During the past forty years there have been in Germany on the one hand, and in the Allied states on the other, two incompatible and mutually destructive principles,—one named Military Autocracy and the other Democracy. The conflict between the two was irrepressible, and our entrance into the war inevitable. Lincoln once said that a house divided against itself could not stand; that the republic could not endure half slave and half free; that it must become all one thing or all the other. To-day Europe, and indeed the world, represent a house divided against itself. It cannot remain half autocratic and half democratic; it must become all one thing or all the other. Either Germany must conquer England, France and the United States, and impose autocracy upon them, and enthrone the Kaiser as the world emperor, or else the Allies must conquer Germany, and overthrow autocracy and militarism, until Germany, and Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey become truly self-governed. On that August day in 1914, therefore, it became morally obligatory upon every patriot, every city and every nation to make the choice between autocracy and democracy. In the hour when the battle lines were set in array, between autocracy and democracy, on August 4, 1914, neutrality became intellectually absurd and morally monstrous. Serving both God and Mammon became unthinkable. Even after our President declared that we must make the world safe for democracy, a few men tried to be neutral, and stretched out the right hand to Germany and the left hand to the United States, in the spirit of the man who declined to choose between hell and heaven, saying he had friends in both places. The time has fully come to recognize that civilization and autocracy are deadly antagonists. John Milton defined a book as the precious life-blood of a master spirit, treasured up and handed on to the future. "As good almost kill a man as kill a good book." But the free and democratic institutions are the precious life-blood of the patriots, the heroes and martyrs, preserved, and handed forward, as means for winning the Golden Age. Better, therefore, a thousand times, that the Kaiser should murder mankind than assassinate the free institutions that manufacture manhood of good quality, and make human life worth the living.
The Strength of Our Enemy
The battle line between a military autocracy and the free government is now set in array. It is to the last degree important that our people know the strength of the adversary. Prudent men never underestimate their opponents. Brave men want to know the worst that can be said, truthfully. Let us confess that Germany with her nine million soldiers, ammunition accumulated through twenty-five years of preparation, has suffered no vital hurt. Three years of battle have lessened the wealth of the Allied nations, but vastly increased the treasures of Germany. This war has cost Great Britain thirty billions of dollars, it has cost France twenty billions, it has cost the United States ten billions. For these billions expended there has been for the Allies no financial return. In striking contrast thereto, consider that if Germany has spent twenty billions upon this war, she has won another twenty billions, and even claims to have won thirty billions. Thus far, her armies, like those of ancient Rome, have looted four countries. She has carried away their gold, silver, copper, iron, steel, stocks, bonds, she has stolen their locomotives, passenger coaches, freight cars, wagons, automobiles, with all the goods of merchants. In the face of her solemn treaties she has stolen the horses, cattle, oxen, sheep; she has spoiled the granaries of their wheat, rye and barley. She has looted the Belgian and French factories of their machinery, and carried away the looms from the mills for cotton, wool and silk. The total value of the steel mills of Belgium and of France, with all lathes and stationary engines, is almost incalculable. She looted the iron and coal mines of Belgium and France and the wells of Rumania for the oil; she has looted the mines of Poland, Rumania and Serbia of their bronze, lead, zinc, copper. She has loaded thousands upon thousands of freight trains with household furniture, agricultural implements, goods from the merchants' stores, art treasures from public galleries, as well as from private houses. In every city and town, in every store and farmer's house, the Germans attack first of all the safety vaults and the little money chest of rich and poor alike. Germany found Belgium worth twenty billion of dollars. It is probable that she has spoiled Belgium of at least eight billions. The national fortunes of the invaded territories were estimated at fifty billions, and most of this, after three years, is now in the hands of the Germans. Each attack made by Germany has been against a rich people whose treasure she could loot, while every attack made by the Allies has been to recover a land already devastated, poor and helpless. In choosing Napoleon, therefore, rather than Jesus, Germany chose the motto of aggressive warfare, and has made war an investment too profitable to be readily abandoned.
The peril to the Allies is the greater because of the vicious methods used by Germany. All military experts know that wars are fought incidentally with guns at the trenches, but in reality with granaries at the rear. Better a million well-fed men with naked fists than two million of armed men who are starving, for the starving men will soon be too weak to lift the guns and the well-fed men will grasp the weapons. From the view-point of food resources, Germany has from the beginning occupied a unique position, in that she is rimmed all around about with little nations unprepared and unarmed, and therefore impotent to protect their granaries and root cellars, their herds and flocks, when Germans came in to steal them. Whenever Germany has, therefore, been short of food, she has organized an expedition and looted some land like Belgium, as Poland. The next winter she sends an army out to loot Rumania. Now that the harvests have been gathered in upon the fields of Italy, Germany is trying to despoil that land.
Whenever she has had to withdraw a million men from the fields to send them to the front Germany has impressed another million from Belgium, Poland or Rumania, and forced these slaves to plough her fields, reap her harvests, and all without wage. Sometimes she has gone through the form of buying grain from the Balkan States, but she has forced these peoples to take in return paper currency, which she can grind out so long as the printing presses hold out and which in the event of defeat she can easily repudiate. On the other hand, when Turkey and Bulgaria have turned towards Germany for guns and munitions, since they had nowhere else to go, Berlin has forced their rulers to pay in gold and silver. Germany's claim is probably true, that her people are as well-fed during the fourth winter of the war as they were during the first winter. These are not pleasant matters to consider, but these are the facts. Wise men want to know the facts, and then they know what plans they must make to overcome the worst and turn it into the best. Better be a wise pessimist than an ignorant optimist. Uninformed Micawbers always waiting for something to turn up have no place in this world war.
The query, How goes the battle? involves the statement that Germany is now fighting this war at the expense of her neighbours. Her great Krupp factories are using enormous quantities of coal, but it is Belgian coal. Every week she consumes vast stores of rich iron ore, but it is French ore. Her motors, trucks, military cars, consume oceans of oil; this oil comes from Rumania. Each month she burns up human muscles in field and factory and shop, but these spent men and women are subject peoples. In a thousand ways events are worked for her interests. Because she is in the center it is very easy for Germany to transport her troops from one front to another, while it is very difficult for the United States to transport munitions and guns and food across an ocean 3,000 miles in width. It is a conservative statement to say that it does not cost Germany one-tenth as much to move a cannon from Essen to Ypres as it costs the United States to move a machine gun from Bridgeport to Cambrai and Verdun.
Nor must we forget that we are building our iron ships with $6 a day labour, our wooden ships with $7 a day carpenters, while Germany is impressing labourers from Belgium and forcing them to work like slaves. Slowly she is starving them to death, while pretending to pay them seven cents a day for their eighteen hours of toil. When one group of men breaks down and dies, Germany simply forces at the point of the bayonet another group to take their places. Brutality, savagery, have an enormous advantage over civilized States. One wolf is equal to a hundred sheep and a thousand lambs. Thus far Germany has not lost one inch of territory, and this fact must be considered when we raise the question as to how goes the battle.
Ignorant of the real situation, underestimating the peril that is upon the United States, many of our citizens refuse to support the government, discourage enlistment on the one hand, or else carry about with them an atmosphere of ignorant optimism. They talk loudly about America winning this war. They never tire of telling about our one hundred millions of people, our two hundred and fifty billions of wealth, our possible ten millions of soldiers, and upon the basis of these considerations they count the war ended, and win battles by waving perils into thin air. Others say that in a moral universe, injustice and cruelty cannot be victorious, and that in the nature of the case Germany must be beaten, quite forgetting that Belgium has been beaten, and so have Alsace and Lorraine. It is a truism that what has been may be. A just God permitted the first republic, Athens, to be ruined by her military neighbour, Macedonia. The story how the militarism of Macedonia brought about the fall of Athens, and contributed to dark ages, makes up a black page in the history of liberty.
The ruthless hand of militarism snuffed out all the torches in the temples of intellect that once "looked down on Marathon, as Marathon looks on the sea." What scholar does not thrill with pain at the very thought of the brutal regiments that destroyed the temples, the libraries, the statues, the galleries of Athens! Phocion believed, as did Plato and his pupils, that society had outgrown forever brute force, wars and savagery. Athens put her emphasis upon the intellect. She founded schools, and made her sons to be scholars. She became the mother of the arts, science and philosophy, and prided herself upon her artists and statesmen. She established foreign colonies, builded ships and extended her trade to far-off lands in Sicily, Spain, Gaul and North Africa. Within a century Athens became the center of eloquence, poetry, philosophy and liberty. One day Prince Philip from Northern Macedonia visited Athens. He marvelled that the city should be like a vineyard whose purple clusters were without a fence, whose treasure boxes were without watchmen. In that hour of avarice and ambition Philip remembered the soldiers in his father's army at home. He believed that one soldier could conquer a dozen merchants, bankers, statesmen and scholars.