Part 7 (2/2)

Chapter VI

STAND FAST, YE FREE!

I

From the outset of this war two things have been clear to me.

First, if the war continued it was absolutely inevitable that the United States would be either drawn into it by the impulse of democratic sympathies or forced into it by the instinct of self-preservation.

Second, the most adequate person in the world to decide when and how the United States should accept the great responsibility of fighting beside France and Great Britain for peace and for the American ideal of freedom was President Wilson.

His sagacity, his patience, his knowledge of the varied elements that are blended in our nationality, his sincere devotion to pacific conceptions of progress, his unwavering loyalty to the cause of liberty secured by law, national and international, made him the one man of all others to whom this great decision could most safely be confided.

The people of the United States believed this in the election of 1916.

They trusted him sincerely then because ”he kept us out of the war”

until the inevitable hour. No less sincerely do they trust him now when he declares that the hour has come when we must ”dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have”

(President's Message to Congress, April 2, 1917), to defend ourselves and the world from the Imperial German Government, which is waging ”a warfare against mankind.”

In the quiet, but never idle, American Legation at The Hague there was an excellent opportunity to observe and study the incredible blunders by which Germany led us, and the unspeakable insults and injuries by which she compelled us, to enter the war.

Our adherence to the Monroe Doctrine was, at first, an obstacle to that entrance. Believing that European governments ought not to interfere in domestic affairs on the American continents, we admitted the converse of that proposition, and held that America should not meddle with European controversies or conflicts. But we soon came to a realizing sense of the ominous fact that Germany was the one nation of Europe which openly despised and flouted the Monroe Doctrine as an outworn superst.i.tion. Her learned professors (followed by a few servile American imitators) had poured ridicule and scorn upon it in unreadable books. Her actions in the West Indies and South America showed her contempt for it as a ”bit of American bluff.” Gradually it dawned upon us that if France were crushed and England crippled our dear old Monroe Doctrine would stand a poor chance against a victorious and supercilious Imperial German Government. As I wrote to Was.h.i.+ngton in August, 1914, their idea was to ”lunch in Paris, dine in London, and spend the night somewhere in America.”

Another real barrier to our taking any part in the war was our sincere, profound, traditional love of peace. This does not mean, of course, that America is a country of pacifists. Our history proves the contrary. Our conscientious objections to certain shameful things, like injustice, and dishonor, and tyranny, and systematic cruelty, are stronger than our conscientious objection to fighting. But our national policy is averse to war, and our national inst.i.tutions are not favorable to its sudden declaration or swift prosecution.

In effect, the United States is a pacific nation of fighting men.

What was it, then, that forced such a nation into a conflict of arms?

It was the growing sense that the very existence of this war was a crime against humanity, that it need not and ought not to have been begun, and that the only way to put a stop to it was to join the Allies, who had tried to prevent its beginning, and who are still trying to bring it to the only end that will be a finality.

It was also the conviction that the Monroe Doctrine, so far from being an obstacle, was an incentive to our entrance. The real basis of that doctrine is the right of free peoples, however small and weak, to maintain by common consent their own forms of government. This Germany and Austria denied. The issue at stake was no longer merely European. It was worldwide.

The Monroe Doctrine could not be saved in one continent if its foundation was destroyed in another. The only way to save it was to broaden it.

The United States, having grown to be a World Power, must either uphold everywhere the principles by which it had been begotten and made great or sink into the state of an obese, helpless parasite. Its sister republics would share its fate.

But more than this: it was the flagrant and contemptuous disregard of all the principles of international law and common humanity by the Imperial German Government that alarmed and incensed us. The list of crimes and atrocities ordered in this war by the mysterious and awful power that rules the German people--which I prefer to call, for the sake of brevity and impersonality, the Potsdam gang--is too long to be repeated here. The levying of unlawful tribute from captured cities and villages; the use of old men, women, and children as a screen for advancing troops; the extortion of military information from civilians by cruel and barbarous methods; the burning and destruction of entire towns as a punishment for the actual or suspected hostile deeds of individuals, and the brutal avowal that in this punishment it was necessary that ”the innocent shall suffer with the guilty” (see the letter of General von Nieber to the burgomaster of Wavre, August 27, and the proclamation of Governor-General von der Goltz, September 2, 1914); the introduction of the use of asphyxiating gas as a weapon of war (at Ypres, April 22, 1915); the poisoning of wells; the reckless and needless destruction of priceless monuments of art like the Cathedral of Reims; the deliberate and treacherous violation of the Red Cross, which is the sign of mercy and compa.s.sion for all Christendom; the bombardment of hospitals and the cold-blooded slaughter of nurses and wounded men; the sinking of hospital s.h.i.+ps with their helpless and suffering company--all these, and many other infamies committed by order of the Potsdam gang made the heart of America hot and angry against the power which devised and commanded such brutality. True, they were not, technically speaking, crimes directed against the United States. They did not injure our material interests. They injured only our souls and the world in which we have to live. They were vivid ill.u.s.trations of the inward nature of that German Kultur whose superiority, the German professors say, ”is rooted in the unfathomable depths of its moral const.i.tution.” (Deutsche Reden in Schwerer Zeit, II, p. 23.)

But there were two criminal blunders--or perhaps it would be more accurate to call them two series of obstinate and stupid offenses against international law--by which the Potsdam gang directly a.s.sailed the sovereignty and neutrality of the United States and forced us to choose between the surrender of our national integrity and a frank acceptance of the war which Germany was waging, not only against our principles and interests, but against the things which in our judgment were essential to the welfare of mankind and to the existence of honorable and decent relations among the peoples of the world.

The first of these offenses was the cynical and persistent attempt to take advantage of the good nature and unsuspiciousness of the United States for the establishment of an impudent system of German espionage; to use our territory as a base of conspiracy and treacherous hostilities against countries with which we were at peace; and to lose no opportunity of mobilizing the privileges granted by ”these idiotic Yankees” (quotation from the military attache of the Imperial German Emba.s.sy at Was.h.i.+ngton)--including, of course, the diplomatic privilege--to make America unconsciously help in playing the game of the Potsdam gang.

The second of these offenses was the illegal, piratical submarine warfare which the Potsdam gang ordered and waged against the merchant s.h.i.+pping of the world, thereby destroying the lives and the property of American citizens and violating the most vital principle of our steadfast contention for the freedom of the sea.

The message of the President to Congress on April 2, 1917, marked these two offenses as the main causes which made it impossible for the United States to maintain longer an official att.i.tude of neutrality toward the German Government, which ”did what it pleased and told its people nothing.” The President generously declared that the source of these offenses ”lay not in any hostile feeling or purpose of the German people toward us.” That was a magnanimous declaration, and we sincerely hope it may prove true.

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