In private relations I understand that Mr. Ford is an amiable man. But I am not dealing with him in his private relations. I am discussing him as a candidate for high office. We are bound truthfully to set forth what we believe will be the effect of his election, and therefore we are bound to say that it would be damaging to the United States and would be encouraging to Germany. No patriotic American should support Mr. Ford.
SPEED UP THE WORK FOR THE ARMY AND GIVE ALL WHO ENTER IT FAIR PLAY
August 23, 1918
Our Government must learn that needless delay is worse than a blunder. We are sending troops to Siberia. This is good, but it would have been ten times better to have sent them last spring when the need was precisely as evident as it is now. The Administration is now preparing to ask Congress to arrange for putting between three and four million men in France by next July. Six months ago our best military advisers and our most far-sighted civilian leaders were urging that we prepare to put five million men in France by next March. The delay has been absolutely needless and may be very harmful. When last spring the demand for five million men was being incessantly urged, President Wilson treated it as merely a case for competitive rhetoric, and asked, with dramatic effect, why we should limit the number at all. But he actually has limited it to a much smaller number at a much later date. Therefore let there at least be no further delay. And above all let us not be misled by the persons who say that Germany will make peace before next spring. Our business is to act on the assumption that we shall have to put forth our utmost effort next spring and not to take any unnecessary chances.
The Government is now very properly proposing to enlarge the draft age limits to include all the men of fighting age, all the men of the ages which furnished the enormous majority of the soldiers of the Civil War. The number of men in the excepted classes should be greatly reduced. There are too many exceptions. It is earnestly to be hoped that the plan will include the institution of universal obligatory military training of all our young men of eighteen to twenty years old as a permanent policy.
But we ought not to adopt the plan recently proposed for special advantages to be given by the Government to young men who go to college and take certain special courses with a view to becoming officers. This would amount to giving a special privilege to persons with money enough to send their boys to college in order to have them escape the draft and secure commissions. This is not fair. It means giving a privilege to money. There is no excuse for giving such a preference to young men of eighteen or nineteen at this time when we have been at war eighteen months. There is still need to give some of the older men a special chance to train. But there is no such need in the case of men under twenty-one.
There was every reason of sound public policy at the outset of the war to take advantage of the forethought and self-denial of the young men who at the Plattsburg and similar camps had at their own expense prepared themselves before the war began, and when, owing to the failure of the Government to do its duty, they were the only men who did prepare. There has been good reason for similar camps for young men during the last eighteen months before our general training camps began to show their full results. But from now on every young officer should be chosen on his merits from the men who enter the army in the ranks. Only the men who show their fitness, by whatever tests are deemed necessary after service in the ranks, should be sent to officers’ schools, and money should play no part whatever in the matter.
SENATOR LODGE’S NOBLE SPEECH
September 1, 1918
Senator Lodge’s speech dealing with the principles for which we are fighting and setting forth in detailed outline the kind of peace which alone will mean the peace of victory was a really noble speech. Nothing is easier, and from the national standpoint as distinguished from the standpoint of personal benefit to the speaker, nothing is less useful than a speech of such glittering generalities that almost anybody can interpret it in almost any manner. Only a great statesman possesses the courage, the knowledge, and the power of expression to set forth in convincing fashion the detailed statement of the objects which must be attained if such a war as that in which we are engaged is to be crowned by a peace wholly worth the terrible cost of life and happiness caused by the war. This is the service which Senator Lodge has rendered to this Nation and to our allies.