The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

What Ralph said was in that evening’s Argus. It was brief.

“When men go to war the appeal is to violence, destruction, death. He who can destroy most, kill most, is the superior. You take what comes in your path. To talk of laws of war is nonsense. To talk of mercy in war is to talk hypocrisy. You’re out to kill. You kill what’s in your way. To debate your right to do what will injure an enemy is not the way of war. It is the way of peace. The destruction of the Lusitania was an act of war—that hideous, senseless thing to which Europe has appealed. It is a tragedy that Americans should have been destroyed. It is a greater tragedy that they should have put themselves deliberately in the path of death. If they had as deliberately walked between the firing lines in battle, would we have condemned the combatants if they lost their lives?”

Dick bowed his head at the merciless logic of the paragraph, its contempt for humanity as it is, its lofty and reckless egotism. He was encouraged, however, when he learned afterwards that when Otto had congratulated Ralph on the editorial, Ralph had said: “But you miss my point, Otto. I’m not defending your infernal country. It was cowardly business, but it was logical. You Germans are in a fair way to demonstrate the silliness of trying to insist on honor in war. Laws of war are about as reasonable as laws against tornadoes. The only hope I have is that you’ll reduce the beastly business to its absurdity.”

The effect of the Lusitania on Sabinsport was much deeper and more general than Dick had dared dream. For the first time since the war began he sensed a feeling of personal responsibility abroad—in the banks, at the grocery, on the street, around the dinner tables. There was a growing consciousness that this was something which did concern her, something that she must see through. There were a few, but only a few in the town, who insisted that we should plunge in immediately and avenge the outrage. Sabinsport was not ready to do that. The world was full of wrongs calling for vengeance, was the Lusitania the one out of all these many where Sabinsport must act? The town reeked with discussion. Dick found indignation, however, qualified strongly by the suspicion that the Lusitania was armed. The doubt was a hang-over from her inherited mistrust of English ways and English dealings. “Probably was carrying munitions,” men would say. “Probably did have guns.”

Then, too, Sabinsport found it hard to believe that it was necessary, and therefore right, for Americans to go to Europe during the war, unless they went to enlist or on errands of mercy. You see, Sabinsport’s idea of business was limited, provincial. She had never quite grasped the fact that men ran back and forth to London and Paris and Berlin now-a-days on legitimate business quite as freely as a few of her own citizens ran back and forth to New York. Going to Europe was still an adventure. There had been a time when Sabinsport numbered so few people that had been to Europe that she had formed a society, “The Social Club of Those Who Have Been to Europe.” It had not lasted long, for she had a sense of humor which saved her from keeping alive that which savored of snobbery, and the Social Club of Those Who Have Been to Europe died a quiet and early death. Going abroad was now common enough, but it had not yet assumed the proportions of legitimate business.

In spite of all this, however, there was not from the first a doubt in Sabinsport’s mind, if you got down to the bottom of it, that whatever laws there were must be observed; whatever rights we had must be defended. Here she followed Captain Billy, who said, “By the Jumping Jehosophat, we’ll go where we have a right to.” One would have thought, to hear Captain Billy, that he made at least two trips across the ocean a year, though, as a matter of fact, he had never laid his eyes on that water.

“Do you suppose, if my business calls me to London,” said he, “and that the laws allow me, an American citizen, to travel on an English vessel that I’m going to keep off that ship? It has a legal right to carry me. Of course they can come aboard and see if that ship has contraband and guns, and if they find them they can take me off; but they can’t blow her up until they have me safe. That’s all they can do under the law, and that they have got to do. I’m going to travel wherever the law says I may.”

Thus Captain Billy put it at the War Board, in his grocery, and even at home, where Mrs. Captain Billy, who always took him literally, said, with a flutter, “William, you must keep off those ships, even if you have the right to go on them. You will only make trouble if you insist on going to London now.”

And in this insistence there were others in Sabinsport who agreed with Mrs. Captain Billy. There was the Rev. Mr. Pepper, as I have already explained. There was the dwindling Peace Party. There was a small number of Socialists in the mills. But they made only a ripple on the surface of that staid, settled conviction in Sabinsport’s mind—“where we have a right to go, we’re going to go, and Germany shall not stop us.”

It was this conviction, so strong in Sabinsport, that made her pick out of the President’s diplomatic correspondence two words, and all through the discussion cling to them. He had said “strict accountability” at the start, Sabinsport agreed, and she was willing to wait and stand on that. “Fine”—“Just right”—“Don’t give ’em a loophole,” was the average opinion. Of course there were those in Sabinsport, though they were very few, that were, like Mr. Kinney, the pillar in Dick’s church, who had found Belgium’s resistance “impractical,” and who now argued that the trouble with the President’s correspondence was that it did not give us “a leg to run on.” “We don’t want war,” said Vestryman Kinney. “Diplomacy consists in so framing your notes that you have a way out. Suppose Germany won’t agree, we must back down. It looks bad to me. He ought to have been more skillful.”