No matter how
trivial the task may seem in the sum of the war work, it may be the one
whose lack of doing may be the breach in the wall through which the
enemy may enter.

  “For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost.
   For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost.
   For the want of a horse, the rider was lost.
   For the want of the rider, the message was lost.
   For the want of the message, the battle was lost.
   For the loss of the battle, the kingdom was lost.
   All for the want of the nail of a shoe.”

And the maker of the horseshoe was one of the factors of his country’s
defeat!

The civilian’s part in this war has been outlined by the President of
the United States in his proclamation of the 16th of April, 1917:

  [Illustration: The launching of the U. S. S. _Accoma_

  Scarcely a minute after this 3,500-ton wooden cargo-ship had been
  launched the keel of another ship was swung into place]

“These, then, are the things we must do and do well besides
fighting--the things without which mere fighting would be fruitless; we
must supply abundant food for ourselves, our armies, and our seamen,
not only, but also for a large part of the nations with whom we have
common cause, in whose support and by whose side we are fighting. We
must supply ships by the hundreds out of our shipyards to carry to the
other side of the sea, submarines or no submarines, what will every day
be needed there, and abundant materials out of our fields and our mines
and our factories with which not only to cloak and equip our own forces
on land and sea, but also to clothe and support our people for whom the
gallant fellows under arms can no longer work; to help clothe and equip
the armies with which we are co-operating in Europe and to keep the
looms and manufactories there in raw materials; coal to keep the fires
going in the ships at sea and in the furnaces of hundreds of factories
across the sea; steel out of which to make arms and ammunition both
here and there; rails for worn-out railways back of the fighting
fronts; locomotives and rolling-stock to take the places of those every
day going to pieces; mules, horses, cattle, for labor and for military
service; everything with which the people in England, France, Italy,
and Russia have normally supplied themselves, but cannot now afford
the men, the materials, or the machinery to make.”

America is the factory of the world. The American who stays at home is
the worker in the factory, and it is his part to do his work so well
that the man who fights overseas for the same cause may hold his hand
in the essential brotherhood of equal service.




CHAPTER IX

THE UNITED STATES AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM


In the soul of every human being, no matter how clogged it be by
traditions, lives the desire for freedom. It is this desire, this spark
of fire, which has peopled the continent of America. For, long before
the colonies revolted and established a republic the great territory
which has become the United States beckoned to the peoples of the Old
World a welcome to a land which would give them opportunity for the
freedom they sought. The whole history of the American colonies is
a history of the search of mankind for individual freedom in which
to work out his ideals without governmental interference. Political
refugees, religious refugees dared the dangers of the ocean to come to
the new land that they might live and worship as their souls urged them.

The settlement of Massachusetts was made by the Puritans of England
who were seeking a refuge from the oppression they had suffered in
England on account of their religious beliefs and practices. They
braved the stormy northern Atlantic to come to the wilderness. They
braved the Indians to stay. They established their homes, their
schools, their meeting-houses, their government, and dwelt according
to the dictates of their consciences in that freedom which they had
desired.

No less for freedom did William Penn and his colony of Quakers come to
the western hemisphere. They sought a place where they would be given a
chance to worship God according to their belief. A peaceful sect, they
sought peace, and they brought into the new country standards of living
that set their impress upon the infant nation. Liberal to others as
they desired liberality for themselves, they were destined to sow seeds
of thought that were to be harvested in the effects of the Constitution
of the republic, when it was formulated.

The Huguenots in the Carolinas, fleeing religious persecution, found
haven. Lord Baltimore established the Maryland colony of English
Catholics who could not practise their religion in the old country.
And where the motive for the establishment of the colony was not in
itself purely a question of finding a place of religious freedom, the
interrelationship of the colonies became so close that in time the
spirit of religious freedom became warp of the fabric of the country
that was to be the American nation.

Political freedom was promoted, in the beginning, by the distance of
the colonies from Europe. France, Spain, and England were too far
away, and ocean travel too hazardous, to make the bond between the
mother countries and the colonies tight. Men and women who had been
venturesome enough to cross the seas were not of the sort who would be
held for long by mere traditions of allegiance to old lands. Little by
little the people of the colonies gained larger measures of political
freedom until the time arrived when the unjust tax imposed by England
aroused them to revolt. The Boston Tea Party expressed the spirit of
America. The Declaration of Independence voiced America’s aspiration
and America’s intention. The War of the Revolution settled the right
of Americans to their own government. The Constitution of the United
States guaranteed to Americans their rights to the enjoyment of that
freedom which had been the mainspring of the foundation of the nation.

Gradually the fact that this was a country where men could have a share
in the government, could speak their minds, could worship God in their
own way, could work out their ideals and ambitions without governmental
interference as long as these in no way conflicted with the interests
of law and order, went over the earth. It found its way into those
countries of Europe where men were eager for its coming. The English,
after the War of 1812, when the United States definitely established
our standing as a nation, were among the first to come as settlers. And
from other western countries of Europe came other settlers, led by the
knowledge that here could they enjoy individual freedom.

To America, as to the Promised Land, flocked the Irish. Restless
under the English yoke, denied economic, political, religious, and
educational liberty by a government of an alien neighbor, the Irish
people turned westward. The famine and the political revolution of 1848
sent them out from Ireland by the tens of thousands. To our land they
brought a passionate yearning for freedom and a passionate gratitude
to the country which opened it to them; and because they were, as a
people, gifted with the power of expressing their emotions, they spread
the fame of the United States broadcast over the world as a haven for
those who sought liberty.

After them came the Germans, led by the political refugees of that
country who had incurred the enmity of Prussia in the Revolution of
1848, which had striven to bring some measure of freedom to the German
people. Denied it at home, hundreds of thousands of Germans came to
America to find liberty in their individual lives, to find opportunity.
It is these Germans and their descendants who, understanding what
the Prussian yoke means, have become among the best of our American
citizens. Knowing what they escaped, they know what America fights
against now.

The third great movement of a people to the United States has been
the westward coming of the Jews. In this country, as in no other,
they possessed full religious freedom, and to this country they have
flocked from every land of Europe where they had huddled, unwelcome,
for centuries. Here they have found no opposition to their faith. Here
they have had full chance to worship as they would. For the first time
in thousands of years the Jew could build his temple unhindered. For
the first time since the Roman had gone into Palestine the Jew was a
citizen of the land in which he dwelt.

Then came the peoples of eastern Europe, peoples of the vast empire
that is called Austria-Hungary for lack of a better name. Ruled by a
man not of their race, a man of one of the oldest, most corrupt, and
autocratic of the reigning families of Europe, they were struggling
upward toward freedom when the growing commercial dominion of the
United States took the word to them of our nation’s beacon. To us they
have literally surged. Among us they have found the freedom denied
their peoples at home.

Another people sought the United States to attain freedom. The Poles,
oppressed on one side by Germany, on another by Austria, and on the
third by the autocratic government of Russia under the Czars, heard
the tale of the land of liberty, and set out for our shores in great
hordes. So many have they come that Chicago is the second largest
Polish city in the world, having almost as many Poles as Warsaw; and
Milwaukee, Buffalo, and other American cities attest the surging of the
Pole toward a land of liberty.

In fact, there has been no country in Europe where people were
dissatisfied with their government that has not sent its people to the
United States. That France has sent the least number in proportion to
her population has been due largely to the fact that the people of
France had worked out for themselves a genuine democracy that satisfied
the souls of her sons and daughters.

Through the hundred and forty-one years that had elapsed between the
calling of the Continental Congress and the entrance of the United
States into war against Germany this nation had been solidifying that
right of individual freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. The war
between North and South had been fought in defense of the right of a
human being to freedom as against the right of a State to separate
itself from the national government. The latter issue was lost, not
because it was wrong, but because it was not as vitally important in
the history of civilization as the former. For that men and women and
children should be held in bondage violated the spirit of America;
and the bondage had to be broken. “No government,” as Abraham
Lincoln said, “can exist half-slave and half-free.”

  [Illustration: An immigrant family qualified to enter the United
  States

  There has been no country in Europe where people were dissatisfied
  with their government that has not sent its people to the United
  States]

Some one has called America the melting-pot of the nations. If it is,
the fire that fuses the nationalities which have come to our land has
been the fire of freedom.

That is why America’s entrance into the world war is so much more
vitally significant than a mere attack in defense of certain violations
of international law. It is a defense of the principle of individual
freedom. Were the United States not to oppose a force that threatened
the freedom of the world, we would not be worthy of the trust which
the peoples of other lands have reposed in us. The Irish, the Germans,
the Jews, the Slavs who came to America would eventually have come in
vain. For Germany threatens the liberty of all peoples, if she wins to
victory in Europe. Germany stands for all those ideas of government
from which these peoples fled. Germany stands for the suppression of
the individual as a political unit. Germany stands for might. Against
all that we have always fought. If we failed to fight now, we would
be but deferring the issue. And so to-day the United States sends our
soldiers to France and our sailors out on the seas in defense of that
right of mankind which is God’s gift, no matter how men have tried to
take it from him, the right of the freedom of the individual to live
his life as he sees best, according only to the dictates of order, of
moral integrity, of justice, and of righteousness.




CHAPTER X

THE UNITED STATES AND INTERNATIONAL PEACE


International, lasting peace is the third great ideal sought by the
Republic of the United States of America, and it is for the enforcement
of that kind of peace that the United States is fighting. For, unless
such peace is assured by a decisive victory, the menace of German
imperialism will so overshadow the world that all civilization will be
flung back into one long effort to keep armed to repel the invader.

Although other nations have struggled toward a standard of
international and permanent peace, the United States was one of the
first great nations to put the theory into practice. One of the first
instances of this practice came at the close of the war between the
States, when the question of the _Alabama_ Claims arose.

During the war the Confederate States had caused to be built in
English ports, with the knowledge of the British Government, cruisers
to damage Federal commerce on the high seas. The cruiser _Alabama_ was
most active of these, and from its prominence gave name to the claim
which the United States brought against Great Britain for the offense
against international law, particularly since the independence of the
Confederate States had not been recognized. Great Britain had paid no
attention to American remonstrance during the war, but at its close
requested settlement of the difficulty.

The United States was equipped for war, with a victorious army at
command, and with a record of two victorious wars over England. It
was a chance to launch another, had our nation been inclined toward
militarism. Instead, our country did its part in appointing members of
a joint high commission, of five British and five American statesmen,
who met in Washington in 1871 and adjusted the difficulty. These
commissioners made a treaty, known as the Treaty of Washington, by
which it was agreed that the claims of either nation against the
other should be submitted to a board of arbitration to be appointed
by friendly nations. In 1872 this board met at Geneva, Switzerland,
and decided the claims in favor of the United States. Great Britain
paid fifteen million five hundred thousand dollars for the damage done
by the cruisers built in her ports; but even more important was the
precedent established by two great nations.

Through a period in which the world was singularly free from great wars
the peace ideal grew among those countries where the democratic form
of government was progressing. The other nations, striving to maintain
that elusive standard of political and trade domination known as the
balance of power, juggled with the peace idea, but from a different
point of view. And it was, strangely enough, the Czar of Russia who
proposed the establishment of an international court for the settling
of international disputes. His idea and that of the nations who
accepted the plan was to keep peace by a settlement of the causes of
war, and also to reduce the military and naval armaments of the great
Powers. He also brought forward the idea that, if war should come, the
conditions of warfare should be made less terrible for the men who were
fighting. He invited the delegates of the nations of the world to a
conference at The Hague, in the Netherlands, in May, 1899.

The first conference promoted--to all appearances--a general good
feeling, but did not formulate actual rules. The second, called by the
Czar in 1907, at the request of the government of the United States,
and extending from June to October of that year, promulgated certain
rules that were regarded until the beginning of the war by Germany in
1914 as those which would hold all civilized nations.

The articles of this conference, known as The Hague Conventions,
provided for:

I.--The pacific settling of international disputes;

II.--The recovery of debts contracted;

III.--Rules for the opening of hostilities;

IV.--Laws and customs of war on land;

V.--Rights and duties of neutral states and individuals in warfare on
land;

VI.--Treatment of enemy’s merchant ships at the opening of hostilities;

VII.--Transformation of merchant ships into war vessels;

VIII.--Placing of submarine mines;

IX.--Bombardment of undefended towns by naval forces;

X.--Adoption of humane standards authorized by the Geneva Convention to
maritime warfare;

XI.--Restrictions on right of capture in maritime war;

XII.--Establishment of an international prize court;

XIII.--Rights and duties of neutral states in maritime war.

In addition to the adoption of these thirteen articles, which were
designed to keep peace or to make war less terrible, if it came, the
conference established a permanent court of arbitration which has had
its place at The Hague, and which is known as The Hague Tribunal. This
court is really a number of judges from whom some are selected to try
cases of international dispute. It is noteworthy that the first case
laid before The Hague Tribunal for settlement was the Pius Fund matter
between the United States and Mexico. The government of the United
States took the dispute to The Hague, the first time in history when a
great nation had appealed to an international court for settlement of a
claim against a small nation.

Since The Hague Conference the United States has concluded about thirty
peace treaties with as many nations. They are all modelled on one
general idea which is expressed in the opening article of each in this
way:

“The high contracting parties agree that all disputes between them, of
every nature whatsoever, shall, when diplomatic methods of adjustment
have failed, be referred for investigation and report to a permanent
international commission to be constituted” (by the contracting
parties) “... and agree not to declare war nor to begin hostilities
during such investigation and before the report be submitted.”

Thirty-five nations had accepted this plan “in principle” before
Germany flung war upon the world, and thirty treaties had been signed.
France, Russia, Great Britain, and Italy had signed the treaties.
Germany professed approval of the plan, but avoided all definite
arrangements, her attitude apparently growing out of her dislike of
arbitration.

This opposition to arbitration on Germany’s part was due to the fact
that for many years she was actually preparing for war, and believed
that her best chance of winning it was in the unpreparedness of the
nations against which she intended to wage it. The utterances of her
statesmen, philosophers, and editors revealed the German official
attitude of mind. There can be no doubt but that Germany desired to
keep the world lulled in a false security until she had made ready to
strike the blow against world peace. Nothing else explains her refusal
to bind herself with the terms that other nations accepted in the hope
that wars were becoming things of the past.

Just before the United States was forced into the breaking off of
diplomatic relations with Germany the President of the country went
before the Senate to set forth the principles which should govern
our nation in the making of any peace with which we would associate
ourselves. The principles which he set forth were:

I.--An equality of rights between nations, to be based on justice and
not on the old principle of balance of power;

II.--Recognition of the principle that governments derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed;

III.--The right of all great peoples to have a direct outlet to the
sea, either by territorial acquisition or by neutralization;

IV.--The freedom of the seas;

V.--The limitations of armaments on land and sea;

VI.--Refusal to permit any nation to extend its policy over any other
nation or people;

VII.--A concert of nations to guarantee peace and the rights of all
nations, no entangling alliances creating a competition for power, but
a league for the enforcement of international peace.

“These are American principles, American policies,” the President
stated. “They are also the principles of forward-looking men and women
everywhere, of every modern nation, and of every enlightened community.”

To the very last, until the action of Germany in restricting the
freedom of the seas for which the United States had fought and won a
war in days when she was ill-prepared for any conflict, our country had
stood out for peace. Only when our vital rights were threatened, our
vital principles violated, did war come. And, when it came the United
States entered into the conflict, not in hot passion, but with the
high purpose of establishing a real peace that cannot be broken by any
one vandal nation.

The kind of peace which is the ideal of the United States, and the one
toward which we are now fighting, is not to be the sort which may be
patched up over a council-table for a brief space. There is only one
way of curing a cancer of the human body. It must be cut out. And so it
is with the world. The only way to cure the world of war is to cut out
the cancer of militarism. The only way to cut it out is to defeat the
armies of militarism.

The United States and the Allies are not fighting to impose on Germany
and her fellow fighters any particular form of government; but they are
fighting to defeat that form of government which has precipitated the
war, the so-called Junker policy of the German Empire. The Junker, who
is a member of the Prussian nobility and a man devoted to militarism,
has been the instrument of war, forcing it on the world that Germany,
which for him means only a certain small class of rulers in Prussia
headed by the Kaiser, shall be rich and powerful over all the earth.
It is to end his reign upon earth that hundreds of thousands of men
are dying on the fields of France and Flanders. It is to end that
policy of Germany which aims to keep men always at war that we are
warring. For, if Germany is not totally defeated, every country in the
world will have to build up a military machine of the same kind as
Germany’s in order to be ready to fight her when she makes up her mind
to invade their territories; and no one will know when she might do
that. The policy of Germany will threaten every democracy in the world;
for democracies cannot exist while military establishments continue.
Nothing but a total, annihilating defeat of Germany in this war will
make the world “safe for democracy” and sure for peace.

When the war is won the United States will, it is sure, insist upon
a just peace that will insure these ideals, a peace that will make
impossible another such outrage as the invasion of Belgium, another
_Lusitania_ outrage, another defiance of all civilized standards, a
peace that will remove militarism, make free the seas, and give to the
individual that freedom that has made the United States the haven of
the whole world.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76636 ***