to maim, and to outrage women and children, to bombard defenseless and undefended towns, to drop bombs from the sky upon civilian populations, and to organize a mode of warfare by sea which if it were individual in its execution would be called a process of assassination, and which consists in an unseen implement, under the surface of the sea, not taking the hazards of war, not willing to play the game, not giving the other fellow a chance, skulking away from any ship which may have the means of defending itself, lurking until it finds an unsuspecting and defenseless victim, and then by stealth doing it to death, without even giving the women on board a chance to say their prayers. Civilian Belligerents "The character of this war has not only become thus barbarous, but its effects are no longer restricted to the combatant population and the civilian population who are intimately connected with those who are thus engaged, but we witness now a coördination of the nations for war which reaches out to the remotest village and hamlet of a country engaged. Take our own case. When we are, ourselves, thoughtless about it, we think of this war as being fought in France. Why, it is being fought in Boston, it is being fought in Cleveland. It is being fought in Seattle, and in Waco, Tex. We think of it as being fought by these army officers and the men in uniform in the other countries. It is being fought by you. It is being fought by your wives. It is being fought in every factory, in every workshop, in every store, in every home, in this country, and by those marvelously subtile processes of modern scientific achievement whereby we are all coördinated together, as Lowell once said, ' by a common nervous system,' until we now have an institution where every man's thought, energy, and nervous system is electrically connected with a center, and all made a part of the aggregate economic force to win. [Applause.] So that this war differs in character, in intensity, and in consequences. "I have no doubt many men in this room have read the story of Napoleon's invasion of Russia. I think no greater book has been written in the lifetime of any living man than Tolstoy's 'War and Peace.' It tells the whole story of war in Russia, the Napoleonic advance, the Napoleonic retreat, the withdrawal of the civilian population in advance of the army; and Tolstoy's purpose was to paint it at its worst - not to be satisfied with the glory, the waving of flags, and the huzzas of victory, but to paint the individual, personal side of war and so he told of families, of villages, and of cities, and how they were affected. Yet when you compare that tragic experience with what the world has seen in the three years which we now look back upon, it seems like the mimicry of children - it seems like sham battles as compared with the awful devastation which the human race has suffered in that time. The Appeal of Belgium "I need say nothing of Belgium. That is so intimately known to us that we, in our own bodies, it seems to me, have suffered with the Belgians. There was a poetic quality about the invasion of Belgium. It seemed as though there was something Greek about it. Here were those people, letting everybody alone and willing to let everybody alone, and asking only that they be let alone, building up a little civilization, a handsome and attractive and beautiful imitation of the civilization of their French neighbor, until their little capital city, Brussels, came to be called 'The Little Paris,' with a charming and cultured people in a small and defenseless country, guaranteed as to its integrity by solemn instruments entered into by all of the surrounding nations, by which each of them agreed not only to prevent everybody else from interfering with the integrity of that country, but to themselves refrain from violating it. So when the German army advanced into Belgium, we had a sense of shock. It was as though to take a small comparison for a large several people had gone into an art gallery and all had agreed to admire some particularly lovely picture, and then one man, who was bound to that, had taken a sword or a knife and cut to ribbons the finest picture in the whole gallery, just to show his contempt. We followed the tragic fate of Belgium. We saw its undefended cities leveled to the ground and burned, and we saw houses entered by soldiers to chase out the civilian population, who were lined up in the streets and shot at by hundreds, in order so we were told- that the whole world might take notice of how terrible the German autocracy was when it really got started. "We saw later a large part of the Belgian population deported, a thing that had not happened, so far as my recollection of history goes, since the days of the Roman conquest of the world, when they used to go out and get the victims and bring them in trailing at their chariot wheels and counted the conqueror's glory by the number of his captives. I think that has not happened since the time of the Roman conquest in the history of the world. But here was a civilian population which had done nothing, and the people were herded into trains and carried into Germany, put into workshops and subjected to compulsory labor, judged and condemned to involuntary servitude, for no crime, but merely in furtherance of the central purpose of military aggression and dynastic aggrandizement. "That story is so well known to us that we scarcely need to have it called to our mind. But all over Europe, in every corner of it, death and destruction has laid its heavy hand in a way that I think we cannot realize. A year ago I was told, by those who had been there, that there was not in the whole place that once was the kingdom of Poland a single child left living under the age of five years. Armies had swept over that country; the shrinking, feeble, and timid women, gathering their children about them, had withdrawn into the woods and tried to hide from this avalanche of armed men, and in the exodus of a population, fleeing from things worse than death, the little babies had been trampled to death before the advance of the army as they came to take possession. In Armenia a million persons killed not combatant persons, not men who bared their bosoms to the adversary and said, 'It is an even game; shoot me or I will shoot you'; but people sacrificed to the fanatical religious hatred of the Turk by reason of the opportunity presented of world-wide war, with the worst passions of the Turk stirred to emulate the example of his overlord, the Kaiser, by the example which the German autocracy had set among civilized people. How Can the Kaiser Sleep? "So that this war differs in its characteristics and in its consequences. And when I think of pictures like this I wonder how the German Kaiser can sleep at night. How fair the world was in 1914! The marching army of democratic effort and belief was going all over the world and adding victories for humanity and mankind to the great territory which it had conquered in its original home here. I was in Europe just before the war broke out, and I could feel it in the air: the air was electric with the feeling that a reorganization of the social and domestic relations of men was in progress, that the thing which was started here in Boston, -the spirit of liberty and independence and of self-government, and of the dignity of the individual, a message which had been started off here, was really being told over there. Men, were getting to be recognized in the world. In places where ancient aristocracies had existed and present royalty and their ancestors had ruled for years and years, we were coming to hear of happy homes, of prosperous and contented people, who had something approaching equality of opportunity economically and industrially, among their own people. In the midst of that just when the spirit of the world seemed marching to the redemption of mankind — in the midst of that, this war was forced upon the world, upon the flimsiest and most paltry of excuses, because I think nobody can have examined the original cause of this war, the ultimatum to Servia and the answer, and the things which happened after that, without realizing that the head of the German government willed this war. And so when I think in this vein, after these three years of slaughter, with civilization bearing vital if not deadly wounds in every part of its body, with the hope of the human race deferred centuries for the advancement that it might otherwise quickly have attained, I wonder how the German Emperor is able to sleep at night. "I saw a picture that must be familiar to many of you, entitled, 'The Conqueror,' and on a shadow emblematic of a state of war there was riding the majestic figure of a man who while living had been a great conqueror. He was riding along a highway, with his head bowed down; and as you studied the impressionistic mist which covered the picture, you could see that the high road over which he went was made up of the bodies of men who had been slain in order that his military ambition might be satiated. Along this dim road through which he was riding, solitary and unaccompanied, stood the accusing figures of the victims of his wars, each of them only a spirit, only a reminiscence, but in the aggregate each of them pointing, as he rode by, to this conqueror. So I wonder just how, when all the flattery and adulation is taken away, and the Kaiser gets into his own room and the supernumeraries who bend the knee that thrift may follow are away from him, and he is by himself and realizes that the head and front of the nation has let loose this war on mankind in the world - I wonder how he is able to sleep at night. But this war has been brought about. It involves all of this vast |