"America," we said, "is very much better employed in making munitions for US. Let her go on making them. Let her help our wounded; let her feed Belgium for us; but let her not come in now and bag the glory when it is we who have borne the burden and heat of the battle."
And this attitude of ours was not righteous. It was egoistic; it was selfish; it was arrogant. We handed over to America the material role and hung on tight to the spiritual glory. It was as if we had asked ourselves, in our arrogance, whether America was able to drink of the cup that we drank of, and to be baptized with the baptism of blood which we were baptized withal?
We had left off thinking even of America's body, and we were not thinking at all about her soul.
Then, only a few months ago, she came in, and we were glad. Most of us were glad because we knew that her coming in would hasten the coming of peace. But I think that some of us were glad because America had saved, before everything, her immortal soul.
And by our gladness we knew more about ourselves then than we had suspected. We know that, under all our arrogance and selfishness, there was a certain soreness caused by America's neutrality.
We did not care much about Spain's or Scandinavia's or Holland's neutrality, though the Dutch and Scandinavian navies might have helped enormously to tighten the blockade; but we felt America's neutrality as a wrong done to our own soul. We were vulnerable where her honor was concerned. And this, though we knew that she was justified in holding back; for her course was not a straight and simple one like ours. No Government on earth has any right to throw prudence to the winds, and force war on a country that is both divided and unprepared.
Yet we were vulnerable, as if our own honor were concerned.
That is why, however much we honor the men that America sends out now, and will yet sent out, to fight with us, we honor still more her first volunteers who came in of their own accord, who threw prudence to every wind that blows, and sent themselves out, to fight and to be wounded and to die in the ranks of the Allies. It may be that some of them loved France more than England. No matter; they had good cause to love her, since France stands for Freedom; and it was Freedom that they fought for, soldiers in the greatest War of Independence that has ever been.
The coming in of America has not placed upon England a greater or more sacred obligation than was hers before:—to see to it that this War accomplishes the freedom, not only of Belgium and Russia and Poland and Serbia and Roumania, but of Ireland also, and of Hungary, and, if Germany so wills it, of Germany herself. It is inconceivable that we should fail; but, if we did fail, we should now have to answer to the soul and conscience of America as to our own conscience and our own soul.
[signed]May Sinclair