USA > Connecticut > Windham County > Thompson > The war and its results : an address delivered at a Grange Meeting and Patriotic Rally held at Thompson, Windham County, Connecticut, August 9, 1918 > Part 2
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The intense resulting bitter feeling in this country has been evidenced by numerous instances, such as the prohibition of the study of German, as though the very language was a curse and would contaminate our children, and such also as the imposition of long sentences upon the comparatively few
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people who venture to speak well of the Kaiser and of Ger- many in the war. Such extremes of feeling and action in this country have never been known before, certainly not even in the period of the Civil War, which I remember well. This is no longer with us a "war without hate," if it ever was. I would even hate myself if I did not hate the perpetrators of such atrocities. This war stands for us amply justified, materially, morally, sentimentally and even spiritually. Here we are, a nation of one hundred millions and more civilized, intelligent people, mostly Christians, with our every activity devoted to the business of killing human beings. What a horrible thing it is when one stops to think of it; but, under the circumstances, the thing is fully justified and indeed absolutely necessary.
OUR RECORD IN THE WAR.
That has been and is simply marvelous.
In considering this matter we should first recall our con- dition when, on April 6, 1917, we entered the war by formal declaration. We govern ourselves, but we do it by agents selected for fixed periods of considerable length. Only the November before we had re-elected our President for four years from March 4th, upon the slogan "He kept us out of the War!" That was supposed, at least by many, to carry with it the implication that he would continue to keep us out of it at all hazards. The Members of the Cabinet were, at least then, supposed to be Pacifists. No one of them, for instance, had served in the Spanish-American War, the only one in which men of their age could have served. The Adminis- tration during the nearly two years following the sinking of the Lusitania had refused to yield to the appeals of its former Secretary of War, Judge Garrason, who had resigned upon that account, or to those of Colonel Roosevelt, Senator Lodge and, notably, the late Major Gardiner, that active and ample war preparations should be made. The agency through which the nation had to carry on the war certainly was not warlike in appearance and yet it has, during the sixteen months, ac- complished wonders in the nature of efficient war work. How
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that is to be explained is beyond my comprehension. I leave the problem to the psychologist, with the bare suggestion that this is the war of the American people, not of any party, not even of the administration, and that the American people in the matter have become so aroused that their indomitable spirit has fired their agents with their own determination and energy.
In a modern war money is a very great element, almost as important as that of the men. We have in the year raised about ten billions of dollars by the three Liberty Loans, each of which was oversubscribed, and we have without complaint submitted to the most drastic taxation. Our Congress has appropriated fifty billions of dollars for the two fiscal years, the one just ended and that now current, twenty-two of them being for loans to our allies. Our entire wealth at the begin- ning of the war was only one hundred and eighty-seven bil- lions. The great war relief institutions, the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., the Knights of Columbus, the Salvation Army and the Jewish Welfare Board has received from our people a total of nearly four hundred and eleven millions of dollars in voluntary contributions. Almost every single fraternity in the entire country has besides raised a special fund for war relief work, so that doubtless at least a thousand millions of dollars have been voluntarily given by the people for that purpose.
As to the men in service our achievement has been magnifi- cent, due, undoubtedly, in large measure, to our adoption of the policy of conscription. Although not of the President's political party, I freely yield to him the credit for the adoption of that policy. Indeed he may be said to have "horse-shed- ded," if he did not horsewhip the measure through the re- luctant Congress. Most of the Southern leaders who of late years have dominated that body were opposed to it, notably the Speaker, Champ Clark, who said, you may recall, that the terms "conscript" and "convict" were equally sweet in Ameri- can ears, the one no more so than the other. No substantial opposition has been made to the execution of that policy. In my own small City of Mount Vernon some seven hundred men under it have gone into the service, and not a single one
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under arrest. We have now three million men in the service, and by the first of January we shall have four million, and by the opening of the campaign of 1919 probably five million. Already there are over there one million two hundred and fifty thousand of our men, and by the end of this month there will be one million, four hundred and fifty thousand. Three hundred thousand were sent over the last month. Well did Lloyd George characterize it as "an amazing piece of organi- zation." This great army is being officered, at least in the lower positions, by the very flower of our young men, many being recent graduates or undergraduates of our colleges. Thus last fall, at the time of the Second Liberty Loan Drive, I found that my own college, Amherst, a small one, had al- ready had fifty-four of the ninety-five men in its senior class when we entered the war, that is the Class of 1917, making fifty-seven per cent. thereof, go into the service. I had the curiosity to look up the old records and ascertain that of the Class of 1861, the senior class when the Civil War broke out, twenty-three of its fifty-one men, or forty-six per cent, enter- ed the Union service during the entire four years of that war. Yesterday I received from the Old College a pamphlet entitled "Amherst in the War." Its foreword states that at the end of the last college year about one-half of the undergraduates had gone into the national service, and also eight members of the faculty.
We have now in our Navy some six hundred thousand men, almost as many as there are in the British Navy, and we have two hundred and fifty war vessels of all descriptions in British waters alone. We have more men in the service to- day than both sides ever had during the entire Civil War.
The nation has also made a notable record in other sub- stantial public war works. On the Fourth of last July, as a special celebration of Independence Day, we launched ninety- five new vessels, and last week we launched one which had been constructed in twenty-four days. During the last year we have completed two hundred and forty ships, with a ton- nage of a million and a half. The allied world, chiefly the United States, is now building ships at the rate of one hundred thousand tons a month more than the submarines are sinking.
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American shipyards, constructed and being constructed, are able to build twenty-four hundred vessels a year, with a ton- nage of fourteen million, two hundred thousand. The re- habilitation of the interned German ships, which their crews had disabled as they thought so that they could not be used before the close of the war, was accomplished in a few months and constitutes a veritable marvel of rapid and efficient work by our American engineers. I have learned from undoubted authority the fact, which I have not seen published, that the German officers of those ships had very skilfully made in cer- tain parts of the machinery pockets in which they had planted a very powerful explosive, of such a nature that it would ex- plode at a comparatively low temperature reached from the friction of the moving parts, and then had covered the pockets with steel or brass plates so skilfully inserted and polished over as apparently to be free from detection, and that our engineers succeeded in discovering every single one of those pockets and unloading them. Indeed we have gotten far better work out of those ships than the German owners ever did.
During the last few months almost every one in the average American family, not excepting father, has been en- gaged in some form of war service, real or imagined. The knitting has been well nigh universal. Travel upon our public conveyances has been almost at the peril of a forest of spears consisting of long, sharp pointed needles. As the heroes at Balaclava rode with "cannon at the right of them, cannon at the left of them and cannon in front of them," so have we been traveling of late in the midst of those knitting spears. Almost every considerable village has its canteen, voluntarily supported and devoted to the entertainment of passing soldiers and sailors. In very truth a mighty Pentecostal wave of war service has swept over our country, inundating wellnigh every American home.
Our actual fighting over there has been simply superb. Thus the Americans at Chateau Thierry, the very key of the German salient, assaulted and beat in the German ranks and when the Prussian guards were sent against them vanquished them as well. Mr. Simmonds of the New York Tribune, per- haps our best war critic, has written that that point of the
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American assault is entitled to be regarded as the high tide of the German invasion of France, as the clump of trees where Pickett's charge was repulsed on the Heights of Gettys- burg was the high tide of the Confederacy in the Civil War. The daily press teems with incidents of American valor. That article by Hamilton Holt, to which I have already re- ferred, states that when, on the second day, the German forces were beaten back out of the American position, a Connecticut lieutenant rose from one of the advanced trenches and report- ed to his commanding officer. He had been in the trench with thirty-seven men when the German attack opened and, having no orders to retire, he had remained. His report was laconic: "We have held the trench throughout the two days against numerous German attacks. Eight of us are left alive. The other thirty lie there in the trench dead." You may search the annals of warfare from the beginning of recorded history and fail to find an incident of greater heroism. It surpasses even that of the immortal three hundred at Thermopylae, for while the three hundred failed to hold the pass, those Ameri- can heroes, most of them from New England, did hold the trench.
German thought as to American fighting has been pro- gressive through at least four different phases. In the first place, before we entered the war, they declared that the Ameri- cans would not fight. They had some authority for that con- clusion in the sentiment "too proud to fight," and in the once popular song, especially in the west, "I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier." That song, however, has since become obsolete with us, being replaced by that other old one, "Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight?" and the answer to that in- quiry is for many of our families coming to be found in that popular favorite of recent birth entitled "Over There."
The second phase was, "The Americans cannot fight." This came right after we had entered the war. The Kaiser declared that it had taken Gott and him forty years to create the German army, and that it was preposterous that the Ameri- cans could create an efficient one in a single year, and that, having overcome the Russians and called to the west his divi- sions which were there in the east, he would overwhelm the
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English and the French and the Italians long before the Americans could possibly appear in Europe in substantial numbers.
Later, a few weeks ago, when we had begun to get there and to fight, the third phase of German thought appeared. It was to the effect that the "Americans don't know the rules of warfare,-they don't understand that when a fighting force is outnumbered, it must surrender, but they keep fighting on." It really does seem that the historic maxim "The old guard dies but never surrenders," stands in very high repute with our boys over there just now.
The last, the fourth phase of German thought upon the subject, has but recently appeared in an article re-printed in our papers, written by a famous German war critic. In that, with German thoroughness, he went over the list of Ameri- can casualties and noted that many of the killed and wounded bore German names and hence were of German descent, and therefore he concluded that the real American fighting was, after all, for the most part a German achievement. The Kaiser is welcome to this conclusion, if it gives him any con- solation. We may tell him that we have in our armies in France a great number of loyal German-Americans, and that we have over here a still greater number of them, indeed a sufficient number to make up an army large enough and strong enough to wipe him and his legions off the face of the earth if they will not behave themselves and be decent. We may well, in these days of suspicion and distrust, at least in some quarters, of our German-American fellow citizens, recall the fact that our neighbor over here in Ashford, General Nathaniel Lyon, in the Civil War saved Missouri to the nation by the aid of the German-Americans of St. Louis. We must give to all such the presumption of loyalty until the contrary appears. Our men over there have amply demon- strated that they are not afraid of the trained legions of the Kaiser. They are fighting them as well as our forefathers fought the Hessians in the Revolutionary War. We have plenty more young men here ready to go over there into the service if needed. In my boyhood days the Union recruits, as they poured into Washington in answer to Lincoln's call,
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chanted the refrain: "We are coming Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more." So today we are, month by month, sending across the seas to beleaguered France the message: "We are coming Fair France, three hundred thousand more," and each month we make the promise good. At this rate the refrain over there, "The Yanks Are Coming," will soon be changed to "Praise God! The Yanks have come, four million strong." Then indeed will what General Pershing said more than a year ago, when he laid a wreath on the tomb of Lafayette, become broadly true,-"Lafayette, we are here." Then indeed will the doom of the Germans be sealed. They will not be able to propagandize and befuddle our men as they did the Russians and, at least for a time, a part of the Italians. They will find that the men behind the American guns are thinking men, for the most part graduates of our common schools, who have cut their eye teeth and cannot be fooled by any palaver.
We must all hold ourselves ready to perform the utmost possible service in aid of the prosecution of the war. Those of us who can fight must do so, those of us who cannot must in every possible way work to sustain the fighting men at their fighting. No one of us wants, when peace with victory has come, to feel the lamentation of the ancient hymn, which has been sung I doubt not a thousand times in the old church yonder,
"Must I be carried to the skies On flowery beds of ease, While others fought to win the prize And sailed through bloody seas?"
Such men as that Connecticut Lieutenant and his Spartan band cannot be beaten. The Kaiser might as well come to that conclusion first as last. He might just as well forth- with call in behind him his six sons, each from the safe place he has held in the rear of a German army without receiving so much as a scratch during the four years of warfare. If I were in the Kaiser's place I should want to attach a cord to the oldest one, that Crown Prince, so as to make sure that he would not become lost or strayed. Mind you, I do not add
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"or stolen," because I do not think that any one would want him badly enough to steal him. Possibly he might safely be trusted to keep well to the rear, as of late he has exhibited a decided instinct for retreating. Probably the other five of the boys can be trusted to keep out of harm's way. They are supposed to be fairly sensible, as they are thought to take more after their mother. Then the Kaiser should fold up his legions and retire to Potsdam and Berlin. He might as well do that first as last, for the Americans with their brave allies will make him do it next summer at the very latest.
Speaking of the Crown Prince recalls to my mind an incident of days long past. Some sixty years ago this high- way one spring morning blossomed out with great picture posters, which announced that "Van Amringe's Great Men- agerie and Highly Moral Show" would exhibit at Webster on a stated day about one month off. The term "Moral Show" was used upon the New England posters out of respect for the Puritan conscience, which was then still keen and dominant hereabouts. Elsewhere the term "Circus" was used. The morning of that day all roads in this vicinity led to Webster, as in ancient times all roads led to Rome. My father took me to the show and I had there the time of my young life. After the main show was over I noticed a small side tent with the flaming announcement that within, for ten cents, could be seen "The Great What Is It?" The lure of the procla- mation was irresistible and I forked over ten cents from my scanty treasury. Probably I had earned the money the sum- mer before picking huckleberries at three cents a quart, or the fall before by selling a snared partridge at the general store here for twenty-five cents. At any rate I had the money and in I went and saw the thing, man or beast I know not which. It made a vivid impression upon me, which remains with me until this very day. For all the world it looked quite like the cartoons of the German Crown Prince recently pub- lished,-the same retreating forehead, the same lankiness of figure, and the same general inanity of expression. Thank God that we do not have to look forward to the possibility of having our children or grandchildren governed by him.
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The thought of those thirty New Englanders lying there in the trench dead suggests that when this war is over it may be said again, as it was of old said in truth and in beauty,
"New England's dead, New England's dead,
On every hill they lie, On every field of strife made red
By bloody victory."
MISTAKES.
The administration is human, and no doubt some mis- takes have been made in the conduct of the war. I mention only a few and simply because they appear to me to be still remediable.
As I look at it the first such mistake was the failure to give Colonel Roosevelt the Brigadier General's Commission which he craved. I understand, although I do not speak with any authority, that he does not want to be Governor or even President again, but that he does wish to be a Brigadier General in the army over there. I think that the Old Hero should have his desire granted, and that, if any legislation stands in the way, Congress should remove that bar at once, and that even the President should ask Congress to do that. He has asked them to do enough other things already. The Germans are saying that our men "Over There" have become so intoxicated with the French flattery that they are exposing their lives recklessly in the fighting and so suffering very heavy casualties. Think how intoxicated with fighting fervor our boys would be if they could have Roosevelt with them,-if only at some critical stage of the battle they could hear his voice shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom after this fashion: "Give them hell Boys! No kamerading here! Ram the cold steel into them, that is what they can't stand! Remember the Lusitania and drive the villains back beyond the Rhine, where they belong!" Indeed he might, upon the impulse of the moment, so far forget himself as to shout out: "Remember the Maine!" as he used to cry out to his men in the Spanish- American War. You recollect, doubtless, how, in one of the
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battles of that war, Old General Wheeler, formerly of the Confederate Service, in the excitement of the charge so far forgot himself as to shout out to his men, United States soldiers, "Give the Damned Yanks Hell!" and how, when we heard of it, we laughed and cheered and loved the Old Hero all the more for it. Under Roosevelt's such battle cry our men would be so enthused that all Hades could not stop them this side of Berlin.
"One blast upon his bugle horn Were worth a thousand men!"
Moreover the Colonel is not without military experience. He fairly gained his title by good military service in the Spanish-American War, and for seven years, as President, he was the constitutional Commander in Chief of the entire American army.
King David was a wise old fellow, not merely because he was the father of Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, but because he knew a thing or two himself. As the Holy Writ tells us, he sent his rival into the front line of battle and heard no further complaints from him. If Roosevelt were in the military service he could not criticize the President, his then Commander in Chief. Opinions may differ as to whether it would be better for the country at large for the Rooseveltian criticisms to cease. As to that question "deponent sayeth not."
The second such mistake which I wish to notice is our national dealing with Japan in reference to Russia. For my part, I have never been able to see any good reason why we should object to any man (black, white, red or yellow) fight- ing the Germans if he wishes to do so. Moreover, for my part, if the Japanese will drive the Germans out of Russia and at the end, after they have performed that world service, ask as a reward a slice of the far western Russian territory, I have no objection to their taking it. I would much rather that they should have it than that the Germans should. More- over, if the Japanese really fight in force, it is quite likely that more of our boys will come back to us safe and sound when this cruel war is over. The joint American and Japanese
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paper recently made public may meet the situation, although I am not entirely clear about it. It seems to me to savor somewhat too much of the "war without hate" and " peace without victory" doctrines which have long since been dis- carded by us all as to the war in chief. I do not believe in treating Russian murderers any differently than any other mur- derers, even if the Russians do murder in the name of Liberty. However, if the joint expedition does invade Russia, no doubt the American Flag will soon be fired upon, and that will settle the matter. There is just one thing which the American people will not stand, and that is the firing on the Flag. That much I learned well as a boy of nine years, when the Flag at Sumter was fired on. Before that anything was possible in the nature of compromise, concession and adjustment, as even Greeley said: "Let the erring sisters depart in peace!" but within twenty-four hours after the Flag was actually fired on at Sumter the whole North was in a blaze and concession and compromise became impossible and the war had to be fought out to the finish.
The third and last such mistake, with which my mind is impressed, is the treatment which the administration has given to General Wood. At the beginning of our participation in the war he was our Senior General Officer and beyond all cavil the one best known and respected abroad. He trained his division in the training camp most efficiently and then was permitted to go over to France to look over the conditions. When there he went at once into the front trench and very shortly was actually wounded by a German shot. I read the news daily, and as my reading goes he is the only one of all our Generals who thus far has been actually hit by the enemy's missile. Some of the others, I believe, have been bruised more or less by the overturning of their automobiles, but he is the only one who has actually been so wounded. Returned to this country and recovered of his wounds, he came to our eastern shore with his division for embarkation, and on the very eve of that was commanded by the administration to leave that division and return to his schoolmaster's task at the camp. No explanation of this extraordinary proceeding has been given. The General, as in duty bound, to interrogation
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responded by quoting the famous line, "Orders is orders," and the administration has declined so far to say a single word. If there was good cause to thus degrade the General, that cause should be imparted to the American people. If there was none such, the thing should never have been done and should now be remedied forthwith.
Woodrow Wilson is a great historian and has written a most charming history of our country, in which he has given great credit and high place to his one time predecessor, Andrew Jackson. It might be well, even in these busy days, if he would recall the following authentic incident in the presi- dential career of Jackson. When he came into the presi- dential office, General Van Rensselaer, a veteran of the War of 1812, who had been severely wounded in action, was Post- master of Albany or Troy. Martin Van Buren, whom New Yorkers then called "The Fox of Kinderhook," was the leader of the President's political party in the Empire State and dis- liked Van Rensselaer very much. Determined to cause his removal from office he importuned Jackson, whose Secretary of State he had become, but for a long time without any promise of success. Finally Van Rensselaer was told that there was danger that Jackson would yield to the persistent solicitation of Van Buren, and so he repaired to Washing- ton and called upon the President at the White House. The latter received him somewhat coldly, smoking his corncob pipe furiously and saying little. Finally Van Rensselaer became impatient, sprang up from his chair, pulled off his coat, then his waistcoat, then his collar, then, unbuttoning his shirt, started to remove that. Old Hickory jumped up and said: "Why, General, what are you going to do?" Van Rensselaer responded, "I am going to take off my shirt, Mr. President, and show you the wounds I received fighting for my country against the Britishers." "Good God," cried Old Hickory, "put on your clothes man and go back to Albany. You may rest assured, by the Eternal, that so long as I am President you will not be removed from your office!" and Old Hickory kept his word.
I beg to commend that historic incident to the consider- ation of our President.
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RESULTS OF THE WAR.
The immediate result must of course be peace of some sort. We have long since adandoned the sentiment of "peace without victory." That maxim has gone into retirement in company with its sister maxims, "too proud to fight," "watch- ful waiting" and "war without hate." From the President down we all now demand that there shall be no peace until a clear, decided, undoubted victory has been gained over the German forces. We insist that the Germans must first be so soundly defeated that the conviction that the person of an American citizen upon his lawful journeyings, whether by land or sea, is and shall be inviolable, has penetrated the thickest German skull living. We demand no indemnity in land. We have land enough. Secretary Lane recently said that we have two million acres of cut over timber land sus- ceptible of being made into farms, and he suggested that that be done at the national expense, and that the farms be given to our soldiers when they return, not a bad idea, at least one worthy of consideration.
We want no money as an indemnity. We are in the habit of paying our own expenses, and we expect to pay them on this trip. Indeed we are paying now some of those of our side partners.
We ask no spoils of victory, save perchance those ninety- two cannon which Lloyd George says our boys have already taken with their own hands, and perhaps a ship load of the spiked helmets, as souvenirs, which our boys are rapidly gathering as they chase up the retreating Germans.
We want no reprisals. In the Civil War times we sang much of how we were going to "Hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree." In the end we even extended to him amnesty, and although the old curmudgeon would not in form accept it, he did actually, and we suffered him to live out his life in this country and even to write and publish his book here, a copy of which I have in my library and which I have read through from cover to cover. As the reward of our such clemency, we now have a united country. For instance, the grandson of Ulysses S. Grant and the grandson of Robert E.
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Lee are young lieutenants in our army over there, in loyal and devoted comradeship fighting for this Flag. But at the end of that war we did demand and make one reprisal. We hanged Captain Wirtz, the demon of Andersonville. We hung him, not as a southerner, or a secessionist, or even a rebel, which harsh term we have ceased to use, but we hung him as a brutal, cruel murderer of our imprisoned men. In like man- ner I insist that when the war shall end some concrete instance of the submarine sinking of a passenger steamship, where lives were lost, like that of the Lusitania or the Carolina, shall be referred to a military commission, and that that commission shall sift the evidence thoroughly and determine the living person highest up directly responsible for that act, and that that person shall be followed, if need be to the ends of the earth, and hanged as a murderer.
We must, however, stand with our allies for the practical satisfaction of their just demands ;- with Belgium for full indemnity, so far as German gold can restore it ;- with France for the restoration of Alsace and Lorraine and money indem- nity for injuries suffered from acts beyond the pale of lawful warfare ;- with Italy for the return of her lost provinces, whose people speak her tongue ;- and that Russia shall be re- leased from the grip of Germany and be permitted, under some sympathetic protectorate not at all German, to work out her own salvation.
Beyond the attainment of such a peace after victory I think that I can foresee the following results:
First there will be an enormous increase of American prestige, both at home and abroad. We may even come to think more of ourselves than we ever have, and have just cause to do so, although I do not know that there has ever been any complaint that Americans did not think enough of themselves. Abroad, the world over, Americans will be hailed as the saviors of civilization, as the Englishmen and the Frenchmen both now admit that their coming has saved the day in France. Said the Great Apostle, when he was haled before the foreign potentate and inquired of as to his nationality, "I am a man * * of Tarsus, a city in * Silicia, a citizen of no mean city," and they dared not put him
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to death. After this war, anywhere on the face of the globe it will be enough to say: "I am an American citizen." No further details will be required. It will matter not one whit whether the person hails from New York City or from Bur- rillville.
The second result, as I foresee it, will be an enormous decrease of German prestige. For a generation at least, if not for a century, Germany will be under a moral boycott as a thing unclean and abhorrent. The sailors of the world al- ready stand pledged against her for years to come. Germans are bound to think far less of themselves because of this war. It may be, even, that they will come to realize and admit that it was far better that they were defeated, far better that the American troops beat them back at the high tide of the second battle of the Marne; just as in that beautiful poem, "High Tide at Gettysburg," the author, a southerner writing some twenty years after our Civil War, in effect declared that it was far better for civilization that the Federal forces won.
"They smote and fell who set the bars Against the progress of the stars, * * * *
They smote and stood who held the hope Of nations on that slippery slope, Amid the cheers of Christendom. God lives. He gave the iron will That clutched and held that trembling hill."
So, perhaps, some fifty years hence some Schiller or Goethe may in like manner and appreciation, for none could be more beautiful, write of the contending forces at the second battle of the Marne.
The third such result, as I seem to fancy it, is that after the war there will be a great accession to American trade and shipping. Our Flag will come back to the high seas and in every port, and there it must be kept. Fool legislation, which gives the preference to foreign shipping, must be repealed, and if subsidies even be necessary to keep our flag on every sea
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and in every port, then let there be subsidies, odious as that term in general may be to American minds.
The fourth such result is that we must hereafter always have some form of general military service, so that never again may we be found unfit to meet the stress of battle, if it shall be forced upon us.
The last such result will be, I think, that after the war some sort of international alliance will be formed for the maintenance of world peace and the administration of world justice. We have now with our present allies practically such a one. No person in his senses for a moment can think that if in August, 1914, England, France, Italy and the United States, each prepared for mobilization of her forces as hence- forth she will be, had been allied for offensive and defensive purposes in the interests of justice, the Kaiser would ever have dared to have undertaken this war. It is, perhaps, of little practical concern whether Germany joins the federation or not. It might be better if she did not for years to come.
CONCLUSION.
As I conclude the thought comes to me, how glad we shall be when peace finally comes,-peace with honor, peace with victory. In spite of all our brave talk about prosecuting the war to a finish, we are a people loving peace and all her works and hating war and its butchery. When such a peace shall come, the great ships sailing in safety over tranquil seas shall bring back to us the survivors of our heroic men. How the boys will hang along the guard rails when the good ships come in. How they will cheer when first they see the high- lands of the Jersey shore rising through the morning mists, and later Liberty with her welcoming torch, and good Old New York shimmering in the sunshine. They went forth from this coast in darkness and in silence from apprehension of the enemy's submarines; they shall come back in the clear light of day, flags waving, bands playing, cannon booming, to be received on shore with tumultuous joy. Later the great ships, before they are returned to commercial service, shall
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bring back to us the bodies of our honored dead,-the burial place of each one "over there" is being distinctly marked and recorded for that ultimate purpose,-shall bring back to us the bodies of our honored dead for final resting within this land which they loved so well and which they died to save. Then with overflowing hearts we may all join in Whittier's Peace Thanksgiving anthem:
"Thank God for rest, where none molest, And none can make afraid, For peace that sits as plenty's guest Beneath the homestead shade."
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