same basis. Unless the language is deliberately used to deceive,
this means that we are to restore to our brutal enemy the colonies
taken by our allies while they were defending us from this enemy. The
proposition is probably meaningless. If it is not, it is monstrous.
Point six deals with Russia. It probably means nothing, but if it means
anything, it provides that America shall share on equal terms with
other nations, including Germany, Austria, and Turkey, in giving Russia
assistance. The whole proposition would not be particularly out of
place in a college sophomore’s exercise in rhetoric.
Point seven deals with Belgium and is entirely proper and commonplace.
Point eight deals with Alsace-Lorraine and is couched in language
which betrays Mr. Wilson’s besetting sin--his inability to speak in
a straightforward manner. He may mean that Alsace and Lorraine must
be restored to France, in which case he is right. He may mean that a
plebiscite must be held, in which case he is playing Germany’s evil
game.
Point nine deals with Italy, and is right.
Point ten deals with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and is so foolish
that even President Wilson has since abandoned it.
Point eleven proposes that we, together with other nations, including
apparently Germany, Austria, and Hungary, shall guarantee justice in
the Balkan Peninsula. As this would also guarantee our being from
time to time engaged in war over matters in which we had no interest
whatever, it is worth while inquiring whether President Wilson proposes
that we wage these wars with the national constabulary to which he
desired to reduce our armed forces.
Point twelve proposes to perpetuate the infamy of Turkish rule in
Europe, and as a sop to the conscience of humanity proposes to give the
subject races autonomy, a slippery word which in a case like this is
useful only for rhetorical purposes.
Point thirteen proposes an independent Poland, which is right; and then
proposes that we guarantee its integrity in the event of future war,
which is preposterous unless we intend to become a military nation more
fit for overseas warfare than Germany is at present.
Point fourteen proposes a general association of nations to guarantee
to great and small states alike political independence and territorial
integrity. It is dishonorable to make this proposition so long as
President Wilson continues to act as he is now acting in Haiti and
San Domingo. In its essence Mr. Wilson’s proposition for a league of
nations seems to be akin to the holy alliance of the nations of Europe
a century ago, which worked such mischief that the Monroe Doctrine was
called into being especially to combat it. If it is designed to do away
with nationalism, it will work nothing but mischief. If it is devised
in sane fashion as an addition to nationalism and as an addition to
preparing our own strength for our own defense, it may do a small
amount of good; but it will certainly accomplish nothing if more than a
moderate amount is attempted and probably the best first step would be
to make the existing league of the Allies a going concern.
As to the supplementary points or proposals, the four advanced or laid
down in February were sound moral aphorisms of no value save as they
may be defined in each particular case.
But the supplementary five proposals set forth by President Wilson
last September were, on the whole, mischievous and were capable of a
construction that would make them ruinous in their essence. They set
forth the doctrine that there must be no discrimination between our
friends and our enemies and no special economic or political alliances
among friendly nations, but uniform treatment of all the league of
nations; the said league, therefore, to include Germany, Austria,
Turkey, and Russia upon a footing of equality of our allies. Either
the words used mean nothing or they mean that we are to enter a league
in which we make-believe that our deadly enemies, stained with every
kind of brutality and treachery, are as worthy of friendship as the
Allies who have fought our battles for four years. No wonder that the
proposal is enthusiastically applauded by Germany, Austria, and Turkey
and by all our own pro-Germans and pacifists and Germanized Socialists
and anti-American internationalists. It is the kind of proposition
made by cold-blooded men who at least care nothing for the sufferings
of others. It is eagerly championed by foolish and hysterical
sentimentalists. It is accepted and used for sinister purposes by
powerful and cynical wrongdoers. When the President was making this
proposition and during the subsequent month Germany was committing
inhuman murders of the people on the Ticonderoga and Leinster at
sea, and on shore was committing every species of murder, rape,
enslavement, plunder, and outrage as her armies withdrew from France
and Belgium.
President Wilson’s announcement was a notice to the malefactors that
they would not be punished for the murders. Let us treat the league of
nations only as an addition to, and not as a substitute for, thorough
preparedness and intense nationalism on our part. Let none of the
present international criminals be admitted until a sufficient number
of years has passed to make us sure it has repented. Make conduct the
test of admission to the league. In every crisis judge each nation by
its conduct. Therefore, at the present time let us stand by our friends
and against our enemies.
FOURTEEN SCRAPS OF PAPER
OCTOBER 31, 1918
In my article yesterday I discussed Mr. Wilson’s fourteen peace points
which had been accepted by Germany. After the article was sent in, Mr.
Wilson explained one of the points by stating that it meant exactly the
opposite of what it said. A New York paper has asked for the election
of a Congress that shall see eye to eye with Mr. Wilson. But only a
Congress of whirling dervishes could see eye to eye with Mr. Wilson for
more than twenty-four hours at a time.
When Germany broke her treaty with Belgium, the German Chancellor
called it a scrap of paper. Any individual who proposes a treaty which
plainly means one thing, and then, as soon as he finds it disagreeable
to adhere to that obvious meaning, instantly interprets it as meaning
exactly the opposite, is treating it as a scrap of paper. Mr. Wilson’s
recent interpretation of what he meant in the point about economic
barriers makes all the fourteen points scraps of paper unworthy of
serious discussion by anybody, because no human being is supposed
to say what any one of them means or to do more than guess whether
to-morrow Mr. Wilson will not interpret each and all of them in a sense
exactly the opposite to their meaning.
Mr. Wilson’s language in the point in question was that he intended
the removal “of all economic barriers and the establishment of an
equality of trade conditions among all the nations.” By no honest
construction of language can this be held to mean anything except that
this Nation, for example, could have no tariff of its own, but must
live under exactly the same tariff, or no tariff, conditions with all
other nations. But Mr. Wilson now notifies a Democratic Senator that he
did not mean any “restriction upon the free determination by any nation
of its own economic policy.” If he meant this, why did he not say
it? Why did he say the exact opposite? His first statement is wholly
incompatible with the interpretation he now puts on it. If anybody in
private life entered into a contract in such manner and then sought
to repudiate it by interpreting it in such manner, there is not a
court in Christendom that would not adjudge him guilty of having used
language with deliberate intent to deceive.
Nor is this all. In his new interpretation of what he did not
originally mean, the President now says that he proposes to prevent
any nation, including the United States, from using its tariff to
discriminate in favor of friendly nations and against hostile nations.
This is what he now says and what he now means, but, of course,
to-morrow he may say that in this new interpretation he again meant
exactly the opposite of what he says. However this may be for the
future, President Wilson at this moment says, for instance, we ought
to abandon reciprocity treaties; that we ought to refuse to make such
treaties with our friends, such as Cuba and Brazil, and ought to punish
these friends by treating them on an exact equality with our embittered
and malevolent enemy, Germany. I hold this to be thoroughly mischievous
doctrine.
The great scientist, Huxley, who loved truth and abhorred falsehood,
said that “the primary condition of honest literature is to leave the
reader in no doubt as to the author’s meaning.” Evidently this primary
condition is not fulfilled by Mr. Wilson’s fourteen points. They should
now be treated as scraps of paper and put where they belong, in the
scrap-basket.
THE TURKS SURRENDER UNCONDITIONALLY
NOVEMBER 3, 1918
The British have beaten Turkey to her knees and she has surrendered
unconditionally. America has no share in the honor of what has been
done. President Wilson, although we were at war with Germany, has
refused to aid our allies against Turkey and has preserved the same
cold neutrality between the Armenians and their Turkish butchers that
he formerly did between the Belgians and their German oppressors.
Turkey had inflicted inhuman wrongs on the subject peoples and had
infringed our own treaty rights, but President Wilson refused to go to
war with her. Yet with our navy at the very outbreak of hostilities
and then with a considerable and constantly growing army, if we had
been willing we could have materially aided the British and French. In
such event Constantinople would doubtless have been taken long ago.
As it is, thanks to President Wilson, we Americans can only look on
and rejoice that others did better than our rulers let us do. We have
had no hand in the freeing of Palestine, Syria, and Armenia. Under the
great law of service and sacrifice it is the British and French alone
who have the moral right to determine the fate of Turkey. They, and
especially the British, have poured out their blood freely, and now,
after the victory has been gained, expenditure of ink on our part
is of mighty small consequence in comparison. I earnestly hope that
permanent justice will be done by expelling the Turk from Europe and
making all Armenia independent. But we have lost the right to insist on
these points.
The beginning of the end came when, two or three weeks ago, Bulgaria
was forced to surrender unconditionally. Here again, thanks to
President Wilson, America had no part in the honor and credit of the
vital triumph. Our Government was still neutral about Bulgaria, still
too proud to fight either Turkey or Bulgaria, still hoping for peace
without victory over them.
Now Turkey has surrendered and Austria has broken up. In the case of
Austria, after ten months’ unpardonable delay, we did finally go to
war, and we have a very small share in the great glory won by Italy and
the other Allies.
The greatest contest was on the western front, and here the hundreds
of thousands of American troops engaged under Foch and Pershing have
shown such extraordinary gallantry and efficiency that we are all
forever their debtors. Nearly a month ago President Wilson entered
into negotiations with Germany which, if continued along the line
he started, might have caused disaster. Fortunately there was such
an outburst of protest in the country that our allies took part and
President Wilson himself took warning. President Wilson may still
serve as a channel of communication. But General Foch will be the
real master of the situation. The men with guns and not the men with
fountain pens will dictate the terms.
PEACE
NOVEMBER 12, 1918
Four years and a quarter have passed since Germany, by the invasion
of Belgium, began the World War and made it at the same time a war of
cynical treachery and of bestiality and of inhuman wrongdoing. Almost
from the beginning our governmental authorities were well informed
of the organized brutality with which it was waged and of the fact
that the Kaiser and the leading soldiers, politicians, and commercial
magnates of Germany had deliberately plunged the world into war because
they expected to profit by conquest, while the Socialist Party aided
and abetted them in the hope of sharing some of the profit.
The rest of us ordinary Americans were successfully hoodwinked because
the facts were concealed from us. But gradually the truth leaked
through to us. First we learned that the stories of the atrocities were
true. Then, although not until much later, we found out that there was
ample proof that Germany had brought on the war to gratify her greed
for gold and her arrogant and conscienceless lust for world domination.
Finally we were permitted to learn that Germany intended to strike us
down as soon as she had made the free nations her victims. Now our
troops have played a manful part, a part not only heroic and efficient,
but also of decisive consequence in the final terrible struggle.
It is not pleasant to think that the two first crushing blows in
bringing about the end, the overthrow of Bulgaria and the overthrow of
Turkey, were due in no way to us, but solely to our allies, England
and France. We never made war on either offending nation; we remained
neutral, and this exhibition of feeble diplomacy on our part made us
onlookers instead of partakers of the triumph. But with Austria, after
much hesitation and wabbling, we did finally go to war, and, although
our part was very small, we have a modest right to share the general
satisfaction over the victory. In the case of Germany, however, we
played a really great part, and although until the very end we were
unable to put on the fighting line any tanks or field guns or battle
planes, and relatively only a small number of machine guns and bombing
and observation planes, our soldiers themselves were probably on the
average the finest troops who fought in Europe.
And now the German imperial military and capitalistic authority has
been beaten to its knees and forced to accept all the terms the Allies
have imposed upon it. The able and wicked men who thought to wade
through a sea of blood to world domination must now bow their heads
before the outside peoples whom they have so cruelly wronged and face
the sullen distrust and hostility of their own people, whom they misled
by promising them a share in the profits of successful guilt. Their
doom has come upon them.
A little over a month ago the Administration embarked upon a career
of note-writing with Germany, which, if unchecked, might have meant a
peace of practical profit to Germany. But the feeling of the American
people, especially in the West, showed itself in such direct and
straightforward fashion that this effort was soon abandoned. Moreover,
at the recent election, the American people, with the issue squarely
before them, declared that they were the masters of their public
servants and not rubber stamps, and that this was the people’s war
and not the war of any one man or any one party, and that loyalty to
ourselves and our allies stood ahead of adherence to any man. Germany
has been beaten down abroad and at home. The pro-Germans and the
pacifists and the defeatists and the Germanized Socialists, and all the
crew who stand for any form of either Bolshevism or Kaiserism, have
been warned that they shall not betray this Nation.
SACRIFICE ON COLD ALTARS
NOVEMBER 13, 1918
A friend, a California woman, writes me that there is staying with
her a widow whose only son has been in the navy and has just died of
influenza, and that the mother said:
I gave my boy proudly to my country. I never held him back, even in my
heart. But if only he had died with a gun in his hand--a little glory
for him and a thought for me that my sacrifice had not been useless.
My correspondent continues:
There must be so many mothers who feel that they have laid their
sacrifice on cold altars. You have written much that will comfort the
mothers whose sons have paid with their bodies in battle. Isn’t there
something you can say to help these other mothers?
I felt a real pang when I received this letter, because the thought
suggested had been in my mind, and yet I had failed to express it. It
had happened that my own sons and nephews and young cousins and their
close friends were where death or wounds came to them on the field of
action. For example, on the day I received this letter we also got news
that the closest school and college and army friend of my son, Quentin,
who was killed, had himself just been killed. He was a man who had been
promoted for a series of hazardous and successful battles with German
airmen. He was as gentle and clean and lovable as a girl, yet terrible
in his battle, and no more high and fearless soul ever fronted death
joyously in the high heavens. My mind had, because of facts like this,
turned toward the deaths of the men on the firing line; and I regret
that I did not make it evident as I meant to make it, and but for this
oversight would have made it, that all who have given their lives
or the lives dearest to them in this war stand on an exact level of
service and sacrifice and honor and glory.
The men who have died of pneumonia or fever in the hospitals, the men
who have been killed in accidents on the airplane training fields are
as much heroes as those who were killed at the front, and their shining
souls shall hereafter light up all to a clearer and greater view of the
duties of life. The war is over now. The time of frightful losses among
the men at the front and of heartbreaking anxiety for their mothers
and wives, their sisters and sweethearts at home has passed. No great
triumph is ever won save by the payment of the necessary cost. All of
us who have stayed at home and all the others who have returned safe
will, as long as life shall last, think of the men who died as having
purchased for us and for our children’s children, as long as this
country shall last, a heritage so precious that even their precious
blood was not too great a price to pay. Whether they fell in battle or
how they died matters not at all, and it matters not what they were
doing as long as, high of soul, they were doing their duty with all the
strength and fervor of their natures.
The mother or the wife whose son or husband has died, whether in battle
or by fever or in the accident inevitable in hurriedly preparing a
modern army for war, must never feel that the sacrifice has been laid
“on a cold altar.” There is no gradation of honor among these gallant
men and no essential gradation of service. They all died that we might
live; our debt is to all of them, and we can pay it even personally
only by striving so to live as to bring a little nearer the day when
justice and mercy shall rule in our own homes and among the nations of
the world.
THE RED FLAG AND THE HUN PEACE DRIVE
NOVEMBER 14, 1918
The war is won. A twofold duty is now incumbent on us. We must strive
to make the peace one of justice and righteousness and to throw out
such safeguards around it as will give us the greatest possible chance
of permanency. Then we must turn to setting aright the affairs of our
own household. But before we set ourselves to the performance of these
two tasks we should thoroughly enlighten our enemies at home and abroad
on one or two points.
Let all anti-Americans stand aside. Let them understand that we are not
merely against some enemies of the country--we are against all enemies
of the country. This week in New York there was a red flag of Anarchy
or Socialistic meeting which was the cause of a riot. It was perfectly
natural that it should be the cause of a riot. The red flag is as much
an enemy as the flag of the Hohenzollerns. The internationalist of the
red flag or black flag type is an enemy to this Nation just exactly
as much as Hindenburg or Ludendorff was an enemy only a week ago. He
is an even more treacherous enemy and equally brutal. Congress should
pass a law without waiting a day prohibiting the use of the red flag
or the black flag or any other flag of the kind here in America. We
have universal suffrage in America. The majority of our people can
have what they wish in the way of industrial and political change, if
they seriously desire it. There isn’t any excuse in this country for
any paltering with revolutionary movements. A riot is riot, without
reference to what the people rioting claim to be for. When a mob gets
started, it always acts the same way, no matter what the theoretical
cause of the outbreak may have been. A Bolshevist mob in New York in
all essentials resembles the anti-draft mob of 1863, although the
arguments of the parlor Bolsheviki of to-day would be totally different
from those of the constitutional copperheads of fifty-five years ago.
When the Romanoffs were overthrown the Russian people lacked
self-control and they permitted the dominion of a Bolshevist gang,
which has brought wholesale robbery, murder, and starvation in
its trail. The overthrow of the Hohenzollerns in Germany has been
accompanied by Bolshevist uprising in that country also. There is some
excuse for excesses in a revolution against a despotism, but in this
country there is no more excuse for Bolshevism in any form than there
is for despotism itself. Any foreign-born man who parades with or backs
up a red flag or black flag organization ought to be instantly deported
to the country from which he came. Appropriate punishment should be
devised for the even more guilty native-born.
Our National Government should take the most vigorous action and have
it understood that America is a bulwark of order no less than of
liberty. We must make it evident that we will stamp out Bolshevism
within our borders just as quickly as Kaiserism.
Moreover, let us realize the nonsense of the pretense that the German
people have not been behind the German Government. They were behind
their Government with hearty enthusiasm until the Government was
smashed by the military powers of General Foch. The effort now being
made by the German Government to bring dissensions between the Allies
by appealing to the United States against the Allies proper should be
spurned by our Government. The French, English, Italians, and Belgians
have been fighting side by side with our men under Foch. They have
acted as comrades under Foch, and we could not have done anything if we
had not acted as comrades like the rest. Now let’s play the game when
the effort is made to divide us by the German peace drive.
Senator Poindexter was entirely right in his proposed bill. The United
States must make absolutely common cause with the Allies. We regret
that the German and Russian people should suffer; the fault lies solely
with the past or present governments. To the very minute of the closing
of the war the hideous German brutalities continued unabated, and
apparently the Turks are still slaughtering Armenians. We will do our
best to help even our enemies now that they have been stricken down,
but we will not do so at the cost of doing injustice to our friends.
We will not permit Hun hypocrisy to succeed where Hun violence has
failed. And we are equally uncompromising foes of Bolshevism and
Kaiserism at home and abroad.
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
NOVEMBER 17, 1918
There are so many prior things to do and so much uncertainty as to the
form of agreement for permanently increasing the chances of peace that
it is difficult to do more than make a general statement as to what is
desirable and possibly feasible in the league of nations plan. It would
certainly be folly to discuss it overmuch until some of the existing
obstacles to peace are overcome. That such discussion may be not
futile, but mischievous, has been vividly shown in the last six weeks.
During the first week of October President Wilson and Germany agreed on
the famous fourteen points of Mr. Wilson’s as a basis for peace. But
this agreement amounted to nothing whatever except for a moment it gave
Germany the hope that she could escape disaster by a negotiated peace.
The emphatic protest of our own people caused this hope to vanish, and
just five weeks later peace came, not on Mr. Wilson’s fourteen points,
but on General Foch’s twenty-odd points, which had all the directness,
the straightforwardness, and the unequivocal clearness which the
fourteen points strikingly lacked.