OUR DEBT TO THE BRITISH EMPIRE
August 16, 1918
Judge Ben Lindsey has recently written two or three striking pieces about what Great Britain has done and is doing in this war. Incidentally he points out how far ahead of us she now is in certain types of social legislation, such as that dealing with children. But the lesson he inculcates which is of most immediate concern is the giant part England has played in this war and the debt we owe to her because, in standing up for Belgium and France, she was really defending us during our days of folly when we followed the lead of our worst enemies, the pacifists and pro-Germans.
The English pacifists are, if anything, even more silly than our own. They did their best to make England keep out of this war. If they had succeeded the British Empire would for a few years have trod the broad, smooth road of peaceful and greedy infamy and would then have tumbled into the bottomless pit of utter destruction. But in August, 1914, Great Britain and the gallant overseas commonwealths which share her empire chose the hard path of immediate danger, of ultimate safety, and of high heroism. Thereby they saved their own souls and the bodies of their children, and in so doing rendered an inestimable service to us.
England has raised an immense army which has fought in Europe, Asia, and Africa. If it were not for this army even the highly trained valor of the French could not have averted German victory. At the same time the British fleet has kept the seas free for the food and coal and munitions needed for the Allied people and armies and has furnished the transports necessary to enable us to put under Pershing a force large enough to be of real consequence in the vitally important battle which has been raging for the last thirty days. If Great Britain had not been far-sighted enough to realize what her own welfare demanded when France was invaded, and if she had not been stirred to noble indignation by the Belgian horror, the whole civilized world would now have been cowering under the brutal dominion of Germany. If she had not controlled the seas, not an American battalion could have been sent to the aid of France as she struggled to save the soul of the world, and no help could have been given gallant Italy or any others of these Allied nations to whose stern fighting efficiency we owe it that this earth is still a place on which free men can live.
We must stand by Great Britain precisely as we stand by our other allies—in the first place, by waging the war with all our strength, and in the next place by seeing that the peace is of a kind which justifies them for all the sacrifices they have made.
One item in waging the war ought to be insistence that every American of fighting age who resides in the British Empire and every Englishman of fighting age who resides in the United States be invariably put in either the British or the American armies. One item in making peace ought to be insistence that Britain keep every colony she has conquered from Germany, both in the South Seas and in Africa. Germany has behaved abominably in Africa. The course Germany has followed in Africa has made her a menace of evil to the Boer and British Africanders, and to return to her the colonies which have been taken from her, whether in Africa or Asia, by Australia or Great Britain, or by France or Japan or Belgium, would be a crime against civilization.