They die for our liberty without a murmur. And while they are suffering and dying, a whole section of the community in every allied country continues to ignore them for one or another fatuous dream.
In France when these dreamers beat at the Chamber of Deputies to be allowed to go to Stockholm, Clemenceau answered them: “I understand your idealism, and I share it. But where we differ is that I am under no illusion regarding the reality of facts.”
The only important fact in the world is that we are fighting the greatest war in history, “in order that government of the people, for the people, and by the people shall not perish from the earth.” Nothing else matters. Nothing. Every other question is a side issue, something to be considered and acted upon after we have won the war.
In this country we have our Bolsheviki who would take advantage of the fact that our best beloved, our sons, are fighting, giving their lives in a far land, to seize power for their “class.” We have fanatics whose paranoia finds expression in “radical” magazines. We have propagandists who find supreme satisfaction in going around the country making defeatist speeches, and we have a public which exclaims in horror when one of these talkers is arrested and given a well-merited prison sentence.
We have lawmakers, men in Congress, whose devotion to their propaganda is so limitless that they are willing to risk losing army appropriations, delaying the progress of the war, in order to hasten a little the prohibition campaign.
We have theorists who can not think very much about the war because they are so occupied with getting on good terms again with a people who never were honestly on good terms with anybody except themselves. After all these years of slaughter these theorists would smilingly get together with the men who willed the slaughter and talk about a league of nations, a society to abolish war.
“A league of nations!” exclaimed Clemenceau to the Unified Socialists of France, led by Albert Thomas. “What will a league of nations mean without Germany? I for one will not let Germany in. You would do so, and on what guarantees? Ask Belgium!”
What are we Americans, those of us who walk without blinders, who see and know the awful realities of the hour, going to do about the class fanatics, propagandists, egotist individualists, the sentimental theorists, big and little? They are traitors to the world that is struggling to be free. Whether they know it or not, they are traitors. They fight side by side with Attila.
Rather, they are the camp followers of the Hun, for they rarely do any fighting. When justice overtakes them they nearly always throw up their hands and cry “Kamerad.” They almost invariably claim that they didn’t mean to be disloyal.
The only thing to do with these people is to snatch the blinders from their eyes and make them look at the reality of a world at righteous war. As soon as one defeatist comes within the law, seize him, imprison him. Whether he is an I. W. W. criminal or a university professor, or even a United States senator. Keep on doing it. Treat women exactly as the men are treated. It wouldn’t take long before the blinders would begin to fall without assistance.