INTRODUCTION THE addresses which have been brought together in this little volume were carried across the Atlantic, since there was not time in which to write the promised introductory word before the journey was begun. I made notes along the way but it was not till I was delayed for many hours not far from the Western Front, where I could see the constant flashing in the sky above the place of the supreme struggle, that I could make a beginning of writing anything in preface to these august utterances which cry across our whole national history and especially out of its most critical hours and darkest nights. It was there that the very principles for whose maintenance Washington, Webster, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson spoke, were being fought for in the most important and critical conflict in the world's history. The flashes in the sky seemed at first but "heat lightning" such as I had seen hundreds of times in the prairie skies of the Mississippi Valley, and as the train waited silently in the midst of the fields a nightingale began to sing whose voice was heard "in ancient days by Emperor and clown" and still sings on "the selfsame song that found a path through the heart of Ruth." But no pacifistic interpretation of the light in the skies should deceive our children and youth; and no singing in groves of literature cause to "fade, far away "the land 'where but to think is to be full of sorrow." And so it is that the minds of our children whom we would have happy even in the face of grim reality, must know the true meaning of these flashings, as of those above Sinai, and appreciate the values of the principles set forth in this solemn little volume, collected and annotated by Dr. James Sullivan, the State Historian of New York. Their happiness is dependent upon our helping to carry through to the victorious end the war which, with all our reluctance to be "entangled" in Europe's quarrels, we have been "guided by justice" in entering. It was not many nights later that I saw and heard the night-battle in the moonlit skies above Paris when the barbarous ships attempted to kill and wreck, and the defending barrage to protect women and children, homes and the highest creations of men's labor and imagination against this ravage. These words of our national leaders are as the barrage of national and world freedom which must constantly be rising in the minds of men and even of children against the menace of "selfish dominion, the "terror by night" of our present era and the “destruction that wasteth at noonday.” - And now from Rome, amid the ruins of her ancient empire, I send back these few prefatory paragraphs. The first words which I read on entering the city were these (the headline in the paper just come from the press) "Truppe Americane al Fronte Italiano." So is the freedom cry of the New World being heard in the land of its discoverer, and so will it be heard in these immortal utterances when the night skies are again lighted by the stars only. JOHN H. FINLEY. ROME, ITALY, May 28, 1918. |