Part 15

In many ways the United States had been very successful. It had grown tremendously, it had carried out many of the ideals of its founders. But in some ways it had fallen from its true course. Special privileges had allowed some men to grow enormously rich at the expense of their neighbors, city governments were too often the playthings of grafting politicians, men were often apt to prefer the liberty of the individual to the welfare of the state. The real question of the country was not as to whether we had won success, but as to whether liberty was still worth striving for. A nation is very much like an individual, and an individual often loses his ideals as he wins material success. Had America grown to be like a rich and torpid man who cares more for his ease and comfort than for the dreams of his youth? Had America forgotten Lafayette’s vision of her, forgotten that liberty is the one priceless gift? Were the youths, few in number but great in spirit, who were offering their lives for freedom in the airplanes and trenches of Europe the only part of the nation that still saw the vision clear?

Woodrow Wilson never doubted his people in that time of stress and strain. He knew what their answer must be when the call came to them. They had forgotten their heritage no more than he. The Declaration of Independence was still their testament; the hundred millions were the true sons of the few millions of the days of Washington. And when the German Menace dared to forbid Americans to travel in safety on the seas the answer of America came instantly. Yes, there was something better than comfort and peace and wealth; there was freedom, there was the goal of helping humanity to throw off the beasts of prey! The world must be made safe for all men! The mailed fist must be shown that might _does not_ make right!

Germany notified the United States that she intended to carry on unrestricted submarine warfare, to become the lawless pirate of the seas. President Wilson handed the German Ambassador his passports and waited to see if Germany intended to carry out her threat. As usual, the House of Hohenzollern would not listen to reason. Germany turned pirate, throwing away the last vestige of any respect for law. And when this was plain the President went to Congress on April 2, 1917, and advised the representatives of the nation to accept the challenge of war thrust upon us by the German Empire.

“Let us be very clear,” said the President, “and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our objects are.... Our object ... is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles. Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people....

“We are now about to accept gauge of battle with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretentions and its power.... The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.”

Let us be thankful that our President could voice the same spirit in 1917 that Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence and that Lincoln proclaimed on the field at Gettysburg. Our country bore malice toward none, we wanted to be friends to all, we had no selfish desires for power or dominion. But as Lafayette heard the call to battle for the freedom of men in America in 1776, so America now heard the same call from the fields of Europe. On April 6, 1917, the United States formally declared war against the autocracy of Germany.

What were we fighting against? Against the old idea of feudalism that the ruler need respect no rights of the ruled, against the old Bourbon theory that the sovereign need obey none of the laws that govern the rest of humankind, against the principles of Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns that the people exist solely for the benefit of the ruling dynasties. All this Prussia had converted into the principle that the Fatherland is supreme, and that the people must obey the Fatherland in everything; and the autocrats of Prussia had made the Fatherland a savage monster, ruthless, unjust and cruel, devouring all it could to satisfy its greed. If you look back through history you will see that the crimes of all the despots are the crimes of Germany to-day and that whenever men were fighting tyranny, rapacity and cruelty they were fighting the same battle that America and her allies fight to-day.

More than that. In fighting for freedom we are fighting for our preservation. The world cannot exist one half slave, the other half free. Let tyranny succeed in Europe and it can only be a short time before it will look hungrily at America. The Menace must be destroyed before it grows so powerful that none can withstand it. “The time has come,” wrote President Wilson shortly after the declaration of war, “to conquer or submit.” Submission would have been to surrender all the principles of the republic, the country to which lovers of liberty had looked for more than a century to prove the actual realization of their dreams.

It is the German machine-made government, the autocratic ruling military caste, the idea that might makes right, and that small nations have no rights that big nations need respect, it is all these old and hideous beliefs of the Dark Ages and the era of despots that the liberty-loving nations are fighting to-day. The individual German is, after all, a human being like ourselves, though warped and twisted in his ideas of what is right and wrong by his selfish and barbarous government. The individual German may become a civilized man again, provided he can come to see the monstrous tyranny of his government. And for this reason President Wilson said to Congress in his speech of April 2, 1917, “We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow-men as pawns and tools.”

It was a war in fact deliberately determined upon and brought about by that same dark enemy of liberty that thrust Lafayette into an Austrian dungeon a century ago, that oppressed the people of Italy and wantonly imprisoned some of the noblest patriots that ever lived, that tore Alsace-Lorraine from France, and that has rattled its sabre and clanked its spurs and declared that war and destruction are the noblest objects of man. But the people have let themselves be treated like galley-slaves, have allowed that dark enemy of liberty to chain them to the benches and make them row that ship of state which is nothing less than a pirate bark upon the seas of the world. The people have been blind. Our President has tried to help them to see the light of freedom.

Treachery, deceit, lies, these have been the watchwords of the rulers of the Huns. When our government was still at peace with Germany her statesmen tried to make a secret agreement with Mexico that in case we should declare war the latter country should attack us and take our southwestern states. Again and again they lied to our Ambassador at Berlin and tried to intimidate him. Nothing has been sacred to them. They talk of religion and God and in the same breath outrage every teaching of Christianity. They have no respect for the great works of art of the world; cathedrals, libraries are destroyed without a thought other than to impress the enemy peoples with the frightfulness of their warfare. The world must be taught to fear them is their creed. And they have no more sense of humor than a stone. Over the slaughter of thousands of poor slave-driven soldiers the Kaiser can still send decorations to his sons, complimenting them and extolling their valor and generalship while all the world knows them to be mere pawns and puppets tricked out in the gaudy dress of the Hohenzollerns. Neither Kaiser nor generals nor statesmen have the least sense of humor, and a sense of humor is more than a saving grace, it is the mark of a sanity of judgment. But how can any sane judgment be found in a nation that thinks to frighten the rest of the world into submission by bombing hospital camps and Red Cross workers? There is no health in the monster. All the poisons of the past ages have collected in his blood.

America has never forgotten Lafayette. As John Quincy Adams said to him, he was ours “by that unshaken sentiment of gratitude for ... services which is a precious portion of our inheritance; ours by that tie of love, stronger than death, which has linked” Lafayette’s “name for the endless ages of time with the name of Washington.” In 1916 the old Château of Chavaniac, Lafayette’s birthplace, one hundred and fifty miles to the south of Paris, was put up for sale by the owner, a grandson of George Washington Lafayette. Patriotic Americans bought it, desiring to make a French Mount Vernon of the historic castle and grounds. At first it was intended to convert the château into a museum, to be filled with relics of Lafayette and Washington and the American Revolution, but the great needs that were facing France led to a change of plan. The castle should become more than a museum; it should be a home and school for as many children of France as could be provided for. This would have been Lafayette’s own wish, and in doing this the American society known as the French Heroes Lafayette Memorial has paid the noblest tribute to the great patriot. And the people of France, the most appreciative people in the world, have welcomed the gift and the spirit that underlay it.

Anatole France, the great French writer, has summed up the sentiment of his nation in glowing words. “American thought,” he says, “has had a beautiful inspiration in choosing the cradle of Lafayette, in which to preserve memoirs of American independence and to establish an institution for the public good. In preserving in the Château de Chavaniac d’Auvergne the testimonies and relics of the war which united under the banner of liberty, Washington and Rochambeau, and in founding the Lafayette museum, ties which have bound the two great democracies to an eternal friendship have been commemorated. But this was not enough for the inexhaustible liberality of the Americans. It went further, and it was decided that upon this illustrious corner of France, the children of those who died in defense of liberty, should find a refuge and home, and that, deprived of their natural protection, some of these children should be adopted by the great American people, while others of delicate constitution should recover health and strength on this robust land. It is a large heart that these men reveal in preserving a grateful remembrance of past services, and in coming to the assistance of the orphaned of a past generation who fought for their cause a hundred and forty years ago. May I venture, as an aged Frenchman and a lover of liberty, to proffer to America the tribute of my heartfelt homage?”

And so the castle where Lafayette was born and the fields and woods he knew so well in his boyhood among the Auvergne Mountains are now to be the home of generations of French children whose fathers gave their lives that the world might be set free from tyrants and war cease to be. What could be more fitting! It is one of the beautiful things of history that Americans could do this for France. It is in such ways that the spirit of brotherly love may some day encircle the earth.

For all wise men know that it is not riches, nor material possessions nor great territories that make either men or nations noble. The United States might cover half the globe, her wealth be beyond what man has ever dreamed of, her population run into the hundreds of millions, and yet our country be only hated and feared by other peoples. That was the future the rulers of Germany had been planning for their nation; so they might possess material things they were willing, nay, they were glad that the rest of the world should hate them. They had no wisdom at all; they had forgotten all the lessons of history. Christ might never have taught, churches never been more than bricks and stone, patriots and poets never have striven to show men their ideals, so far as these rulers, and through them their people, were concerned. Lafayette knew the truth, but the spirit of Lafayette was what Germany and Austria most hated; they are trying to-day to imprison that spirit just as they did imprison the man himself when they had the chance.

Nations, like men, live to serve, not to conquer for the lust of power. Only when nations have learned that are they worthy of admiration. Had America drawn her cloak about her, said “I am safe between my two oceans,” made money out of the sufferings of other peoples, held fast to safety and ease, then America would have betrayed every ideal of her founders, every hope of the men who have loved and worshipped their “land of the free.” Only when America said there were greater things than ease and safety, that the liberty of all peoples was indissolubly bound up with her own freedom, did she show herself as the great republic in spirit as well as in name; only when she was willing to serve others did she rise to the true heights of her national soul.

One of our poets, James Russell Lowell, has written the beautiful line, “‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe, when for the truth he ought to die!” The truth of that was known to the farmers of 1775 who took their guns and at Lexington and Concord fired “the shot heard round the world.” And the same truth was known to the men of 1861 who went out to keep the republic their fathers had given them. For we have all received a great legacy from those who have gone before, and now we know what it is, and have again gone forth to fight for truth.

We know that this is the greatest of all crusades. We know that men must be set free. Tyrants, whether they be emperors and kings or governments that place greed above justice, must be cleared from the earth. This last and greatest of tyrants, this league of the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs, has by its very brutality and injustice opened men’s eyes and let loose a new spirit in the world. Russia was autocratic, her ruling house of Romanoff was in many ways true brother of the other tyrants, but the people of Russia felt the new spirit and have already driven their Czar from his throne. When we think of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, and all that France had to endure on the hard road to liberty we may well imagine that dark days lie before the Russian people, but in time France rose like a phœnix from the ashes of revolt, and when we see what France is to-day we may look confidently to the future of this other great people.

For the spirit liveth! The truest words that were ever spoken! And the spirit that fills France to-day, the spirit that fills England and Belgium and America and all the allies, yes, even that same spirit in Russia, will carry mankind a long way on the road to liberty. For no one can conquer that spirit; it is the immortal part of man.

Let us read again the glorious lines of Julia Ward Howe in “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” lines as true in this crusade as they were in the crusade against slavery for which they were written.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.

“I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the evening’s dews and damps; I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps. His day is marching on.

“I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel: ‘As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; Let the hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on.’

“He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat; Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on.

“In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.”

America heard the call; America saw that there were no limits to the evils of the powers of darkness unless the powers of light should fight them; and on April 6, 1917, America declared her purpose to do so. As the small American republic once heard with rejoicing and confidence the word that Lafayette and Rochambeau were to bring aid westward across the Atlantic, so now the great French republic heard with the same emotions the declaration that American soldiers were to bring succor to them eastward across the same sea. The last great neutral nation, immense in power of men and wealth and energy, had cast in its lot with the forces that were fighting for freedom. The Allies, weary and worn with more than two years of fighting, looked to this fresh, great people to bring them victory.

A month after we joined the cause of liberty French generals and statesmen came to America. At their head was Marshal Joffre, the hero of the Marne. He visited Mount Vernon and laid a wreath on the tomb of Washington; he traveled through the country and everywhere he found statues of Lafayette and Joan of Arc and memories of great Frenchmen. To America Joffre stood for the ideals of France, courage, endurance, nobility of thought and action. Not since Lafayette’s visit in 1824 had the people of the United States welcomed any visitor with such love and admiration.

The tour of Marshal Joffre was the outward symbol of the new union. Instantly the United States, a peaceful nation with a very small standing army, an insignificant merchant marine, its farms devoted to supplying its own needs, its factories busy with the commerce of peace, changed to a nation at war. It faced a stupendous problem. From its untrained men it must create great armies, fitted to cope with and defeat the fighting machine that the enemy had spent years in building. It must have the ships to carry those millions of soldiers to Europe and it must supply them in Europe with the food, the clothing, the guns, the ammunition they would need. That in itself was a task beside which the greatest military achievements in history paled into insignificance. Napoleon crossed the Alps, but he could feed his army on the supplies of the countries on the other side of the mountains. We must supply everything, must transport America into Europe, and then keep America there by an unending bridge of boats.

More than that, we must do our part in building ships to provision our allies, ships that should replace those the pirates of the sea were sinking daily. And we must feed not only our own people, but the people of starving countries, and particularly the people of Belgium, whom we had helped since the war began. Here in the broad and fertile land that lay between the two oceans was to be the granary and factory and training-camp that were to make liberty victorious. The nation turned to its new task with the same indomitable energy that had conquered the wilderness in the days of the pioneers.

At the call of the love of country men instantly volunteered. Congress passed the Conscription Act, and young men who had dreamed of peaceful occupations went to be trained as soldiers. Ceaselessly, tirelessly the great work went on. Americans landed in France to reinforce the volunteers who were already there as engineers, as motor-drivers, as aviators. Railroads had to be built, and docks and factories; the most skilled men in every line of work hurried to be in the vanguard. Then General Pershing reached France as commander-in-chief of the vast American army that was to come. As we had received Joffre so France now welcomed Pershing. And he went to Lafayette’s tomb and laid a wreath upon it, declaring that America had come to the aid of France.

Great armies are not built in a day, nor are gigantic fleets of merchant ships. Mistakes must always be made, and there are always critics. But in spite of critics and mistakes the American government, and under it the people, went on with the work in hand. Men became skilled soldiers and ships were launched, and at the end of the first year after our entrance into the war our troops were in the trenches, fighting side by side with their allies, and a steady stream of more troops flowed day by day from west to east. America had already thrown the first part of her power into the conflict and given earnest of the greater power to come.

Americans have already given their lives for freedom. First there were the eager, intrepid young spirits who volunteered as flying-men, in the French Foreign Legion, in the regiments of England, in the driving of ambulances at the call of mercy. How gloriously their sacrifices will live in the pages of history and in the hearts of their countrymen! And then there have been men of the first American army, such men as the private soldiers Hay, Enright, and Gresham, above whose graves in France is the inscription “Here lie the first soldiers of the Illustrious Republic of the United States who fell on French soil for Justice and Liberty November 3, 1917.” Truly have they proved the truth of the Latin motto, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

What is the lesson of Lafayette, of Washington, of Lincoln, of all men who have put the ideal of justice and liberty above their material wants, of the men who have fought in France and in all parts of the world for the cause of freedom? The lesson is simply this, that service and self-sacrifice for others is the noblest goal of man, that life is given us not to keep but to spend, and that to follow the teachings of Christ is the only road to happiness for men or nations.