Can a Republic fight a successful war? Can a people with a century and a quarter of free thought, free speech and free press change suddenly from words to deeds? Can custom and tradition yield gracefully to necessity? Is the heart and brain of the Republic so impressed with the magnitude and importance of this war as to induce it to forget the things which are past and to press forward to the things which are needful?
The Imperial German Staff thought not. It imagined that a people, whose daily sport was carping criticism of their public officials, whose army was hardly as large as a policeman's squad, whose sentiments were all for peace and arbitration, whose ordnance was archaic and whose only gas-bombs were per fervid oratory could never right-about-face and set themselves to engage in the horrific warfare desolating the fields of Europe.
The mistake in this German opinion sprang from a misconception of what liberty really means and of the things for which freedom really stands. Its assumption was that there could be no courage with kindliness nor strength with flexibility. To the slow-going mind of the methodical German his mistaken view is beginning to appear. His first jolt came when the traditions of a century and a quarter with reference to military service were, without riot, tumult or disorder, set aside and 10,000.000 young men of America, without murmur, submitted themselves to conscription, He was further prodded when he learned that, as each successive liberty loan was presented to the people of America it was promptly taken, and what is more important, taken by larger and larger numbers of citizens.
No wonder Uncle Sam and the world think it no bad start that we have made. Like all reforms, it has been accompanied by lapses, by weaknesses, by mistakes of judgment, but through it all there has run the golden thread of a cohesive, coherent and indomitable American public opinion that this country, having set itself to the task of assisting the Allies in forever freeing the world from the menace of German military power, will never turn back in the breaking of a single furrow until the blood-guiltiness of the German race shall be put underneath the sod and the world shall be planted with the asphodels of a permanent peace.
Uncle Sam still smiles confidently, knowing full well that every day is rectifying mistakes and that every day is adding to the bull-dog tenacity of a people, who are willing to defend to the uttermost the principles for which they stand against invasion from without and sedition from within.
THOS. R. MARSHALL,
Vice-President of the United States.
