We ought at once to introduce obligatory universal military training for our young men between nineteen and twenty-one. They would not be sent to war until they were twenty-one. This would be the most effective step in preparing to get ready an army of five million men. Such an army would be relatively no larger than the four hundred thousand men which gallant Canada, to her eternal honor, has already raised. Let us begin now to prepare ourselves for a three years’ war.
If we had prepared as we ought to have done during the two and a half years before we at last reluctantly faced our duty and went to war, we would have put a couple of million of fighting men into Europe last June. Russia would never have broken, and in all probability the war would have ended at once with almost no fighting. There is no use in crying over the enormous quantities of milk we have already spilled, unless it becomes necessary in order to prevent us from continuing to spill it in the present and future. Failure to prepare as above outlined may cause us as much trouble in the future as our past failure to prepare has already caused us. General Pershing’s gallant little army has already made the entire United States its debtor. But it is not as yet as important a military factor as the army of Belgium or of Portugal or of Serbia. Let us back it up and equip it and reënforce it to the utmost of our strength. Let us quit talking peace and bend all our energies to winning the war, and thereby winning the only kind of peace that will be safe, honorable, and lasting.
BOLSHEVIKI AT HOME AND ABROAD
March 19, 1918
The answer of the Bolsheviki to the President’s message was an example of mean and studied impertinence. There was no gratitude, no apology for their betrayal of America and of the cause of liberty, and no expression of hostility to their German masters, but there was a gratuitous and insulting expression for a class war in America against what the Bolsheviki with ignorant folly speak of as capitalism. A couple of days afterward the Bolshevist authorities definitely concluded with Germany their peace of ignominy and treachery.
There is now no possible reason for our Government to draw the sharp distinction they have drawn between the Bolsheviki abroad and the Bolsheviki at home. The Government is prosecuting Victor Berger and has suppressed the paper of Max Eastman. But Berger and Eastman are essentially the same as Lenine and Trotzky. All four have played Germany’s game; all four have been the enemies of the cause of the United States and of liberty. The utter ruin which the Bolsheviki have brought on Russia offers an illuminating example of the destruction which would befall the United States if it ever submitted to the leadership of men like Messrs. Hillquit, Townley, Haywood, and Berger.
We have had many evil capitalists in the United States, but on the whole the worst capitalists could not do the permanent damage to the farmers and working-men in America which these foreign and native Bolsheviki would do if they had the power. Our people should keep steadily in mind that the Russian Bolsheviki have not attacked the big Russian capitalists who were in alliance with the autocracy of the Romanoffs and they have been the tools, paid or unpaid, of the German militarists and capitalists. They have spent their energies in attacking the revolutionists who overthrew the Romanoffs and in persecuting the peasants who have become small farmers and the working-men who are skilled mechanics and the small shopkeepers. They hate and envy those thrifty and self-respecting workers who in this country make up the great majority of our people and who are our most typical and characteristic Americans.
The Bolsheviki have concluded a peace with Germany which includes handing back to the Turks, or, in other words, plunging back into brutal savagery, a district in Asia in which there are multitudes of Armenians and other Christians. Our Government has been derelict in its duty to the Armenians, to the Christians of Syria and to the Jews of Palestine, by its failure to declare war on Turkey. It is a grave error to coddle the Bolsheviki and support them in any way against our allies unless we are also willing fearlessly to condemn their betrayal of us and of the Allied cause, and unless we are ready to war to the end against both Germany and Turkey in order to rescue from tyranny and to give independence to the unfortunate people whom the Bolsheviki have abandoned to a cruel fate.
THE FRUITS OF OUR DELAY
March 26, 1918