Chapter VII: Part 7

As there is no machinery in existence and no register has as yet been completed in Ireland, it may take some weeks before active enrollments begin. As soon as arrangements are complete the Government will put the act into immediate operation.

Irish Members Raise Uproar

[When Mr. Lloyd George referred to Ireland, Alfred Byrne, Nationalist member from Dublin, shouted: "We won't have conscription in Ireland!" An uproar followed. The Premier said the report of the Irish Convention was adopted by a majority only, and therefore the Government would take the responsibility for such proposals for self-government as were just and could be carried out without violent controversy. It would be some weeks before enrollment in Ireland began, the Premier continued. One Nationalist cried out: "It will never begin." Michael Flavin, Nationalist member from Kerry, said: "You come across and try to take us." Another Nationalist exclaimed: "It is a declaration of war against Ireland."]

When the Premier was referring to Ireland, John Dillon, the successor of the late John Redmond as leader of the Irish Nationalists in Parliament, said: "If Irish liberty were at stake I would not hesitate to support that policy. I never challenged the justice of war. I don't challenge it now."

Mr. Lloyd George began: "I don't want to cause trouble--"

"You will get plenty," interrupted an Irish member.

Resuming, Lloyd George said "While we have one ship afloat we should not accept a German peace. The men being taken now may be the means of a decisive issue."

Mr. Asquith said he would suspend judgment until he saw the bill in print. He invited every one to keep his mind and ears accessible to reasonable argument. At the conclusion of Mr. Asquith's speech, Joseph Devlin moved an adjournment and warned the Government that it was entering upon a course of madness if it endeavored to inforce conscription on Ireland. His motion was defeated later by a vote of 323 to 80.

Mr. Dillon said he hoped for the sake of the war and for the sake of the empire that the methods of the War Cabinet in dealing with the war were different from its methods in dealing with Ireland. A bill applying conscription to Ireland, Mr. Dillon continued, would plunge the country into bloodshed and confusion and would open a new war front in addition to the western front. He urged the War Cabinet to inform itself as to the state of Irish feeling before proposing conscription to Ireland.

Leave to introduce the Government's Man-Power bill was carried after further hot debate by 299 to 80.

Russia and the Allies

The Russian and the French Revolution Compared--The Gloomy Outlook of Russia

By Arthur J. Balfour

_British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs_

[FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN PARLIAMENT MARCH 14, 1918]

The inference that Russia would have been kept in the war if we had announced that we proposed to go in for the status quo ante and readjustments is wrong. Pronouncements made by Russian statesmen always included self-determination. Self-determination can never be squared with mere adjustments. It may be that self-determination might conceivably receive a large measure of fulfillment, I agree, up to a certain point, but that Russian statesmen by their declarations have materially limited the scope of the war I believe to be inaccurate. But whether accurate or not, one is entirely misrepresenting the political and social forces of Russia if he thinks that the reason Russia went out of the war was that our war aims were not publicly or semi-publicly reconsidered in concert with the Allies.

I do not profess to have a remedy for the misfortunes that have occurred--as I think to civilization itself--from the fact that the Russian revolution occurred in the middle of a European war. I welcome the change from autocracy to what we hoped and still hope, what we believed and still believe, is going to be a reign of ordered liberty. But the revolution, unfortunately, came at a time when Russia was weary with the sacrifices of a great war, and it was mixed up and almost overshadowed on its political side by the pacifist influences which were allowed to reign uncontrolled in the army and navy and all the other forces which might and should have been co-ordinated to resist the common enemy.

There are resemblances between the Russian revolution and the French Revolution, but from our point of view, and from the point of view of the war and of how we are to secure in the future the freedom of small nationalities, and how we are to save the world from the domination of one overgreedy power, from that point of view no greater misfortune could have occurred than the coincidence between the Russian revolution and the fact that a war was being conducted in which Russia was one of the great Allies. I personally am an optimist about Russia, but I am not an optimist about the immediate future of Russia, because it seems to me that difficulties are thrown in Russia's way by the fact that the war raged before the revolution. Russia is only nominally out of the war at the present time, but is still suffering from the invasion of her enemies. The French Revolution was associated with great military operations. It ended in the production of an army whose fiery efficiency was the wonder of Europe and which overturned all the decrepit monarchies in the Central European States. Contrast that with what has happened in Russia since the revolution. There is not a single fighting instrument possessed by Russia which the Russian revolutionaries have not deliberately but absolutely and completely destroyed.

RESULTS OF THE REVOLUTION

The Russian Army no longer exists and the Russian Navy no longer exists. The Rumanian Army--that most gallant and most unfortunate body, which might have and would have co-operated to preserve both Russia and Rumania from the tyranny of the Central Powers--had been betrayed by Russia itself. The unhappy results of the revolution from the military point of view are quite plain and obvious to the most casual observer. The actual course pursued by the Bolsheviki has rendered them completely helpless in the face of German aggression. Now they express the desire--I am sure they express it genuinely and earnestly--that they should reconstitute the Russian Army for the purpose of Russian defense, and they would welcome our assistance, doubtless, in carrying out this object. But can you reconstitute it for purposes of national defense? Can you improvise a new instrument when fragments of the old instrument are lying shattered around you? It cannot be done in a day.

Had Russia not been at war I believe it would have taken many years to complete what I hope and believe is to be the beneficent course of the Russian revolution. Autocracy--and it is very difficult to see how the Russia we know could have been created without it--showed itself quite incapable of bringing into existence that frame of mind which makes a great self-conscious nation independent of the particular form which its institutions may have at the moment. Autocracy was destroyed, and immediately Russia fell into chaos.

I am not sure that it was not my honorable friend (Mr. MacCallum Scott) who said exactly the same thing happened in France. The same thing really did not happen in France. I do not say we cannot find in this or that episode parallels to the French Revolution, but the total effect of the Revolution was not the disintegration of France but its integration. The units out of which modern France was constructed were no doubt compacted into a nation under the old monarchy, but the divisions between these units were still obvious; they still remained in the institutions of the country, and it was not until the Revolution that France became homogeneous from end to end and all the old provincial distinctions were swept away.

Precisely the opposite has happened in Russia. The revolution comes and immediately all the old divisions between populations, between different regions, between different creeds, suddenly become marked and prominent. First this body and then that body threatens to fall way, and it must inevitably take time before we see the end of that process and know clearly how much of the old Russia, if any, ought to cease to form part of the new Russia and how the new Russia will be constituted. A very difficult process in time of peace, a very difficult process in time of prosperity, but how are you going to carry it out in time of war when you have at your gates an enemy remorseless, persevering, quite unscrupulous, like that which is dealing at its own sweet will with Russia at the present moment? That is the real difficulty which we have always had to deal with and to think over to the best of our ability when we consider some of the problems raised by the honorable gentleman who initiated this debate.

JAPAN AND SIBERIA

[The speaker then took up an inquiry regarding a suggestion of Japanese intervention in Siberia. He said the hypothesis that whenever one country sends troops into another country those troops invariably stay where they are sent, and annexation is the result, was false; if such were the case there would be a bad outlook for the north of France. He argued that if the Japanese did intervene it would be as friends of Russia and enemies of Germany, to preserve the country from German domination, and he proceeded thus:]

Russia lies absolutely derelict upon the waters, and now it has no power of resistance at all; there can be a German penetration from end to end of Russia, which, I think, will be absolutely disastrous for Russia itself, and certainly will be very injurious to the future of the Allies. I suspect that at this moment a German officer is much safer traveling at large through Russia than an allied officer. Why? Not because the Russians love the Germans, but because, as a matter of fact, the German penetration has really struck at the root of Russian power. I was informed the other day that only one bank was allowed at Moscow. That bank is a German bank.

The Bolshevist Government, I believe, sincerely desire--I hope not too late, though I fear it may be so--to resist this German penetration. How can they resist it when they themselves or their predecessors have destroyed every instrument which makes resistance possible?

Inevitably Russia's allies have to ask themselves whether, if Russia herself has destroyed every instrument of self-protection which she once possessed, they cannot themselves among themselves supply that which she now lacks. We do that in Russia's own interests and for Russia's own sake, if it is done. It is not done to satisfy the greed of this or that power. That is the Allies' point of view. May I ask the House to consider the question from the Russian point of view? It is impossible to penetrate the future. Russia has always been a country of surprises, and that she remains at the present moment. What are the things which most of us fear for Russia when we look to the future? Frankly, I tell the House what I myself fear for Russia is this: Under the impulse, under the shadow of the great revolution, the cataclysm of social order has been shaken to its foundations, and many disasters, and I fear many crimes, have been committed.

DIVIDE AND GOVERN

It is Germany's interest, I believe, to foster and continue and promote that condition of disorder. Those who watch her methods throughout the world know that she always wishes to encourage disorder in every other country but her own. If the country is a republic she wishes to introduce absolutism; if it is an absolutist Government then she seeks to encourage republicanism. She counts it her gain that other Governments should be weak, and she knows that there is no better way of making other countries weak than by making them divided--a house divided against itself. Therefore I believe that Germany unchecked will do her best to continue those disorders which have unhappily stained the path of the Russian revolution.

What must be the result? The result must be--especially in a country where the sense of national unity appears, at all events, for the moment to be singularly weak compared with that which prevails in other civilized countries--that men will at last look around and say to themselves, "This disorder is intolerable; it makes life impossible; human effort cannot go on; something must be done, good or bad, to put an end to mere chaos." There will therefore be classes in Russia, some with patriotic motives, but some with personal and selfish motives, who will welcome anything in the world which gives them the semblance of a stable, orderly, and civilized Government.

When that time comes, then I can see Germany will say, Now we will step in; we will, by both the open and subterranean methods which we have developed and cultivated, now exercise our power in the country. We will re-establish, possibly in the same form, possibly in some new form, the autocracy which we in this House hoped had gone forever; and you will have in a Russia shorn of some of its fairest provinces set up again an autocracy far worse than the old autocracy, because it will lean upon a foreign power to continue its existence. Then, indeed, if that prophecy came to pass--and I most earnestly hope I am in this a false prophet--all our dreams of Russian development and Russian liberty would be gone. Russia under this Government would be a mere echo of the Central Powers; she would cease to be a make-weight in any sense to German militarism. She would have lost all that initiative, all that power for self-development that we so earnestly hoped the revolution had given her.

A GLOOMY HOROSCOPE

I admit that this picture is dark and sombre. Will anybody have the courage to say he can draw a horoscope for the future more likely to be fulfilled, if Russia remains, as I fear she is at this moment, absolutely helpless in face of the German penetration? It all turns upon that. If Russia could only rouse herself now and offer effective resistance to the German invader, that might give her a national spirit and sense of unity, and make her future far more splendid than her past. Therefore the question will inevitably be asked: Can any of the Allies give to Russia in her extremity that help and that sympathy of which she so sorely stands in need? It is help and sympathy which the Allies desire to give, and not invasion and plunder. I agree that there may be circumstances, prejudices, and feelings which render assistance in the East by the only country which can give it in the East a question of difficulty and doubt--a question which must be weighed in every balance and looked at from every point of view; but that the Allies--America, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan--should do what they can at this moment to help Russia, if she fails to help herself, through the great crisis of her destiny appears to me to be beyond doubt, and I will not reject, a priori, any suggestion which seems to offer the slightest solution of our doing any good in that direction.

THE LOYALTY OF JAPAN

I do not think this debate should finish without repudiating the suggestion made that Japan is moved by selfish and dishonorable motives in any course which may have been discussed in Japan, either among her own statesmen or the Allies. Japan has maintained perfect loyalty. She has kept all the promises made to the Allies. I hope I have said enough to indicate the general problems as they present themselves to this Government, and at the same time also to show that we recognize to the full how difficult this problem is, how hard it is to help a nation which is utterly incapable for the moment of helping itself. The House will feel, I think, that the decisions which the Allies may have to give are not without difficulty, and the principles upon which those decisions will be come to are neither ungenerous, unfair, nor hostile to Russia or the Russian revolution; but on the contrary that our one object is to see Russia strong, intact, secure, and free. If these objects can be attained, then, indeed, and then only, will the Russian revolution bring forth all the fruits which Russia's best friends desire to see.

President on the Russian Treaties

Declares Germany Has Repudiated Her Peace Avowals and Will Be Met With "Force to the Utmost"

_President Wilson delivered an address at Baltimore on April 6,
1918, in which he denounced the terms which the Central Powers
had exacted from Russia and Rumania, and defined the attitude of
the United States toward all peace proposals offered on such a
basis. The text of his speech in full is as follows:_

Fellow-citizens: This is the anniversary of our acceptance of Germany's challenge to fight for our right to live and be free, and for the sacred rights of freemen everywhere. The nation is awake. There is no need to call to it. We know what the war must cost, our utmost sacrifice, the lives of our fittest men, and, if need be, all that we possess.

The loan we are met to discuss is one of the least parts of what we are called upon to give and to do, though in itself imperative. The people of the whole country are alive to the necessity of it and are ready to lend to the utmost, even where it involves a sharp skimping and daily sacrifice to lend out of meagre earnings. They will look with reprobation and contempt upon those who can and will not, upon those who demand a higher rate of interest, upon those who think of it as a mere commercial transaction. I have not come, therefore, to urge the loan. I have come only to give you, if I can, a more vivid conception of what it is for.

The reasons for this great war, the reason why it had to come, the need to fight it through, and the issues that hang upon its outcome, are more clearly disclosed now than ever before. It is easy to see just what this particular loan means, because the cause we are fighting for stands more sharply revealed than at any previous crisis of the momentous struggle. The man who knows least can now see plainly how the cause of justice stands, and what the imperishable thing he is asked to invest in. Men in America may be more sure than they ever were before that the cause is their own, and that, if it should be lost, their own great nation's place and mission in the world would be lost with it.

OUR VERDICT DELIBERATE

I call you to witness, my fellow-countrymen, that at no stage of this terrible business have I judged the purposes of Germany intemperately. I should be ashamed in the presence of affairs so grave, so fraught with the destinies of mankind throughout all the world, to speak with truculence, to use the weak language of hatred or vindictive purpose. We must judge as we would be judged. I have sought to learn the objects Germany has in this war from the mouths of her own spokesmen, and to deal as frankly with them as I wished them to deal with me. I have laid bare our own ideals, our own purposes, without reserve or doubtful phrase, and have asked them to say as plainly what it is that they seek.

We have ourselves proposed no injustice, no aggression. We are ready, whenever the final reckoning is made, to be just to the German people, deal fairly with the German power, as with all others. There can be no difference between peoples in the final judgment, if it is indeed to be a righteous judgment. To propose anything but justice, even-handed and dispassionate justice, to Germany at any time, whatever the outcome of the war, would be to renounce and dishonor our own cause, for we ask nothing that we are not willing to accord.

It has been with this thought that I have sought to learn from those who spoke for Germany whether it was justice or dominion and the execution of their own will upon the other nations of the world that the German leaders were seeking. They have answered--answered in unmistakable terms. They have avowed that it was not justice, but dominion and the unhindered execution of their own will.

GERMANY'S REAL RULERS

The avowal has not come from Germany's statesmen. It has come from her military leaders, who are her real rulers. Her statesmen have said that they wished peace, and were ready to discuss its terms whenever their opponents were willing to sit down at the conference table with them. Her present Chancellor has said--in indefinite and uncertain terms, indeed, and in phrases that often seem to deny their own meaning, but with as much plainness as he thought prudent--that he believed that peace should be based upon the principles which we had declared would be our own in the final settlement.

At Brest-Litovsk her civilian delegates spoke in similar terms; professed their desire to conclude a fair peace and accord to the peoples with whose fortunes they were dealing the right to choose their own allegiances. But action accompanied and followed the profession. Their military masters, the men who act for Germany and exhibit her purpose in execution, proclaimed a very different conclusion. We cannot mistake what they have done--in Russia, in Finland, in the Ukraine, in Rumania. The real test of their justice and fair play has come. From this we may judge the rest.

They are enjoying in Russia a cheap triumph in which no brave or gallant nation can long take pride. A great people, helpless by their own act, lies for the time at their mercy. Their fair professions are forgotten. They nowhere set up justice, but everywhere impose their power and exploit everything for their own use and aggrandizement, and the peoples of conquered provinces are invited to be free under their dominion!

Are we not justified in believing that they would do the same things at their western front if they were not there face to face with armies whom even their countless divisions cannot overcome? If, when they have felt their check to be final, they should propose favorable and equitable terms with regard to Belgium and France and Italy, could they blame us if we concluded that they did so only to assure themselves of a free hand in Russia and the East?

Their purpose is, undoubtedly, to make all the Slavic peoples, all the free and ambitious nations of the Baltic Peninsula, all the lands that Turkey has dominated and misruled, subject to their will and ambition, and build upon that dominion an empire of force upon which they fancy that they can then erect an empire of gain and commercial supremacy--an empire as hostile to the Americas as to the Europe which it will overawe--an empire which will ultimately master Persia, India, and the peoples of the Far East.

DEMOCRATIC IDEALS FLOUTED

In such a program our ideals, the ideals of justice and humanity and liberty, the principle of the free self-determination of nations, upon which all the modern world insists, can play no part. They are rejected for the ideals of power, for the principle that the strong must rule the weak, that trade must follow the flag, whether those to whom it is taken welcome it or not, that the peoples of the world are to be made subject to the patronage and overlordship of those who have the power to enforce it.

That program once carried out, America and all who care or dare to stand with her must arm and prepare themselves to contest the mastery of the world--a mastery in which the rights of common men, the rights of women and of all who are weak, must for the time being be trodden underfoot and disregarded and the old, age-long struggle for freedom and right begin again at its beginning. Everything that America has lived for and loved and grown great to vindicate and bring to a glorious realization will have fallen in utter ruin and the gates of mercy once more pitilessly shut upon mankind!

The thing is preposterous and impossible; and yet is not that what the whole course and action of the German armies have meant wherever they have moved? I do not wish, even in this moment of utter disillusionment, to judge harshly or unrighteously. I judge only what the German arms have accomplished with unpitying thoroughness throughout every fair region they have touched.

AMERICA ACCEPTS CHALLENGE

What, then, are we to do? For myself, I am ready, ready still, ready even now, to discuss a fair and just and honest peace at any time that it is sincerely purposed--a peace in which the strong and the weak shall fare alike. But the answer, when I proposed such a peace, came from the German commanders in Russia, and I cannot mistake the meaning of the answer.

I accept the challenge. I know that you accept it. All the world shall know that you accept it. It shall appear in the utter sacrifice and self-forgetfulness with which we shall give all that we love and all that we have to redeem the world and make it fit for free men like ourselves to live in. This now is the meaning of all that we do. Let everything that we say, my fellow-countrymen, everything that we henceforth plan and accomplish, ring true to this response till the majesty and might of our concerted power shall fill the thought and utterly defeat the force of those who flout and misprize what we honor and hold dear.

Germany has once more said that force, and force alone, shall decide whether justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men, whether right as America conceives it or dominion as she conceives it shall determine the destinies of mankind. There is, therefore, but one response possible from us: Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall make right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.

American Liberty's Crucial Hour

By William E. Borah

_United States Senator From Idaho_

[DELIVERED IN THE SENATE, MARCH 18, 1918, AT THE CLIMAX OF A DEBATE OVER THE FIXING OF WHEAT PRICES]

Mr. President: The German historian, Professor Meyer, in a book written since the beginning of the war, in which he sums up the issues involved, or rather the issue, because it all resolves itself into one, uses this language: "The truth of the whole matter undoubtedly is that the time has arrived when two distinct forms of State organization must face each other in a life-and-death struggle."

That is undoubtedly the understanding and belief of those who are responsible for this war. It is coming to be the understanding and belief of those who have had the war forced upon them. We have finally put aside the tragedy at the Bosnian capital and the wrongs inflicted upon Belgium as the moving causes of the war. They were but the prologue to the imperial theme. We now see and understand clearly and unmistakably the cause at all times lying back of these things. Upon the one hand are Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the principles of human liberty which they embody and preserve. Upon the other hand is that peculiar form of State organization which, in the language of the Emperor, rests alone upon the strength of the army and whose highest creed finds expression in the words of one of its greatest advocates that war is a part of the eternal order instituted by God. We go back to Runnymede, where fearless men wrenched from the hands of power habeas corpus and the trial by jury. They point us to Breslau and Molwitz, where Frederick the Great, in violation of his plighted word, inaugurated the rule of fraud and force and laid the foundation for that mighty structure whose central and dominating principle is that of power.

It is that power with which we are at war today. Shall men, shall the people, be governed by some remorseless and soulless entity softly called the "State" or shall the instrumentalities of government yield alone and at all times to the wants and necessities, the hopes and aspirations, of the masses? That is now the issue. Nothing should longer conceal it. It is but another and more stupendous phase of the old struggle, a struggle as ancient and as inevitable as the thirst for power and the love of liberty, a struggle in which men have fought and sacrificed all the way from Marathon to Verdun.

It seems strange now, and it will seem more extraordinary to those who come after us, that we did not recognize from the beginning that this was the issue. But, obscured by the débris of European life, confused with the dynastic quarrels and racial bitterness of the Old World, it was difficult to discern, and still more difficult to realize, that the very life of our institutions was at stake, that the scheme of the enemy, amazing and astounding, was not alone to control territory and dominate commerce, but to change the drift of human progress and to readjust the standards of the world's civilization. Perhaps, too, our love of peace, our traditional friendship for all nations, lulled suspicion and discouraged inquiry. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt now.

Whatever the cause, however perverse the fates which bring us to this crisis, we are called upon not to settle questions of territory or establish new spheres of national activity, but to defend the institutions under which we live. Who doubts should we fail that the whole theory and system of government for which we have labored and struggled, our whole conception of civilization, would be discredited utterly? Who but believes that, should we lose, militarism would be the searching test of all Governments and that the world would be an armed camp harried and tortured and decimated by endless wars?

No; we can no longer doubt the issue, and, notwithstanding some discouraging facts, we must not doubt the result. We are simply meeting the test which brave men have met before, for this issue has been fought over and over again for 3,000 years. Islam's fanaticism was grounded in the same design and made of the same stuff, but it broke upon the valor of Charles Martel's men at Tours. But the conflict was not conclusive. The elder Napoleon was obsessed by the same dream of world dominion, the same passion for military glory, that now obsesses those against whom we war. But he, too, saw his universal sceptre depart when chance and fate, which sometimes war on the side of liberty, turned from him on the field of Waterloo. And now the issue is again made up, and again this dream of world dominion, this passion for military glory, torments the souls of our would-be masters. And now again somewhere on the battlefields of Europe the same fate awaits the hosts of irresponsible power. In such a contest and with such an issue we cannot lose; it would not harmonize with the law of human progress.

It has been the proud belief of some that not only would this war result in greater prestige and greater security for free institutions, but that it would effectuate the spread of democracy throughout Europe. We all hope for great things, for we believe in the ultimate triumph of free institutions, but we must not expect these things out of hand. The broken sobs of nations struggling to be independent and free so often heard in that part of the world and then heard no more, the story of Russia just now being written in contention and blood, admonishes anew that the republican road to safety and stability is encompassed by all kinds of trials and beset by countless perils. Democracy is the severest test of character which can be put upon a people, and must be learned and acquired in the rigid school of experience. It cannot be handed whole and complete to any people, though every member of the community were a Socrates.

But what we have determined in this crisis, as I understand it, is that we will keep the road of democracy open. No one shall close it. If any nation shall hereafter rise to the sublime requirement of self-government and choose to go that way, it shall have the right to do so. Above all things we have determined, cost what it may in treasure and blood, that this experiment here upon this Western Continent shall justify the faith of its builders, that there shall remain here in all the integrity of its powers neither wrenched nor marred by the passions of war from within nor humbled nor dishonored by military power from without, the Republic of the fathers; that since the challenge has been thrown down that this is a war unto death between two opposing theories of government we are determined that whatever else happens as a result of this war this form of organization, this theory of state, this last great hope, this fruition of 130 years of struggle and toil, "shall not perish from the earth."

So, Sir, stripped of all incidental and confusing things, the problem which our soldiers will help to solve is whether the theory of government exemplified in the dynasty of the Hohenzollerns or the theory of government exemplified in the faith of Abraham Lincoln shall prevail. It is after all a war of ideals, a clash of systems, a death struggle of ideals.

Amid the sacrilege of war it is our belief that the old order passeth. In such a contest there is little room for compromise. We can no more quit than Washington could have quit at Valley Forge. We can no more compromise than Lincoln could have compromised after Chancellorsville.

We can and should keep the issue clear of all selfish and imperialistic ambitions, but the issue itself cannot be compromised. Cost what it may in treasure and blood, the burden, as if by fate, has been laid upon us, and we must meet it manfully and successfully. To compromise is to acknowledge defeat. The policies of Frederick the Great, which would make of all human souls mere cogs in a vast military machine, and the policies of Washington, which would make government the expression and the instrument of popular power, are contending for supremacy on the battlefield of Europe. Just that single, simple, stupendous issue, beside which all other issues in this war are trivial, must have a settlement as clear and conclusive as the settlement at Runnymede or Yorktown. To lose sight of this fact is to miss the supreme purpose of the war, and to permit it to be embarrassed or belittled by questions of territory is to betray the cause of civilization. And to fail to settle it clearly and conclusively is to fail in the most vital and sublime task ever laid upon a people.

We need not prophesy now when victory will come. Neither is it profitable to speculate how it will come. If it is a real and not a sham peace, we will have no trouble in recognizing it when it does come. Whether it shall come in the bloody and visible triumph of arms or, as we hope, through the overthrow and destruction of militarism by the people of the respective countries, we do not know. But that it will come we confidently believe. Indeed, if the principles of right and the precepts of liberty are not a myth, we know it will come.

It has been said by some one that it was not possible for Napoleon to win at Waterloo, not on account of Wellington, not on account of Blücher, but on account of the unchanging laws of liberty and justice. Let us call something of this faith to our own contest. Let us go forward in the belief that it is not possible in the morning of the twentieth century of the Christian civilization for militarism, for brute force, to triumph. It would be in contravention to every law, human and Divine, upon which rests the happiness and preservation of the human family. It would be to place brute force first in the Divine economy of things. It would be to place might over right, and in the last and final struggle that cannot be done.

No; we cannot lose. We must win. The only question is whether we shall, through efficiency and concerted and united action, win without unnecessary loss of life, unnecessary waste of treasure, or whether we shall, through lack of unity in spirit and purpose, win only after fearful and unnecessary sacrifices.

It has often been said since the war began, Mr. President, that a republic cannot make war. I trample the doctrine under my feet. I scorn the faithless creed as the creed of cowards and traitors. If a republic cannot make war, if it cannot stand the ordeal of conflict, why in the name of the living God are our boys on the western front? Are they there to suffer and die for a miserable craft that can only float in the serene breeze of the Summer seas and must sink or drive for port at the first coming on of the storm? No; they are there to defend a craft which is equal to every conflict and superior to every foe--the triumph and the pride of all the barks that have battled with the ocean of time.

A republic can make war. It can make war successfully and triumphantly and remain a republic every hour of the conflict. The genius who presided over the organization of this Republic, whose impressive force was knit into every fibre of our national organization, was the greatest soldier, save one, of the modern world; and the most far-visioned leader and statesman of all time. He knew that though devoted to peace the time would come when the Republic would have to make war. Over and over again he solemnly warned his countrymen to be ever ready and always prepared. He intended, therefore, that this Republic should make war and make war effectively, and the Republic which Washington framed and baptized with his love can make war. Let these faithless recreants cease to preach their pernicious doctrine.

Sir, this theory, this belief that a self-governing people cannot make war without forfeiting their freedom and their form of government is vicious enough to have been kenneled in some foreign clime. A hundred million people knit together by the ties of a common patriotism, united in spirit and purpose, conscious of the fact that their freedom is imperiled, and exerting their energies and asserting their powers through the avenues and machinery of a representative Republic is the most masterful enginery of war yet devised by man. It has in it a power, an element of strength, which no military power of itself can bring into effect.

The American soldier, a part of the life of his nation, imbued with devotion to his country, has something in him that no system or mere military training and discipline as applied to automatons of an absolute Government can ever give. The most priceless heritage which this war will leave to a war-torn and weary world is the demonstrated fact that a free people of a free Government can make war successfully and triumphantly, can defy and defeat militarism and preserve through it all their independence, their freedom, and the integrity of their institutions.

Defending the World's Right to Democracy

By James Hamilton Lewis

_United States Senator from Illinois_

[FROM A RECENT SPEECH IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE]

No democracy was ever founded in any Government of earth that did not have to fight to continue its existence or maintain its ideals. Hear Goethe proclaim to Prussia, "Those who have liberty must fight to keep it." The test of every free land that tries out its worthiness or unworthiness to exist as a Government of freedom has been its willingness or refusal to fight and die for its faith. No Government that has not exhibited a capacity to sacrifice all it has for the theory for which it was founded, and to prove its ability to protect and perpetuate the institutions it has created, has ever yet existed for a length of time sufficient to be recorded in history as having fostered liberty or transmitted democracy to men. No Government has yet been accorded by civilization a place among the nations of the earth until it had first demonstrated its worthiness to administer justice by doing justice to itself, and then to prove its power in conflict to overcome its natural enemies, whether from within or without. * * *

Our United States, too, must pass under the rod. America's institutions of freedom, inspiring mankind to her example and awakening oppressed lands to follow her course if they would know liberty, inflamed the souls of the royal rulers of Prussia with fear and fired them to war of destruction upon all that America stood for and was living for. * * *

Whatever riches America has amassed from her industry, whatever wealth gathered from her commerce, what harvests garnered from her fields, are all as but the least of offering compared to that which she brings to civilization in the growth of liberty, the perfection of justice, and the expansion of freedom with which she has been able by her example and her power, through her religion and her generosities, to endow mankind. Other nations have risen in triumph of power and lived for a while in the glory of arms, but by selfish achievement--conquest through the slash of swords--they have fallen. As these wrenched victory by strength and success by power, they but showed the way to the rival wherein to multiply and by these same standards prevail. That which was victor yesterday was the conquered of today, and thus one after the other the powerful nations of the world, resting only upon the achievement of riches, the multiplication of wealth, and the power of the sword, have broken and melted away, leaving nothing enduring to which mankind appeals as example to follow or the children of men turn to as gods to be worshipped or praised. Hear Ruskin echoing this truth:

Riches of Tyre, Thebes, and Carthage; yea, I say also the once
Rome and great Persia are left for our beholding in the periods
of their decline. They are ghosts upon the sands of the sea.
Theirs was power, riches, grandeur; much for a country--nothing
for man. They rose; they shined, yea glowed, laughed,
persecuted, and oppressed, and then they died, and man asks not,
where are they? nor cares that they live not among nations. As
among men, there is to nations a justice of God and the
vengeance of time.

Mr. President, refined civilization as it increases in its purpose of equality among men and justice to all peoples scorns the suggestion of accepting these dead nations of the past as models of national education or guides of personal conduct. The people of the modern world shun them and hold as their boast before earth how they disdain to pattern after them, and turning the face of all those that are new and hopeful to the one standard, approach the United States of America, and bowing in admiration, ask but to follow her past growth, hold her guiding hand, and walk beside her in the light of approving heaven.

Then who are they who misrepresent the purpose of democracy under Wilson that they may defeat all democracy to all men? These charge that America, under Wilson, would continue war to force Governments and people of foreign lands to take our form of government. Let the world know that as George Washington fought for democracy as a right to America and Thomas Jefferson proclaimed it as a necessity to mankind, while Lincoln made it his creed of emancipation for all color and all climes--so, too, Wilson fights for democracy as a right of the whole world. The promise of Wilson to "make the world safe for democracy" is no threat to make the world take democracy. It is but the assurance of the effort to give to the world its chance to take democracy. This war of America is the announcement that we, by our entrance into the conflict, will prevent any despot from depriving any people of the right to exercise their free will in rejecting despotism and choosing democracy. The United States does not fight to force any Government to adopt the theory of our Government, nor does the United States fight to force any foreign people to take our form of government against any form of government they may choose for themselves. But America does fight to prevent any foreign Government from thwarting any land from enjoying democracy if it so wills by the voice of its own people. And this United States fights now and will ever fight to the expenditure of its last dollar and the sacrifice of every son, rather than submit to any monarch wresting our democracy from us, to the death of our liberty and the end of our Republic.

Messenger Dogs in the German Army

How They Are Trained

Through captures made in the battle of the Chemin des Dames the French General Staff has obtained precise information regarding the German Army's use of dogs as war couriers. The training of the animals is divided into two periods--the training at school and that at the front. At school the men receive detailed instructions as to the care and treatment of dogs, after which they begin a rigorous drill, training each dog to run daily over a longer and longer course, accompanied by his masters; then the dogs must run over the same courses alone, while the two trainers are posted one at each end. The longest course is about three miles.

On the battle line there is similar training. On Sept. 1, 1917, for instance, the 52d Meldehundetrupp left the school at Wiegnehies to join the 52d Infantry Division, near the Hurtebise Farm, in Champagne. The troup consisted of one officer, six sub-officers, thirty-six men, and twenty-one dogs. It was divided at once among the units of the division, the level sectors receiving a larger contingent than the hilly sectors, where communications are less difficult. Marshy ground, where human messengers might be mired, and positions heavily pounded by artillery also were favored.

In their respective sectors the dogs are subjected to local training. Little by little they are drilled to run as couriers between the company and the battalion, on the one hand, and the battalion and the regiment on the other. Thus the courier that has to keep up connection between the company and the battalion is sent by one trainer, who stays with the company commander, to the other, who is quartered with the chief of the battalion. In twenty or thirty days, it appears, the dogs are broken to their work as couriers, and have become familiarized with the tunnels, trenches, shelters, and officers' posts, as well as with the roar of cannonade and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns.

As for the practical results of all this training and ingenious organization, the French officers say these are still in doubt. They indicate the nature of the doubt by citing the case of two trained dogs at Pinon. When the French attacked with a heavy bombardment, one dog disappeared in terror and the other was made sick and useless by a French gas bomb. The fact remains, nevertheless, that canine messengers are doing useful work in dangerous places on both sides of No Man's Land, and to some extent conserving human lives.

Full Record of Sinkings by U-Boats

Statement by Sir Eric Geddes

_First Lord of the British Admiralty_

_Sir Eric Geddes in a speech before the House of Commons on
March 20, 1918, for the first time revealed the total shipping
losses of Great Britain and the other Allies and neutrals from
the beginning of the war up to Jan. 1, 1918. His summary was
followed next day by a statement from the Admiralty Office
giving the figures in fuller detail. This was made public
simultaneously at London and Washington. The essential portions
of both utterances are presented below. Sir Eric Geddes said:_

The world's tonnage from the commencement of the war until Dec. 31, 1917, exclusive of enemy-owned tonnage, has fallen by a net figure of, roughly, 2,500,000 gross tons. This is out of 33,000,000 estimated allied and neutral ocean-going tonnage, which is arrived at after deducting small craft, river and estuary craft, and a considerable amount of lake tonnage, tugs, &c., so that with a net loss of 2,500,000 tons we, the allied and neutral world, have suffered about 8 per cent. reduction in ocean-going tonnage of the world, excluding enemy countries. The total world's tonnage, exclusive of enemy tonnage, is 42,000,000, and the deduction is made after careful consideration and investigation. The percentage of net loss in British tonnage alone is higher than this, and reaches 20 per cent. for British tonnage, the more favorable allied and neutral tonnage percentage being, of course, due largely to a credit brought in by the United States of interned German ships.

The main submarine attack is upon us. It was to starve these islands that the enemy instituted this form of warfare. In 1915-16 the output of new tonnage was very low--it was lowest in 1916. In fact, before the intense submarine warfare commenced we were over 1,300,000 tons to the bad from all causes since the beginning of the war. Then our shipping has been in the war zone to a far greater extent and far longer than has that of some of our allies, and our navigational risks and losses, which are included, are greater, because of the absence of lights in the waters around our coast and elsewhere.

With regard to enemy exaggeration: For the twelve months of unrestricted submarine warfare, from Feb. 1, 1917, to Jan. 31, 1918, the enemy has proclaimed in his public notifications that he has sunk over 9,500,000 tons of British, allied, and neutral shipping. The actual figures of vessels sunk by submarine action, including those damaged and ultimately abandoned, amount roughly to 6,000,000 tons, so that we have an exaggeration of 3,500,000 tons in twelve months, or well over 58 per cent. In January the exaggeration was 113 per cent. It is rather amusing that since I publicly showed up this grossly false declaration of results the usual return of submarine sinkings for February has not been issued by Berlin. It is now overdue. I think, if any proof of the failure of the campaign is needed, this exaggeration and Berlin's reticence would show it.

TO THE SHIPBUILDING TASK

For the first two years of the war or more the shipyards of the country had lost their men and the work had become dislocated. Hulls had been on the slips for very long periods and there was no material in existence to finish them. Vessels were lying in the yards awaiting engines, but the engines had never been built, because up to 1917 the Admiralty had made use of the engine shops for naval work. There was great confusion in the shipbuilding industry, not due to the fault of the industry, not really due to any one's fault, but due to war conditions. The output had been checked by urgent work being placed in the same works by different departments. With the introduction of the Controller's Department it was immediately realized that this policy was bad for output as a whole. It was accordingly arranged to allocate yards or separate sections of yards, so that one class of tonnage only would be produced. The result is that forty-seven large shipyards, containing 209 berths, are wholly engaged on ocean-going merchant vessels. That is entirely apart from the large private warship building establishments, which are obviously most suited for naval work. But there are in addition eleven--and only eleven--other yards suitable for large merchant tonnage which have at the present time naval craft on the stocks.

I now give the figures of output in the yards. In the fourth quarter of 1914 the merchant tonnage produced in the United Kingdom was 420,000. From that date it steadily fell, and it must be noted that the fall was concurrent with our great munitions effort. In the fourth quarter of 1915 it had fallen to 92,000. It then began to rise, and the rise is as follows:

1916
Tons. Tons.
1st quarter 95,000 3d quarter 125,000
2d quarter 108,000 4th quarter 213,000

1917
Tons. Tons.
1st quarter 246,000 3d quarter 248,000
2d quarter 249,000 4th quarter 420,000