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We are not a warlike nation; patterned, rather, for keen trading;

Some will say the style is English, that from them we get the cut;

East and west our ships went speeding, decks awash from heavy lading;

Bowsprits poked in every harbor, never seeking quarrels; but

When our rich Levant trade came, and Tripoli claimed tribute from it,

Tribute paid by other navies trading down the midland sea,—

We, the least and last of nations, blew her gunboats to Mahomet,

Blew the faithful to their houris, made the straits forever free.

We are not a warlike nation; we had states to form and settle,

We had stuffs to manufacture, till our markets felt the glut;

We were busy getting headway, busy panning out the metal

From the human dust that reached us from the old-world digging; but

We could slow up for a moment, just to show our elder brother

That the bird we put our faith in was not stuffed upon his perch;

And we told him through the cannon, in the sea fights' reek and smother,

We had searched the Scripture duly, but had found no "right to search."

We are not a warlike nation; peace sometimes keeps men's souls sleeping;

Some of us still sought our harvests in the old barbaric rut

Worn by captive feet, till, one day, party feeling upward leaping,

Broke into a flame and blazed on all the startled nations; but

When the smoke from red fields lifted, when the armies were disbanded,

Better armies, all the world knows, never cartridge bit or rammed,

Proud of their own deeds, and proud, too, of the men who, lighter handed,

Fought them long and ofttimes whipped them, slavery was dead and damned.

We are not a warlike nation; we love life far more than dying;

We have little time for swagger and the military

strut;

Let old Europe pay big armies; we have better fish for frying,

We have nobler tools for manhood than the sword and rifle; but

Since we are a Christian nation, and the blood our veins are filled with Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Teuton

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When we see weak women starving, helpless, illstarred children killed with

Filthy water, air empoisoned, just to eke out Spanish rule;

Since we find that Cuba's Cuban, and the Spaniard but a tenant

Who defiles the house he lives in, then our duty stands out plain;

We are masters in these waters, at the mainmast flies our pennant,

End this hell on earth, or, hark ye, eastward lies the path to Spain.

ROBERT CAMERON ROGERS

VIVIANI AND JOFFRE

LAFAYETTE came to America from France in 1777 to help us win liberty and independence. Viviani and Joffre came to America from France in 1917, to urge us to make haste to help France, Great Britain, Italy, Belgium, Russia and the other allies in their war for freedom.

Viviani was at the head of the government of France. when Germany, in spite of her solemn promise, sent her armies through Belgium, burning villages and killing women and children as they went, and advanced into France, hoping to take Paris.

Joffre was in command of the heroic French army that suddenly turned, when Paris was almost reached, and drove the Germans back in defeat in the Battle of the Marne. These brave Frenchmen, Viviani says, answered, as children answer, the call of their mother. All the history of France was behind them. They were fighting not only for France but for democracy everywhere and for all time.

"Stand with us, Britons!" cried Henry Ward Beecher, the American, in 1863, when he went to England to ask for sympathy in the war against slavery. "Come to us, brothers!" cried Viviani to the men of the United States, "to the fight we are fighting for right and truth and justice!" And within three months there was an American army in France. Frenchmen, Britons, Russians, Italians, Americans were standing together for right, truth, justice, freedom and democracy.

THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE

By RENÉ VIVIANI, Chicago, May 4, 1917

As children answer the call of their mother, so the children of France answered the call of

their country.

The first shock was a fearful one. I do not think that in all history a single people ever remained more resolute and dauntless under the tempest of steel and fire that was unchained against us. We stood undaunted; but our hearts felt the impact of an avalanche of two millions of men.

The German machine was well organized. For forty years no cog was lacking in it. In that machine that knew not the rule of the individual, in which a man counted for nothing, in which the machine was all, in that machine all was ready.

And you know what happened. Serbia trampled under foot, murdered, simply because it was weak; Belgium summoned to throw open her frontiers to her invader, and refusing; hurling herself, in spite of her material weakness, in the full splendor of moral greatness and strength, because she would leave no stain on the pages of

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