When the cup of German iniquities overflowed with new crimes, American reprobation was also raised to the high water mark. Indignation was at the height of its exasperation. Public opinion had rapidly rallied and ripened at the horrible sight of so many American citizens, women and children, murdered in mid-ocean, their dead bodies floating over the waves, and their souls from above crying for vengeance.
Then the President, Congress, statesmen, politicians, publicists, loyal Americans numbering almost a hundred million, all of one mind, of one heart, pledged their national honour to avenge the foul deeds of Teutonic barbarity, and to do their mighty share in rescuing Freedom and Civilization from the threatening sanguinary cataclysm which was cruelly saddening our times and darkening the prospects of our children.
How powerfully, how grandly, how admirably they have kept their word, all know. The laws necessary to prosecute the war with the utmost vigour were unanimously passed by Congress. The organization of the man-power of our neighbours has been made on a grand scale. The calls to the financial resources of the Republic have been patriotically answered by the people who poured out billions and billions of their hard earned and prudently saved money to support the national cause so closely identified with that of the Allies. Besides spending innumerable millions for their own gigantic military effort, the United States are lending billions of dollars to their associates in the great struggle to curb down German autocratic criminal ambition.
The universe, as a whole, gratefully applauded the magnificent effort of the leading nation of the New-World in defending the old continents of Europe, Asia and Africa against the new invasion of the Huns.
The only shadow to this ennobling picture is that which our Nationalists, from this side of the boundary line, try to breathe on it, expecting that their treacherous whisper will find some echo amongst the French Canadian and the German elements of the Republic.
The following lines are a sample of the kind words Mr. Bourassa has addressed to Mr. Wilson—the warrior—not the pacifist. On August 30, 1917, respecting the answer of the President of the United States to the Pope's appeal in favour of peace, he wrote in a gentle mood:—
"Truth and falsehood, sincerity and deceit, logic and sophism are sporting with gracefulness in this singularly astonishing document. One would imagine that the President, persuaded that the European Governments are playing an immense game of "poker" having the life of the peoples at stake, wanted to go further and to prove to them that at such a game the great American democracy is their master. Perhaps did he believe that the "bluff" outbidding would succeed in tearing to pieces the mask of falsehoods, of ambiguities and hypocrisy, by which the national Rulers are blinding the peoples in order to lead them more readily to be slaughtered."
On perusing such outrageous writing, one cannot help being convinced that Mr. Bourassa considers all the distinguished and most patriotic political leaders who, for the last four years, have guided with so much talent and devotion France, the British Empire, and their Allies through the unprecedented crisis they have had to face, are a criminal gang of murderers.
So, in Mr. Bourassa's kind opinion, when Mr. Wilson and all the members of the two Houses of Congress, with a most admirable unanimity of thought and aspirations, called upon the American nation to avenge their countrymen, countrywomen and children, murdered on the broad sea, they were criminally joining with European Rulers in a game of "bluff", going further than all of them in order to tear to pieces the falsehoods and hypocrisy they were using to blind their peoples to the facile acceptance of the slaughtering process. A very strange way, indeed, of unmasking others' hypocrisy by being more hypocritical than them all.
The next day, in a second article on the same subject, the Nationalist leader said:—