FREEDOM STANDS WITH HER BACK TO THE WALL
April 20, 1918
This is a terrible hour of trial and suffering and danger for our war-worn allies, who in France are battling for us no less than for themselves. If shame is even more dreadful than suffering, then it is a no less terrible hour for our own country. Our allies stand with their backs to the wall in the fight for freedom, and America looks on. The free nations stand at bay in the cause that is ours no less than theirs; and after over a year of war the army we have sent to their aid is smaller than that of poor heroic, ruined Belgium, is hardly more than a twentieth the size which gallant and impoverished Italy has in the field. And this great wealthy Nation of ours has not yet furnished to our own brave troops in the field any cannon or airplanes, and almost no machine guns, save those which we have obtained from hard-pressed France—and let our people remember that every gun thus made for us by hard-pressed France is a gun left unmade for hard-pressed Italy.
Our few gallant fighting men overseas have won high honor for themselves, and have made all other Americans forever their debtors; but it is a scandal and a reproach to this Nation that they are so few. If in this mighty battle our allies win, it will be due to no real aid of ours; and if they should fail, black infamy would be our portion because of the delay and the folly and the weakness and the cold, time-serving timidity of our Government, to which this failure would be primarily due. If those responsible for our failure, if those responsible for the refusal to prepare during the two and a half years in which we were vouchsafed such warning as never nation previously received, if those responsible for the sluggish feebleness with which we have acted since we helplessly drifted into the war—if these men now repented of the cruel wrong they have done this Nation and mankind, we could afford to wrap their past folly and evil-doing in the kindly mantle of oblivion. But they boast of their foolishness, they excuse and justify it, they announce that they feel pride and delight in contemplating it. Therefore, it is for us, the people, to bow our heads on this our penitential day; for we are laggards in the battle, we have let others fight in our quarrel, we have let others pay with their shattered bodies for the fire in their burning souls.
The trumpets of the Lord sounded for Armageddon; but our hearts were not swift to answer nor our feet jubilant; coldly we watched others die that we might live. Our rulers were supple and adroit, but they were not mighty of soul. They have shown that they will not lead us, and will ever stand in front only if we force them forward. Therefore, the reason is all the greater why we, the American people, must search our own hearts and with unflinching will insist that from now on not a day, not an hour, shall be wasted until our giant but soft and lazy strength is hardened, until we ourselves take the burden from the shoulders of others, until we pay whatever price our past shortcomings demand, and with heads uplifted and spirit undaunted stride forward to the great goal of the peace of victorious right.