Our Part in the Great War

mbatants by order of German officers. I saw German troops burn peasants' houses. I saw dying men, women and a child, who had been bayonetted by German soldiers as the

ed among the gutted houses a hundred houses undamaged, with German sc

hine of treachery and cruelty, I had seen an uprising of the people of three nations, men hating war and therefore enlisted in this righteous war to preserve

work group, which would interpret the struggle and give our nation a call to action. I looked to social workers because I have long believed and continue to believe th

y of them anti-war, some of them members of the Woman's Peace Pa

nking worthy of the sudden and immense crisis which challenged them. Absence of moral leadership

ho have not studied the Bryce report, and who are unaware of the German diaries and German letters, specifying atrocities, citing "military necessity," and revea

his hour that German woman's countrymen are holding the little nation in subjection, and impoverishing it by severe taxation, after betraying it for many years, and then burning its homes and killing its peasants. An active unrepentant murderer is not the same as a naughty child, whom you cajole into a conferen

hich I had witnessed, and should state that the war must go on to a righteous finish, she withdrew her invitation, saying she was sorry the women couldn't listen to my stori

axation, of systematic steam-roller crushing, were allowed to be filed in silence, so that these protests that cover more than twelve months of outrage are to-day unknown to the general public, and have not availed to mitigate one item of the ev

d out of existence. They believe that another way out can be found, by some sort of mutual understanding, continuous mediation, and overlooking of definite and

imps, cadets and disorderly hotel keepers. They have let their minds slip into a confusion between right and wrong, a blurring of distinctions as sharp and fundamental as the distinction be

generalizations of prohibition fanatics, of pseudo-Marxian Socialists, of Anarchists, of vegetarians, of Christian Scientists, and of many other sincere persons who overstate, who like to focus what is comp

when confronted with the honeycombing of Belgium with spies through long years and with the state of mind and the resultant acts of infamy recorded by Germans in their letters and diaries. There is an incurable romanticism

and neighbors, and substituted a worl

ents, who were extracting information and forwarding it to Berlin, buying up peasants for spies and building villas with concrete foundations for big guns. "Friends and

e, ancient brutishness trail

unjust, when applied to the Belgian, French and British armies. I have lived and worked as a member of the allied army for five months. It does not trai

umma

revelation of the human spirit in one of its supreme struggles between right and wrong. As the result their words have of

facts of the war. As the result, they have made n

woman with a bayonet thrust through her thigh, and the twelve-year-old girl with her back cut open to the backbone by bayonets. Is it too much to ask that our social workers shall hold their peace in the presence of universal suffer

a few of our social workers had been wounded under fire, we should feel that their companions in the hazard were speaking from some such depth of experience as the peasants of Lorraine. But our idealists have not spoken from t

table distinction between right and wrong, that lends strength to those dying for the right. With such frank taking of sides, le

e act because of the present war alliance. If we had a staunch public opinion, resulting in a strong government policy at Washington which had decided there was a right and a wrong on the western front, and which had thrown the

China into a subject state. If our government were on relations of powerful friendship with the Allies, it would be conceivable that Eng

t will shape it. Because we want a restored Belgium and France and a world peace, we need statesmen who are effective in attaining these things. We need men who can suggest a diplomatic gain in the cause of justice that the nations will agree on, because of a government at Washington that carries we

of four years, we want those men for our leaders who can work results in the world of ti

nd to range on the other side. There will be strange mixtures, of course, on both sides, even as there are in the present war. But the grand total will lean ever more and more to righteous