FEW things have been more disheartening in the course of the War than the way in which the Teutonic foes of liberty have used so many friends of liberty in Russia as unwitting instruments to undermine and destroy the resistance of the Russian people to the German armies.
Vast territories, amounting to nearly half a million square miles in area, have thus been abandoned to German domination, practically without a struggle; and over fifty million people in the abandoned regions have seen their prospects of freedom vanish.
The German armies thus released from the eastern front and poured into northern France, have enormously increased the difficulties of the Armies of Liberty, battling in France and Belgium to save the world for Democracy.
J. G. PHELPS STOKES.
President Wilson’s Declaration
RAEMAEKERS is, here, having the President say:
“When Germany is defeated, and peace can be discussed, we shall pay the full price of peace,—namely, justice for all the nations.”
We know what justice will be for the nations spoiled. But what will be justice for the spoiler? We know what this latter would be to an individual; and a nation is only a greater individual, capable of greater mischief, subject to greater punishment.
An individual, who, with progressive malice, had broken all the laws of his country, society and God, from simple lying, through perjury, robbery, piracy, up to wholesale murder, would be destroyed—for the good of his fellowmen and as a warning to others. If he should escape the noose the quieter but no less inevitable force of public morality would destroy him. Neither man nor nation has ever long lived by force, flaunting his crimes in the face of the world, committing, threatening yet others. Nor will Germany. She is now, I believe, in the way of destruction, either by the public executioner, or, more likely, by the slower, but not less certain, process of isolation and decay.