The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

Ralph had been giving nights and days to the hardest studying and thinking he had ever done. He had been saturating himself with the history of Europe, the philosophies of the contending nations, their ambitions and their procedures. He had succeeded in divesting himself from all personal prejudices and feelings about the war. He had achieved one of the most difficult of human tasks—a completely impersonal, non-partisan attitude toward events which thrilled with human emotion and which involved all of the deepest of human wants and human dreams. He meant to see the thing right, and whatever labor or pain was necessary to see it right he was giving. Gradually it unrolled itself before his mind—the most terrific of human dramas.

Like Sabinsport, Ralph had come to hinge his final decision of what the United States should do on whether or no Germany had still enough sense of decency and righteousness in her to keep her given word, and, when she proved she had not, his case was complete.

The day after the news came of her insolent announcement that she would resume her submarine warfare, a full column of the Argus was given to a double-leaded, signed article. It was an article of vast importance in Sabinsport, for it put into words the feelings that were within her. It became her statement of the necessity that she should at last take part in the Great War. And it gave her, too, some sense of an issue far greater than the defense of rights.

The article was headed “A Confession and a Good-by,” and it began with a characteristically blunt statement: “As this is the last piece that the editor will write for the Argus for a long time, he is going to drop the third person and use the first. That third person always was a cramping for him as a dress suit.” The piece followed.

“I have always tried to say to you as nearly as I could what I thought about any matter which it seemed to me I should discuss in this newspaper. I have often failed to say what was in my mind—sometimes because I attempted to write of things of which I did not know enough, sometimes because I was determined to force your attention to things in which you were not interested, and again because I was more interested in converting you to my ideas than in attending to my business, which was the expression of those ideas. But, whether I have failed or succeeded in saying what I undertook to say, I have tried to be frank, especially since the war began.

“I don’t think there is anybody who reads the Argus who does not know how the war has affected me. I have tried to believe, and to persuade others to believe, that Sabinsport need not concern herself with the war. I tried to talk and act as if we could go on with our daily lives here as if it were not loose on the earth. I thought that was our duty—at least, I wanted to think that was our duty. My persistency has been due mainly to the program I had laid out for myself for this town.

“I came to Sabinsport eight years ago with a plan for her regeneration. I do not know that a man should be ashamed of wanting to make a perfect community in this imperfect country, but I see now that a man should be ashamed of thinking that he can force regeneration on men. There is very little difference, except in the size of the field of action, between my attitude toward Sabinsport and that of the Kaiser towards the world. He had a plan for making what he thought would be a perfect world; I had a plan for making a perfect Sabinsport. And I have been in my way as narrow and as unreasonable as he.

“You have been both tolerant and kind in your dealings with me. If this war had not come, I believe that gradually some of my ideas might have been adopted in Sabinsport; but the war came and, in spite of my fierce gestures and loud shouting, it swept over us. It threw me high and dry out of the current of human activities. As long as I refused, as I did, to go with my kind and take part in its agonies, it had no place for me. It took me two full years to discover this, to understand that my wishes and my ways were too puny for the times.

“I would have left Sabinsport and probably been sulking with the few scattered egotists, who, like myself, think their individual wisdom greater than the mass wisdom, if it had not been for the one man in this community who, since the war began, has given his mind and strength to helping all men and women in this town to understand events, ideas, and aspirations as they unrolled. You all know this man. He does not think of himself as being a leader; but we all realize that it has been his wisdom and patience and suffering that has opened our eyes. There has been nobody in Sabinsport so humble, so ignorant, or, like myself, so selfish that he was not his friend and counselor. When I finally realized the hopelessness of my opposition, it was this man who showed me the vanity and the inhumanity of my position, and who urged me to use my little training and scholarship in trying to understand how this human tragedy came about and why there was to-day no finer or nobler thing than to take a man’s part in it. For six months I have been following his advice.

“I know now that this war came on the world because Germany willed it. It was necessary to her plans. It is no great trick to show from her own records why she wanted the war, why she believed she would win. Perhaps the most amazing thing about it is that while she has herself been telling us for forty years why she must have a war, we have not heeded. The few in France and in England that believed her were cried down as disturbers of the peace. As for us Americans, our stupidity has been beyond belief. There is scarcely a college or university in this country that has not its quota of men and women, educated in Germany, whose chief ambition has been to demonstrate the superiority of her scholarship and of her social system. It was her social machinery that captivated my imagination. Without ever having seen it in operation, without having any sense of its relation to her war machine, which she never hesitated to tell us was her main objective, I, like thousands of others in this country, accepted and lauded her. I swallowed her whole, because she insured her sick, her old, and her unemployed. All I knew about that I gathered from statistics and from observers who had seen in Germany only what they wanted to see.