Слике страница
PDF
ePub

ball across? What's the matter with you! Buck up!" And sometimes the moment comes when the supporters of the team in the earnestness of their support even shout, "Take him out!" That, as Dr. Powell, speaking on his tours under State Councils of National Defense (which he describes elsewhere in this issue), has pointed out, is what Americans must keep saying to their Government. And the Government can surely be in no doubt that those who are shouting to it to speed up are the most earnest supporters of the country's cause.

The enemies at home are not those who are showing the defects or urging haste, but are those who are talking about peace by negotiations, or about a stalemate, or about the British and French doing it all, or are harping on vain regrets, or are saying" Perhaps." There is no room in this free country for men or women who by their talk are robbing the people of their will to win and keep their freedom.

This is a people's war. It may take years, it may exact from us a terrible price for our past negligence; but it is going to end in the defeat of Germany.

Whatever is in store for us during this German offensive, we must keep our heads as steady as the British keep theirs and our hearts as high as French hearts.

We are freemen, fighting for liberty. We are not blind men to be guided, but freemen to be led. We want leadership, and whatever leadership will bring us to victory we will follow.

IN HOC SIGNO VINCES

On Palm Sunday, March 24, the Rev. S. De Lancey Townsend, D.D., rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church of All Angels, New York City, preached a sermon which, we think, must answer the perplexity of many men and women of faith who are wondering what the horrors of the great combat on the western front really mean.

We reprint a large part of this sermon here in place of an editorial article because it is what we also would say to those of our non-combatant readers who are often oppressed by the terrible vicarious sacrifice which is being made for us on the battle-lines:

"Then saith Pilate unto him, Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and power to release thee?"-John xix. 10.

[ocr errors]

No man taketh it [my life] from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again."-John x. 18.

"This is your hour, and the power of darkness.”—Luke xxii. 53.

The power of evil casts its shadow upon our path. Now is his hour and the power of darkness. In other years we may have asked questions concerning the experience of Jesus.

To-day we are interrogating our own experience. The ascendency of evil baffles us because we have put our trust in the good, and the fate of goodness perplexes us. Some are asking, What is truth?" "What is goodness?"

Pilate is puzzled and perplexed.

Pilate was a product of a military Kultur.

[blocks in formation]

The war lord with his millions of trained fighters, his mammoth mortars, his biggest of all big guns, his unlimited stores of munitions, his flame-throwers, his murderous gases, his Zeppelins and his submarines, his perfected panoply of destruc tion, says to Albert of Belgium: "Art thou a king?"

Oh, the scorn of it! How can a man be "king" without the power to crucify?

We are just beginning to appreciate the Prussian. The world's Calvary is exposing the Prussian. The Prussian has a God and a religion and a philosophy. But until the world came to the "place of a skull "it vainly assumed that "God" and "goodness" and "truth" meant the same in all languages and to all peoples -even to the Prussian.

66

But now we remember that the Passion Play was not a Prussian product. Now we learn, in the revealing light of the world war, that "truth" and goodness" are to the Prussian simply terms which are synonymous with physical comfort and convenience. To the Prussian truth and goodness rest for their authority upon the power to "crucify." Their content rests on physical force. They mean what military power makes them mean. They are not spiritual verities, as with the rest of the world.

There are no "spiritual" beings in Prussian thought. "God" is but a term to typify national purpose, national char acter, national genius. The Prussian God has never ceased to be from barbaric days the God with the hammer-Thor-the terrible destroyer. The war lord never once refers to God as revealed in Jesus Christ. To the war lord, as to Pilate, Jesus is but a poor fanatic, an idealist, doomed to inevitable defeat and destruction in a world of materialism.

Prussia has been worshiping a God who could delight in crucified Canadians, ravished women, and murdered infants. We didn't know it until the world came to the " place of a skull."

Prussia worshiped a God who could approve the poisoning of wells, the dissemination of disease germs in neutral countries, the infection and the return of infected prisoners.

power.

Prussia worshiped a God who could bless the utter disregard of treaties and the plighted word. Prussia asks, with Pilate, "What is truth?" Prussia says, with Pilate, "Truth is deter mined by the power to crucify." That is the basis of Prussian It looks upon men and women as mere animals, whose highest satisfactions are met by warm clothing, comfortable housing, clean streets, plenty of food, plenty of parks and music, plenty of pensions for unenployed and sick and aged. As long as the people have these they will be docile; animals will rebel from bodily hunger, but not for freedom, not for truth.

But the All Highest Hun reveals himself when his Lucife Ludendorff declares: "We have three hundred thousand men whom we are willing to throw away in an offensive for such and such a position." I call him "Lucifer" because he lets in

Pilate was widely experienced in human beings of various light for even the dulled optics of the German masses, whe countries and tongues and religions.

But this man puzzled him.

"Art thou a king?" he asked.

Pilate knew "kings" and thought he understood "power." He was vaguely conscious that this maltreated prisoner before him was possessed of power-a strange, mysterious sort of influence and a personal poise characteristic of men of power.

He seemed to hope that in some fashion this person would exercise his mysterious power to extricate himself from his present peril. Time and time again he besought his prisoner to do something that would relieve Pilate from an unwelcome responsibility; and at last he seems to come to the conclusion that he was mistaken and that the man was, after all, but a harmless fanatic-a victim of a delusion.

Therefore the ruthless Roman finally feels that he can safely yield the foolish man to the fury of the mob.

Pilate respected physical force. He had only contempt for

will presently be moved to inquire of him (after they first inquire of themselves), "Who gave these men to you to use mere cannon fodder for your personal purposes? How is it tha it is always we who must be slaughtered, while the shadow death never comes nigh you or your sons? After all, are we not paying rather a high price for clean streets, comfortable houses warm clothes, and six meals a day, with pensions for sickness and old age? If we are slaughtered for your holiday, what sa isfaction do these privileges provide?" Some one says:

66

War is not hell so much as it is an occasi for the display of pre-existing hell in human souls which was matured before the conflict began." Calvary shows up Pilate and it shows up Christ.

So to-day men and women and nations are being revealed by the light from the cross. Prussia and the pacifists are per plexed, as Pilate was perplexed, because the son of man France, the son of man in Serbia, the son of man in Italy.

and in Japan and China, and in England and America, will not bow down to the power to crucify.

66

We have professing Christians among us to-day who say: “ Let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him and accept him. Let us have peace. Let us end this terrible bloodshed and suffering and expenditure of money."

Then there are others who say, "To go on is suicide. If this war goes on, none of us will have any property whatever. Think of the taxes already!"

Then there is the man who says, frankly, "We're beaten; why not admit it? Germany has the brains, she has the training, she now has resources, and Europe is at her mercy. I have thought all along that our part in this conflict was foolishness. I am a materialist, I believe that materialistic efficiency is more than a match for the moonshine of idealism. Don't throw money and life away for an idea. Accept facts."

Are you willing to sit down at a council table with those who have wrecked every precious and hard-won achievement of the human soul through the toil of thousands of years?

Are you willing to accept the dictates of diabolism to secure creature comfort?

Are you willing to accept the power to crucify as supreme? From such a one let us turn to the trenches and hear the glorious and inspiring and uplifting testimony of the tired, begrimed, wounded, battered, and dying, but not defeated, sons of men. "No man taketh our lives from us, but we lay them down of ourselves. We have power to lay down our lives, and we have power to take them again.

They have seen the spirit of evil and his works. They have met him, and they are absolutely certain of victory. They have found that the supreme power is not the power to crucify, but the power to be crucified, and to meet crucifixion with a cheer. "In hoc signo vinces."

The other day there came a fateful telegram to a fond father whose boy had been among our first to volunteer as an aviator, in France.

up

As the of yellow paper scrap fell to the floor that father's lifted eyes were filled with tears, but his whole countenance was illumined with joy as he triumphantly exclaimed: “He's won!"

"O happy boy, you have not lost your years!

You lived them through and through in those brief days
When stood facing death! They are not lost!
They rushed together as the waters rush

you

From many sources; you had all in one.

Why should we mourn

Your happiness? You burned clear flame, while he
Who treads the endless march of dusty years
Grows blind and choked with dust before he dies,
And dying goes back to the primal dust,
And has not lived so 'long' in those long years
As you in your few, vibrant, golden months
When, like a spendthrift, you gave all you were!"

"GOD AIN'T DEAD YET!"

The Happy Eremite invaded the domain of Maria, the cook, on his way to the cellar to attend to the furnace. Invading the kitchen with Maria in it was not the ordeal that it was under the government of despots less benevolent-Lena, the Finn, for instance, or Carrie, the Anarchist. For Maria was a colored lady from West Virginia, a relic of an age dead and gone, when the hired girl was a part of the family and loved every member of it, and when no man had yet frantically drawn the attention of his fellow-citizens to the fact that time is money. Time was neither money nor anything else to Maria. She had a way of rising at four or five or six in the morning and working until ten or eleven or twelve at night, taking her meals when she was hungry and sleeping when she was tired. She was generally tired at dish-washing time, and had a way of sitting down at the kitchen table and dropping to sleep for an hour or two, while the dishes waited and the Lady Eremite wrung her hands in despair. Time, it happened, was a word not in her lexicon. For the Lady Eremite, who had a prejudice in favor of prompt meals, this lack was a frequent source of sighing and helpless lifting of hands. She had to tell herself more often than she liked

that a kind heart, after all, was more than promptitude, a reflection of which the Happy Eremite reminded her at intervals when her efficiency as a housewife threatened to overwhelm her appreciation of Maria's qualities as a human being.

For the Happy Eremite liked Maria. She was a slight, agile person with a mouth that could have surrounded a popover without denting it anywhere. Her indifference to time, which had a way of gently wrecking the nice calculations of the Lady Eremite, had served her, on the other hand, to good effect in defying time's ravages. She never told how old she was, but it took no mathematical genius, adding the years she said she had been in this place and the years she had been in that, to calculate that she must be moving toward sixty. She might have been anything between forty and seventy.

The Happy Eremite had always found it rather pleasant, on the way to the furnace, to stop a minute for a friendly exchange of courtesies. Maria did not read the papers. Maria did not read anything. Maria did not know how to read. So the Happy Eremite always gave her the news, with a bit of banter thrown in. But on this particular evening he did not feel like quips and levity. The news from France was like a cold hand clutching his heart. "There's a terrible battle going on, Maria," he said, rather solemnly.

"Who's doin' it?"

"The Germans."

[blocks in formation]

66

Spanish or English, have it your own way," she muttered under her breath. Amounts to the same thing."

"Well, we'll call them the English," he went on. "The Germans are coming for them along a fifty-mile front. That means that along a section of the English line as long as from here to New York there's a cannon every ten or twelve feet and a million. Germans rushing forward with bayonets."

Maria laid aside the shaker and stood erect. There was a troubled look in her black eyes. "Say, boss, I sure am glad I ain't no soldier tryin' to stop 'em."

"It's a terrible business.'

She drew her brows together. "Ain't it the truth!" she exclaimed.

"The Germans want to get to Paris," he went on. They don't seem to care how many men it costs them. They are sending men by thousands and hundreds of thousands right into our guns, but it's taking thousands and hundreds of thousands of men to hold them back even a little while. They say two hundred thousand on our side are wounded or dead."

Maria lifted her head, and there was a look about her huge mouth and behind the sharply contrasted black and white of her eyes that seemed strange and out of place there, a look of grave exaltation that made a little old colored lady from West Virginia suddenly a person of dignity and power. "God ain't dead yet!" she snapped.

There was a curious mingling of rebuke and defiance in her voice-rebuke for the Happy Eremite, who had allowed his faith to waver, defiance toward the far-away enemy threatening her country.

The Happy Eremite looked at her and felt a little ashamed of himself for his exhibition of dismay.

"Right you are, Maria," he said, softly.

"Jest you believe it," she muttered, turning to the sink and talking more to herself than to him. "The trouble is when folks git scared they forget that God's alive.'

The Happy Eremite proceeded to the furnace, threw on a shovelful of coal, opened the draught, and took to pacing up and down the cellar floor while he waited for the coal gas to burn off. He was trying to recall the words of a story he had loved as a boy. They that be with us are more than they that be with them," he murmured. "That's it. And then Elijah or

666

Elisha or somebody opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha."

66

He closed the draughts and turned off the cellar light.
"God ain't dead yet," he cried, swearing grimly to himself.
God ain't dead yet."

WHY ARE THE SOUTHERN SLAVS ANTI-GERMAN?

A

BY PIERRE

S regards the internments, they are nothing but whole sale massacre. Merely from the region occupied by Austria-Hungary more than 150,000 Serbian subjects (civilians only) have been interned, including several thousands of old men over sixty years of age, several thousand women, and even children from eight to fifteen years. . . . About thirty per cent have died up to the present of hunger and of cold. The sufferers devour the grass they find along the hedges, although this kind of food is strictly forbidden..

...

"Several Austro-Hungarian doctors attached to the camps declined to see more than ten patients a day, at a time when the death rate in the camps was from twenty to thirty a day.

"The whole method of the Austrian administration is directed by the inexorable purpose of exterminating the last remnants of the Serbian people." (From the Memorandum to the Russo-Hollando-Scandinavian Committee of the Socialist Party at Stockholm.)

"This memorandum is not a work of hate. It is a cry of distress. . . . What is needed is that at least the Socialists of the Central Empires should know and should act." (C. Huysmans, Secretary of the Socialist International Bureau.)

The Socialists of Germany have known these things for two years, and have done nothing. There was an easy opportunity for them of putting elementary human principles into practice, of coming to the rescue of a stricken group, with out even being disloyal to their Kaiser. Relief work only was wanted. But German liberals do not put their principles into practice.

In the case of Armenia, they could claim that distance prevented them from interfering efficiently. But Serbia lies only a few hours from Vienna and Berlin, and the southern Slav race begins at Marburg and Klagenfurt, where the German ends. I consider that German liberals have shut their eyes because German interest demanded the annihilation of the Serbian race. Nobody is more opposed than I am to wholesale accusations based on local instances. Still, when performed on such a scale, atrocities become a historical factor, a lasting drawback to pacification. What understanding will be possible between the people of Germany and the Yugoslavs after these deeds?

The world war had its direct origin in the fact that AustriaHungary, decaying and old, wanted to inflict on Serbia a punishment for being young and prosperous. The example given by Serbian freedom and vitality was dangerous for the millions of southern Slavs incorporated by force in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These subject people were beginning to envy the fate of their independent brothers from Serbia and to agitate for liberty. This is why Austria waged war (it is strange how many people still fail to see in this a sufficient cause for the conflict). The Yugoslav spirit was in opposition to German ambitions in the southeast, and the Germans soon discovered that this opposition was irreconcilable and growing as education and national consciousness developed among the Yugoslav race, in spite of all efforts to prevent it.

Before 1914 there had been many episodes of persecution in Bosnia, Dalmatia, and Croatia, and the best known is the famous Agram trial in 1908, when the Hungarian administration was shamefully exposed to the world for having practiced forgery in the prosecution. I traveled through Bosnia some time before the war, and, although the Austrians had occupied the country for thirty years, it all looked as if they had just conquered it. There was nothing but military occupation, strategic railways, officers haughtily aloof from the population, and I remember an old merchant of Sarajevo who refused to sell anything to me because I had talked to him in German.

The real war of extermination against the Yugoslavs began in 1914 with the tragic and ludicrous ultimatum of July 23. Serbia submitted to terms which Vienna had thought unaccept

DE LANUX

"

op

able, and then Austria-Hungary did the incredible thing of declaring war on a nation after it had already yielded. Austria-Hungary alone proved incapable of “ punishing' Serbia. The invading army was repulsed after a crushing de feat. It needed the help of Germany and Bulgaria, in 1915, to break the indomitable little nation. But in the meantime pression went on against the Yugoslav subjects of the Empire with an untold cruelty. More than one hundred and twenty thousand people were deported to the interior of Hungary in order to eradicate the national element. The documents we have on that policy of suppression could fill a heavy book: these are only a few cases. An engineer at Trebinje saw thirtyseven persons taken to the gallows at one time; six women were among them. A military driver told of once crossing a road where from every tree there hung a corpse. A high priest enjoying much consideration was hanged in the market-place. On the road from his prison the old man sang popular Serbian songs; at the last minute he addressed the people who formed a circle and said: "Look, and remember how the Serbians die!" Then he put the rope around his own neck.

At the Vienna Parliament a Yugoslav Deputy, TresicPavisic, who had been able to escape torture, made appalling revelations :

"All the educated and decent people were arrested, interned. ruined, condemned, executed. Anybody too young or too old had to starve, and the rest were stricken with terror, demoral ized, dishonored.

"At Mostar, at Doboj, at Arad, where the patriots were interned, the jailer, Gaspar Scholier, chose the hostages that were to be executed later. Only with money could he be appeased. The victims were chosen during the night. The hideous figure of Scholier, surrounded by bayonets, came silently in. In these nights of terror more than one prisoner's hair turned white Those who wanted to live on had to show by the movement of their hands how many bank notes they were worth."

Interminable, monotonous, is the list of horrors. I do not speak of the ghastly deeds of Austro-Hungarian fighting troop in Serbia, which Dr. Reiss, from Switzerland, recorded in his famous report. I speak of the regular administration in regions peopled by Yugoslavs, within or without the Empire.

This is not local. It is happening over an area which is approxi mately the size of England. The Parliaments and the press have known of it, although the censorship tried to hide the most shameful facts. For I have told only of what political oppres sion did in a spirit of fear, seeing revolt everywhere, among students, among children, and striking blindly on all sides. But the worst was done in cecupied Serbia by systematic adminis tration, through police and army forces, when the men from Austria-Hungary tried to get rich as quickly as they could when private confiscation existed under all forms, each officer enjoying an uncontrolled power to seize and take away anything he pleased. The rate of exchange for Serbian money was fond bly depreciated for the purpose of speculation. In France the Prussians were famous for carrying away the clocks. In Serbis the Austrians carried away everything. Protests? The freedom of opinion is such that any printing is forbidden, menu cards. Every man, woman, or child must salute any Austrian officer or policeman. Two students of the University of Belgrade were condemned to receive seventy-five blows with a stick for failing to salute a petty officer in a car. In that cit a certain Lieutenant Wiedmann enjoys unlimited power over the lives and liberties of all the inhabitants. Several thousan people have been interned by his orders.

even that of

The courts do not prevent robbing. They legalize it. The deal with human life with great indifference, and on the depo sition of secret agents of the lowest class. As an instance, tr shooting or hanging of thirty-five peasants with the schoolmaste

Glishitch and the imprisonment of two hundred and fifty men and women in the village of Ramatya (district of Gruja).

The memorandum of Stockholm, from which we quote this, contains thirty pages of similar facts.

As for the part of Serbia occupied by the Bulgarians, the memorandum, although it draws an academic distinction between the rulers and the people of Bulgaria, says that conditions are much worse and more cruel there, and that the inhabitants are envying the fate of their kinsmen under Austrian administration.

The Germans have pretended and declared that the Serbians were in a backward condition, and that they were going to benefit from a higher Kultur. The truth is that Serbia, although not rich, had an evenly distributed wealth and a perfectly democratic Constitution, and was in advance of Bosnia and Transylvania, for instance, as far as prosperity, education, etc., are concerned. Now she is reduced to such distress that only rapid and efficient help can save her valiant population from further destruction. Only one Swiss and one American mission have gone

there since the occupation, and visitors from Bohemia who helped
to expose those ignoble and stupid methods of administration.
A conclusion has to be drawn. It is that the thieves and
hangmen from Vienna, Budapest, and Sofia have signed their
own condemnation. Now the Yugoslav party has joined the
Czechoslovaks in an uncompromising claim for independence.
Enough children, enough women, have escaped to rebuild a new
Yugoslav generation which will be more irreconcilable to Ger-
manism than that which is dying in our cause.

Martyrs do not die in vain. To-day the world is aware that it will know no rest as long as dissatisfied races have to suffer under German rule and exploitation. After that rule is thrown off peace will come. Also restorations, indemnities. And international understanding as well, when Germany ceases to be the drawback.

But if you hear, in the time to come, that a retired lieutenant of police, or a retired hangman, or a retired archduke, has been killed like a dog by a war orphan who has grown up, you will not have to wonder why.

This article will be followed next week by one on the spirit and characteristics of the Serbian people. The author is Dr.
Vesnitch, Serbian Minister to France, who recently visited this country as chief of the Serbian War Mission to
the United States. Dr. Vesnitch is a well-known and widely honored Serbian statesman.-THE EDITORS.

AT THE FRONT IN INDIANA

BY LYMAN P. POWELL

A nation of a hundred million people cannot be easily or quickly moved. The vigor with which Americans have sustained their Government in this war by acquiescence in the draft, by a cheerful payment of taxes, by a lavish lending of their money, and in many other ways, has been extraordinary; but a nation's morale depends upon the depth and power of the people's convictions; and everywhere there are to be found apathists and aliens, and not everybody is informed as to the real, fundamental issues for which this country is fighting. There has therefore been instituted a non-partisan, non-sectarian movement to bring people together in mass-meetings, and to disseminate among them information about the war. The campaign for this patriotic education throughout the country has already begun in real earnest. One of the speakers, the President of Hobart College, is Dr. Lyman P. Powell. After returning from campaigns in Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, and Maryland, and just as he was about to take part in a campaign in Kentucky, he has given us some first-hand impressions of his experiences in Indiana. In that State speakers on behalf of this cause reached a million people, and left a pivotal State solid for the winning of the war.

Among those who took part were Dr. Powell, Mr. Everett Colby, of New Jersey, Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, President of Leland Stanford University, Mr. Julius Lincoln, Mr. Edwin F. Trefz, Dr. W. J. McGlothlin, and Dr. Alexander Cairns. They spoke under the auspices of the State Council of Defense, which, like all other State Councils of Defense, is working in conjunction with the Council of National Defense at Washington. Dr. Powell in the following article gives some pictures of America in war time which we believe will be not only of immediate but also of permanent interest.-THE EDITORS.

"T

HE trenches for me!" said one of our soldiers as for a month we circled round and round, speaking in the public interest. Eighty-seven war conferences were held, covering almost every county in Indiana. Scarcely a crossroads in the State but felt their impact. There were several of us civilians and soldiers who were starred because we had been "over there," while there were perhaps a score of local speakers of great ability who dealt with the technical problems of the campaign.

Days of speaking were followed by nights of traveling in day coaches, which sometimes gave no chance for sleep. Atomizers, mufflers, and fur-lined overcoats bore witness to the care some of the speakers took of themselves, with the thermometer for twenty-six days in succession at zero or below.

"Sure," the clerk said when I asked for a room with a bath and left orders that I should not be called until noon. But the tub was in the middle of the room. It was the coldest day in winter. The tub matched the day. The clerk called me at eleven instead of twelve to meet the County Committee, and then it was for me a succession of speeches on various aspects of the war, leading up to the long address in the evening, at the great mass-meeting in the Coliseum, when I made the special plea to think of nothing but the war, to stand behind the Government, to prepare to rebuild and re-educate a world once it is redeemed from pre-primitive autocracy.

Always, whoever spoke, it was the comprehensive view that won the audience. Always it was the conception of responsibility to our allies as well as to ourselves that gripped the heart. Always it was the plea to recognize that the time had come for us to take a share in dying, if need be, that those may live who have been dying these years past that we may live. Always the supreme word was "noblesse oblige."

To how many we spoke in those four weeks no one will ever definitely know. A conservative estimate placed the number at

one million, and with the after-meetings still in progress in school-houses and at crossroads, practically all of Indiana's two and a half millions will have had the war brought overseas to them and their duty laid upon their conscience.

The State Council of Defense left nothing to chance. Under the leadership of the man with the magic touch, Mr. Will H. Hays, new Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Dr. John J. Pettijohn, efficient head of the Speakers Bureau, everything was planned out with prevision. To be sure, now and then some speaker disappointed a committee, an occasional throat gave out for the time, and even pneumonia threatened one trench-hardened soldier. There may have been some errors in detail, but there were also largeness of vision and singular capacity to meet emergencies. Institutions like the State University, Purdue, Notre Dame, and the State Normal helped with understanding and efficiency. The Hoosiers know how to get things done.

There were aliens to convert. I was told that I should find some down at Evansville. That luncheon of the Rotary Club. in the beautiful hotel overlooking the Ohio River, was a revelation to me. German names there were in great abundance, but there also were at the close of the meeting American handclasps and assurances that Evansville is loyal. Among all cities in the country it must have distinction, for James Bethel Gresham, the first American to go over the top" and to fall on the soil of France, lived here, and his mother says: "My sorrow is made easier to bear by the knowledge that my boy did his full duty for our country in her time of need."

66

There is a way to talk to German-born who still have dreams of a “fatherland" which Prussianism has killed. It is not difficult to visualize for them a new fatherland beneath the Stars and Stripes, in this country where long ago God said: “I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more.

As for the speakers of English birth, their habit was to praise

[ocr errors]

the French. The French speakers in turn never lost a chance to emphasize the valor and the chivalry of their allies. Of course I heard criticisms of the Administration, but none offered in dishonor or disdain. All criticism resolved itself at last into a democratic desire to know as much as could be told without giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The Hoosiers simply want the confidence of Washington.

One night when an officer loaned by one of the Allies had finished his simple, moving story of "trench life" the audience that packed the Coliseum to its utmost rose as one to emphasize the solidarity of our war against the enemy and sang with all their might

"Blest be the tie that binds."

Kendallville and Ligonier will always have a warm spot in my memory. At Kendallville I was to change cars for Ligonier, but the train was six hours late. The thermometer spurned zero as the gray day darkened into night, and then went below. There was no auto and no sleigh was to be procured. I tried to get an engine from the nearest junction, and in that I failed. Ligonier was eighteen miles away, across snow-drifts deep in places, and the cold was too biting for a walk so long.

The long-distance telephone was a godsend. The county chairman called back to me across the drifts at half-past seven : "The house is packed. Come on when you can. We will hold them till you come." Then till nine we had an extemporized meeting in Kendallville, and when I reached Ligonier at 10:15 my audience was there-all there.

My fellow-speakers from beyond the State will not think me unappreciative of them if I say that when it comes to public speaking Indiana needs no immigrants. Both men and women Hoosier speakers are of a high type; but, as a county chairman said to me, "The people want to hear you men who have been over there." In consequence, we were usually expected to speak longest, and the courtesy of our local associates never failed. They cared too much for the cause to have any personal feeling. It may not matter much to them, but it matters much to some of us, to whom they showed consideration, that we shall always, after that experience, have a special place in our regard for Hoosiers,

Seldom did the speakers from outside the State have opportunity to hear one another. In the brief intervals, however, between our speaking, when we were traveling slowly from one point to the other or were having hasty dinners under the same roof, we had our good times in exchanging stories and experiences. Sometimes we were under the same roof with National celebrities, and Mr. Everett Colby, at one place, informed me with assumed awe that the man with his feet on the rail was Wallace the showman, and that Pete Jackson, sometime hero of the prize ring, would black my boots.

Lieutenant MacQuarrie, pipe in mouth and note-book in hand, portable typewriter near for his secretary's use, was mapping out with me our afternoon schedule. In his jolly and persuasive manner he implored me to let him speak in the opera-house while I spoke in the church. He seemed to think that his "trench talk" would go better on the stage than in the pulpit. After we had finished, and the audience in each house wanted more, the chairman shifted us, and my last glimpse was of the lieutenant, with a rueful face, carrying his "trench talk" to the church, while I was speeding to the opera-house.

and me that we might expect a large "turnout" of farmers. He was conservative. The halls were filled to overflowing. Antiquated buggies lined the curbstone. Beards and top-boots walked the streets. The make-weight of democracy was there in all solemnity. They listened. When they had the chance, they questioned. They wanted to know. They were making up their minds that in the land which Lincoln saved democracy must get ready to strike Lloyd George's "knock-out blow to autocracy and the world become all democratic.

There were two days beyond description. I arrived at Bloomington one Sunday night, barely in time to reach the auditorium where the meeting was beginning, with a crowd outside so large that the chairman, on my arrival, thought it best to change the meeting to the biggest auditorium in town, where twenty-five hundred people used up every inch of space and needed more.

It was not at Madison-but it might have been—that word came of the torpedoing of the Tuscania. The presiding officer grimly announced that "a boy from this county was on that boat," and I realized then that America is now like Milton's strong man, waking out of sleep and shaking his puissant locks to carry Gaza's gates away and make an end to war. North Vernon lay beyond the hills. Twenty-three miles intervened. The Bureau had decreed that I was to speak there in the evening, and to North Vernon I was bound to go. But no train was running. The thaw was setting in. "You will never make it," said one who thought he knew. But there are always autos, even in the land of Lincoln, and relays of autos were arranged by telephone. Two chauffeurs drove each car. Be cause of slush and mud the valleys were as difficult to cross as the snow-clad hilltops. Twice our auto stuck, and not even the younger of our chauffeurs was quite confident, but we drove through. Once we clipped a big slice from a five-foot bank of snow which impudently barred our way.

As I went to bed at eleven I told the hotel clerk to call me the next morning in ample time to catch the train at 3:55, so that I might speak some hours away that afternoon in Indiana's "Switzerland." As our train drew down to Madison among the "knobs," crowned by gigantic trees, with the water toppling over "Clifty Falls," and valleys even in the winter sheering off into surpassing beauty, the shade of Lincoln seemed to hover over us. The Lincoln spell was on the farmers who came out to hear the war discussed. There were real Lincoln types-tall, lean, thoughtful, serene, patient, tolerant, forgetful of self in the preservation of peace. The chairman told my soldier friend

The stream George Rogers Clarke in 1778 waded, on his way to snatch Vincennes from British hands, was overflowing both its banks, and we had a pretty drive, a memorable drive, for a few minutes through water two feet deep, with even chances whether we should go out with the maddened torrent down to the Ohio or go on to North Vernon. We went on, and when we reached North Vernon the time to speak had come. The moving-picture house was packed. The street outside was dense with those who wanted to get in. We could not force our way through such a crowd. The chairman, in collusion with the owner of the house adjoining, took me through by the “back way." The mud and water, almost up to our shoe tops, were unwelcome, but we reached the stage at last. Anybody can speak when such enthusiasm awaits him for the sake of what he represents.

At Lafayette I had the honor of speaking with the President of the Monon Railroad, the Belgian Commissioner, and Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, of Chicago, whose attitude was so properly judicial that he left nobody outside of the insane asylum anything to say to justify our foe; and the Purdue Uni versity band punctuated the good speech by playing “ Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile."

66

The Hoosiers talk. They read. They make you feel at home. They never bristle. They are folks. What they know, they know; and when they do not know, they candidly admit their ignorance. Said one aged man to me at midnight, with a chuckle in his voice, “Last summer I thought I knew how to run this war. I said so pretty freely until I ran up against a man who knew more than I, and ever since I have known enough to keep my mouth shut."

Mr. Samuel Hopkins Adams may be right in pointing to the menace afforded by the truly large foreign population, the workings of whose minds we do not always understand. Perhaps the Secret Service has its problems with a few of them, but my experience in Indiana, confirmed since in other Middle Western States, leads me to assume such patriotism in the average man as needs no questioning. At any rate, this proper assumption brought out declarations of loyalty where else there might have been no word.

Professor Mütterer, of the State Normal School of Indiana, certainly spoke for the great mass of German-born when he said in public, of his own accord :

I am not ashamed of my German name or German blood, but I feel deeply aggrieved against the German military party, the German Imperial Government, Prussianism, and the unholy German arrogance which made good blood and a good name a challenge to the world and has discredited the spiritual contributions of old Germany. I believe the great majority of the Americans of German descent feel the same intense grievance

« ПретходнаНастави »