Because England has been fighting our battle for two and a half years,
we are now not only fighting our own battle, but trying to repay in
part our immeasurable debt to the motherland. Great Britain has been
the mother of many republics; all the harvest of our liberty came from
seed corn gathered in England's harvest fields. Among Pilgrim Fathers
who founded New England were men educated in Cambridge. We had our
revolt against the autocracy of George the Third from the inspirations
of Oliver Cromwell, John Pym and John Hampden. Boston owes a great debt
to Sir Harry Vane, whose statue stands at the entrance of her Public
Library. We borrowed our freedom of the press from John Milton's noble
argument. Our Declaration and our Constitution are nothing other than
the restatement, in legal form, of the noble visions that pursued the
soul of John Milton all his life long.
And now that England is steadily winning and gaining six battles and
attacks out of seven, during the fourth year of the war, the time has
come for the American people and government to ask themselves this
question,--Shall we not do in the first year of our war the things
that England did in the third year and the fourth?--thus assuring
our winning six times out of seven. At the beginning of this war,
Britain's ammunition was provided by three government factories and a
few auxiliary firms. "The first 100,000 men," sneered at by the Kaiser
as "Kitchener's contemptible little army," were pounded by fifty German
shells for every one shell with which they could reply. Now England has
over 5,000 factories turning out munitions. Her capacity for producing
high explosives in October, 1917, was twenty-five times as great as
in the autumn of 1915, while the expense is one-third. She is now
producing 25,000 tons of projectiles every week, and each new arsenal
factory is built with the thought of turning them over to productive
industrial companies when the war is over. Her cannons are roaring upon
every front in Europe, as well as in the Balkans, in Palestine, in
Persia and in Africa.
She now has 400,000 automobile trucks, or lorries, in France and
Belgium, and will turn out 20,000 airplanes during the next year. Her
fleet has increased from 136,000 sailors to 400,000; and at last,
thanks to the deep-sea bomb, for every slow and old ship Germany
sinks, she has to lose a far more costly submarine. To-day England has
4,000,000 men on six fronts and three continents. She has not simply
mobilized her army, but mobilized the entire nation, and is only
beginning to exert her full power.
The lesson for us, from England's experience, is this: that every
factory in the United States, now turning out luxuries, should be
taken over by the government to turn out munitions; that every loom
and lathe, forge and hammer, every mine and forest and shipyard should
be dedicated to this one task--of winning this war for humanity and
liberty. History will doubtless say that during the first two and a
half years of this war America was like the priest and the Levite who
passed by on the other side, leaving Belgium like the wounded man
lying among thieves, while England was the Good Samaritan, glorious
forever through her service, self-sacrifice and loyalty to her written
pledges. We owe Great Britain and her colonies a debt of service
because she placed her army and her navy between us and our enemy and
preserved us. When, therefore, an occasional pro-German, who does not
dare defend the Kaiser, stands on the street, and in his harangue
vilifies Great Britain, we should remember that the Allied cause has
three armies, Haig's, Petain's and Pershing's. Whoever vilifies one
of the hosts is the enemy of all three. When General Grant found one
of his aids chuckling over the news of a defeat of Sheridan, Grant
court-martialed the man, found him guilty, shot him at daybreak,--an
example to be commended with reference to any man who vilifies Great
Britain or France with his lips or pen. In this crisis there are no
German-Americans,--there are only Americans and traitors. The first
duty of our government is to defend our transports, our soldiers and
sailors, from all spies, American with their lips, but with hearts full
of hatred for our Allies and our country.