To-day, physicians and surgeons count the cancer man's deadliest enemy.
Every year this baffling disease takes large and larger toll of human
life. From time to time experts come together to plan its limitation,
but meanwhile the terrible disease increases. Addressing a company of
experts recently, a great physician exclaimed: "Even if we can stop its
growth by radium, it still remains for us to get rid of the growth
itself. There seems to be no way to lift the evil cells out save through
the knife, after which nature must heal the wound. Science knows no
other way." Plainly, no magic can be invoked. No miracle assists the
surgeon. His one recourse is to the knife, and after that the healing
forces of nature.
Let us confess that the knife has a large place in the extermination of
social diseases. Militarism is a cancer on the German body-politic, just
as slavery was once a cancer fastened on the fair body of the great
South. That disease had fastened itself upon the South many years before
the Civil War. Like a cancer, it spread its roots throughout the whole
social and economic structure of the Southern States. It poisoned trade.
Its virus was in the body of law. It destroyed kindness and sympathy for
the weak. Slavery debased the poor white working-man. It made the white
fathers of mulatto children so cruel that they sold their own flesh and
blood. Overseers became brutes. Slave drivers stood up and bid upon
their own children in the auction markets. Slowly the disease spread.
Men became alarmed. They tried everything excepting the knife held in
the hand of war surgeons. Clay recognized the cancer in the body
politic. He proposed compromise as a poultice. Garrison and Phillips
proposed the amputation of the diseased limb. John Brown tried to put
sulphuric acid upon the sore spots and eat it out through the flames of
insurrection. Lincoln knew that it was a case of life or death. The
Republic could not endure half slave and half free. All measures failed.
Finally the god of war went forth and lifted a knife heated red hot and
cut the foul cancer out of the body and saved the fair South. When many
years had passed nature healed the wound and saved the life of the
Republic.
Germany, Austria and Turkey to-day are patients in a world hospital. It
is plain that they are stricken with death. The foul cancer of
militarism has fastened itself upon Germany. The cancer of autocracy is
eating into the vitals of Austria. The cancer of polygamy is enmeshed in
the life of Turkey. Of late the disease has been spreading. Now these
surgeons, named Foch, Haig and Pershing, have been anointed by the
ointment of war black and sulphurous, and, lifting their scalpel, these
men have been ordained to cut out the foul growth from the body-politic
of Germany. Perchance there is still enough vital force left therein to
heal the wound after the disease has been removed. Meanwhile, the sick
man of Turkey struggles. The patient hates the knife. The diseased body
will not have the only instrument that holds possible cure, and yet,
despite all his struggle, the disease must come out. Slowly the surgical
process goes on. One root at Verdun was cut, and now another is being
sundered in the West. Much blood flows, but the blood is black and foul.
Every cell in the German body-politic seems to be diseased. Medicines
must be found. The stimulants of sound ethics and morals must be
invoked--after that it is a question of the recuperative forces of
intellect and conscience in the German people. These forces alone can
heal the wound left after the foul cancer has been cut away. To-day, men
with a large mind, blessed with magnanimity, kindness and good-will must
stay their hearts upon history, that shows us that in the past in our
own country slavery was a cancer cut out by the surgeons of war, and
that after a long time the great South recovered its health, its beauty
and its usefulness.