It seems sometimes as if the torch of civilization had been almost extinguished in this deluge of blood. This darkening of the face of the earth has cost more than the blood and treasure of the race—it has involved a terrific strain on the mind and soul of man.
The blasting of hundreds of villages, the sinking of thousands of ships, and the killing of millions of men is no small monument to the power of the human will. Deplore as we may the sanguinary ends to which this will has been bent, it has at any rate shown itself to be no weakling. We must marvel at the grim tenacity with which it has held to its goal through the long red years.
But now it is challenged by an infinitely bigger task.
The great nations sundered apart by this hideous anarchy have become hissings and by-words to each other. One group has been cast outside the Pale to become the Ishmaels of the universe. The purpose is to keep them there.
Yet try as we may we cannot live upon a totally disrupted planet without bringing a common disaster upon us all. It may be a matter of decades and generations but eventually the reconciliation must come.
To start civilization on the upward path again, to make the world into a neighborhood anew, to achieve the moral unity of humanity, is that infinitely bigger task with which the human will is challenged. As in the last years it has relentlessly concentrated its energies upon the Great War, now through the next decades and generations it must as steadfastly hold them to the Great Reconciliation. The tragedy of it all is that humanity must go at this crippled by a hatred like acid eating into the soul.
Villages will arise again from their ruins, the plow shall turn anew the shell-pitted fields into green meadow-lands, a kindly nature will soon obliterate the scars upon the landscape, but not the deep searings on the soul. Europe must grapple with this work of reconstruction handicapped by this black devil poisoning the mind and vitiating every effort. The worst curse bequeathed to the coming generations is not the mountain of debt but this heritage of hate.
It does not behoove Americans to stand on inviolate shores and prate of the wickedness of wrath. Moreover, this evil is not to be exorcised by a pious wish for it not to be. It is. And there is every excuse under the arch of heaven for its existence.
If we had felt the eagles' claws tearing at our flesh; if, like Europe, our soil was crimsoned with the blood of our murdered; if millions of our women were breaking their hearts in anguish—we too would consider it a gratuitous bit of impertinence to be told not to cherish rancor towards those who had unleashed the hellhounds of lust and carnage upon us.
As it is, we are not sacrosanct. Three thousand miles have not sufficed to keep the deadly virus out of our system. The violation of Belgium kindled a fire against the invaders which the successive cruelties served to fan into a flaming resentment.