"Let Us Be Just"
I yield to none in my admiration and affection for France, but let us be just in the application of our standards and criterions of judgment. If we are to condemn and repudiate our debt to England because we deny it the element of disinterestedness, let us also, and for the same reason, repudiate our admitted debt to France. It is admitted that we were utterly unprepared for war even as late as 1917. Mr. George Creel defends our unpreparedness and says that we could not logically and consistently work for peace while we prepared for war, but even in defending he admits the fact. While we have been so unprepared it has been the English fleet that has been defending our Monroe Doctrine; it is the English fleet that has kept our coasts unscarred; it is the English fleet that has enabled our commerce and our transports to cross the seas; it is that Imperial line of ships and guns and men that have protected us through our uneasy slumbers, that have given us time to wake up to the issues of this war and upon which we have depended for the opportunity to make ready and prepare.
Again and again has England saved the world; once when the white sails of the Armada rounded Ushant and spread out over the English Channel; again when Louis XIV was threatening the Old World and the New; again when Bonaparte was making and unmaking kings from Madrid to Warsaw; but never did England give to the world a greater service than when she offered up that little Expeditionary Army and threw herself, all unprepared, across the pathway of victorious Germany. Not one of us can look at the ruins of the cities of France and Belgium and remember the threats of Germany directed towards ourselves without thinking with a shudder at what might be the condition of our own cities and citizens had England failed the world in that dreadful summer of 1914.