Page:Armistice Day.djvu/150

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ARMISTICE DAY
 

setbacks are many. Nothing is more tedious than the development of justice through courts of law, yet here is clearly the most valuable foundation for increased security against war that can be devised. Slender and confused as are the beginnings of the World Court, it offers the best hope of progress, provided it can be separated from the politics of the League.

What we suggest as the fitting theme for this day of commemoration is the long, slow and endless task of strengthening justice and right in the world. The labor is hard and discouraging—like trench warfare. It differs no whit from the struggle which every individual faces in his own soul against the enemies within. But it is a man's fight. It is the cause for which Americans fell at Concord Bridge, at Gettysburg, in the Argonne. It knows armistices but no real cessation. If the gains are small they are real, not the mirages of dreams. They are, as the sober opinion of the world is coming to believe, the only possible gains.


HOW AMERICA FINISHED

BY GREGORY MASON

(Paris, December 7, 1918)

The legend, "Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken by Christmas," on a tent near General Headquarters