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Class. Book / War Addresses 1917 J. J. Jusserand Theodore Roosevelt Henry Cabot Lodge James W. Gerard Brig. Gen. William A. White, C. M. G. Stephane Lauzanne Henry Franklin-Bouillon James M. Beck New York The Pennsylvania Society 1918 ANNUAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE SOCIETY The Year Book of the Society is a record of its annual work and a summary of contemporary patriotic and historical activity in Penn- sylvania. Year Book, 1901. Cloth. Pages, 68. Illustrations, 18 Year Book, 1902. Cloth. Pages, 143. Illustrations, 72 Year Book, 1903. Cloth. Pages, 208. Illustrations, 150 Year Book, 1904. Cloth. Pages, 352. Illustrations, 175 Year Book, 1905. Cloth. Pages, 208. Illustrations, 88 Year Book, 1906. Cloth. Pages, 223. Illustrations, 113 Year Book, 1907. Cloth. Pages, 264. Illustrations, 101 Year Book, 1908. Cloth. Pages, 248. Illustrations, 112 Year Book, 1909. Cloth. Pages, 246. Illustrations, 103 Year Book, 1910. Cloth. Pages, 240. Illustrations, 88 Year Book, 1911. Cloth. Pages, 232. Illustrations, 126 Year Book, 1912. Cloth. Pages, 192. Illustrations, 83 Year Book, 1913. Cloth. Pages, 228. Illustrations, 98 Year Book, 1914. Cloth. Pages, 256. Illustrations, 76 Year Book, 1915. Cloth. Pages, 272. Illustrations, 92 Year Book, 1916. Cloth. Pages, 256. Illustrations, 74 Year Book, 1917. Cloth. Pages, 280. Illustrations, 104 Other Publications Report on the William Penn Memorial, 1911. Boards. Constitution of the United States. With facsimile letter from President Taft. 1912. Boards. The United States and the War. 1916. Cloth. War Addresses : 1917. CONTENTS Editorial Note 4 Addresses at the Dinner for the French Ambassador, Decem- ber 8 5 1. Presidential Address — Honourable James M. Beck... 5 2. France — His Excellency, Mr. J. J. Jusserand 10 3. The United States — Honourable Theodore Roosevelt. . 19 4. The Old and the New Entente — Honourable Henry Cabot Lodge 28 5. The American Diplomat — Honourable James W. Gerard 33 6. A Message from the British Ambassador — Brig. Gen. William A. White, C. M. G 40 Address by Stephane Lauzanne 41 Addresses at the Luncheon for M. Henry Franklin-Bouillon. . 44 1. Introductory — Honourable James M. Beck 44 2. Address by M. Henry Franklin-Bouillon 48 EDITORIAL NOTE The addresses delivered at the meetings of The Pennsylvania Society in 1917, by a brilliant group of world-leaders and thinkers, constitute a valuable contribution to the war literature of 1917. It has seemed worth while, therefore, to issue them apart from the Year Book, for which they have been prepared, that they may have a wider circulation than may be possible in the larger publication. Concerned, as they are, with vital topics of the present day, they appear in every way worthy of the largest possible distribution. Barr Ferree. WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 ADDRESS OF THE HONOURABLE JAMES M. BECK President of the Society Your Excellency and Gentlemen of France: The Pennsylvania Society is greatly honoured in having you as its guests tonight and extends to you a heartfelt welcome. You need no other passport to our hospitality than that you come from France. We greet you tonight as fellow-citizens. This is no unmeaning phrase. While our soldiers fight side by side in the trenches, while our women behind the lines give to the great cause the very treas- ures of their souls, while our statesmen meet in joint council and combine the common resources to a common end, while our flags are intertwined in the comradeship of battle, there is, to the eye of imagination, a new state called into being which we may call the United Free States of the world, and of that State we are fellow citizens. Your Minister of War Painleve recently gave fitting ex- pression to this ideal, when he urged that "a single front, a single army, a single nation, that is the programme for future victory," and to this the great Prime Minister of England fittingly replied: "if after forty months of war, after all the lessons the war has taught us, the Allies are not capable of that sacred international union, then in spite of their sacrifices they would not be worthy of victory." That sacred union, so finely characterized by our President as a "partnership of the democratic nations," will continue and all the powers of Prussianism and Hell will not prevail against it. Our soldiers who fight side by side in the trenches can claim a more sacred relation, for it is true of them as they stand guard to- night on the far-flung battle line, as Shakespeare made his Henry V say to his soldiers on the eve of Agincourt — "We band of brothers For he who sheds his blood this day with me He is my brother." 6 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY The Pennsylvania Society meets each year to pay a tribute of affection to the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Tonight, however, our theme is France ; but in making this notable departure from a policy of many years, we need not forget the Common- wealth, to whose honour this Society is dedicated, for France has written notable chapters of her epic history upon the soil of Penn- sylvania. It was in Philadelphia that Lafayette tendered his sword to Washington ; it was at Brandywine that he gave his blood for our cause; it was from Philadelphia that the greatest son of Penn- sylvania, Benjamin Franklin, went to France to seek aid for the infant republic, and it was there that he received a welcome such as France never gave before or since to any man from a foreign coun- try. The glory of Valley Forge is that of France as well as of America, and when the long, dreary and terrible winter had ended, it was in this sacred place, in the Valley of the Schuylkill, that news came to Washington that France had staked her very existence as a nation upon the success of the American arms ; and it was then that Washington, with his own hand, wrote the order that the little army should be assembled, and that to the rolling of the drums, and the jubilant roar of the cannon every American soldier should give three cheers — one for "France," one for "the friendly European powers," and one for "the American States." That cheer, which awoke the echoes in the Valley of the Schuylkill nearly 140 years ago, we take up tonight; and again from our heart of hearts, we, descendants of the Pennsylvania line, cheer for "France," for "the friendly European powers" (now most happily including Great Brit- ain), and for "the American States." We are met tonight especially to honour the Ambassador of France, who greatly honours us with his presence. For many years he has represented his noble country in the capital of our nation, and at all times he has enjoyed the respect and confidence of each successive President of the United States. We honour him not merely as an accomplished and noble-minded diplomat, but also as an author of distinction, who has promoted the great cause of Franco-American fraternity, by interpreting the literature of the English-speaking races to France, and the literature of France to England and America. WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 7 I shall not at this time attempt to say all that is in my heart with reference to His Excellency's contribution to the welfare of civilization, a contribution never more conspicuously useful than in the last three years, when in a very critical time and under cir- cumstances of extraordinary delicacy and embarrassment, he has served not only his own country, but also the nation to which he was accredited. To speak of him as he deserves is the office of a friend, and while I am greatly privileged to feel that I am his friend, yet I shall not say all that is in my heart to say as to our guest of honour, for there are two here tonight, who are older friends, and who may more justly claim this office of friendship — one a leading Member of the Senate, and the other an Ex-President of the United States, who will pay deserved tributes to all that the Ambassador has done in making the path smooth for the new En- tente, new and yet gloriously old. In the limited time that I shall reserve to myself, less I trespass unduly upon those who are also our guests tonight, I wish to speak of France. I shall not attempt to praise her, for the person that we love we do not attempt to praise merely in words. We love France and her glory is beyond verbal appraisement, and never in all her long and resplendent career as a nation was her prestige more resplen- dent than at this hour. We hail her tonight as a victor, and notwithstanding the critical nature of the hour, a victor she is. Every war has two aspects — a spiritual and a material one — of these, the former, measured by the eternal verities of the ages, is the more important. From this higher and more enduring standpoint, the result of this war is no longer in doubt. France, and indeed the Allied nations are the un- doubted victors, not only because the irreversible judgment of man- kind has sustained the righteousness of their quarrel, but because they have shown an infinite moral superiority to their cruel and unscrupulous enemies. France has conquered herself, and "he that conquers himself is greater than he who takes a city." She has conquered Germany, for even if German arms should triumph — which God forbid! — France would stand in the estimation of the ages as an infinite superior to her adversary, as Athens was greater 8 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY than Rome, even when Athens .was in a material sense conquered. The art, the culture, the idealism of Greece rose even in defeat above the martial might of Rome. For all that is the finest in life men turned and still turn to the "City of the violet crown," rather than to Imperial Rome, and the new city of the violet crown on the banks of the Seine dims with its glory the vulgar splendour of Berlin One can measure this triumph by a striking contrast. Tonight every nation in the world respects France, and every nation, with the exception of Germany, loves France, while tonight there is not a nation in the world that loves Germany; and only her vassal allies can be said to even respect her, in the sense that the slave respects the lash of the slave-driver. The bouleversement in this respect in the last half century is remarkable. In 1871, France was abased in the eyes of the world, and Germany stood forth as the conqueror in shining armour. Tonight the world salutes France as a nation of Bayards — sans peur et sans reproche — and loathes Ger- many as a convicted criminal at the bar of civilization. All the roar of Hindenburg's cannons cannot silence the rising storm of execra- tion against this criminal nation, nor can it lessen the glory with which civilization invests the France of today. But it is not enough that France should have only spiritual triumph. Her faith, which has literally removed mountains, must not be in vain or lack fitting recompense. She has given the lives of over a million of her sons for the cause of civilization, and her material triumph is a sacred debt due alike to her dead and to her unborn. Her martyrdom in the cause of civilization has lasted longer than the three years of this tragic war. For nearly half a century she has suffered the agony of an undeserved humiliation, during which she made inestimable sacrifices to interpose herself as a barrier between the arrogant ambitions of Germany and the rest of the world. The statue of her Strassburg is still draped with mourning emblems, and they must and shall be removed. For three years she has "fought the good fight and has kept the faith," and while she has never in words appealed to us, yet she now has a just claim, that America should come to her relief and share to a larger degree her sacrifices. We, of all nations, cannot afford to resist WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 9 the appeal that comes to us, not only from the living Frenchmen but from the graves of her dead. Let us not forget that early in 1781, when the hour was dark for us and the situation most critical, Washington sent this message to France : "If France delays a timely and powerful aid in the critical position of affairs, it will avail us nothing should she attempt it hereafter — it may be declared in a word that we are at the end of our tether, and that now or never deliverance must come." France could make to us the same appeal. Never did a nation make greater sacrifices and ask less for them. Never did a nation fight so valorously and boast less about it. Whatever comes, she will fight bravely on until final victory, for in this dark and terrible night she is a star — "To whose fixed and constant quality There is no fellow in the firmament." I may assure his Excellency, and our other guests from France, that America appreciates this ; but appreciation of the fact is not enough. It must not only be translated into action, but into very speedy and effective action. The primal necessity is one of ship- ping. France needs our men and our guns less than she needs our ships and our food, for her position in this critical hour of a titanic war is that of the valorous Ajax, who, when enveloped in unnatural clouds and darkness in the war before the walls of Troy, prayed : "Dispel this cloud, the light of heaven restore, Give me to see and Ajax asks no more." In aiding France, the feet of America should be swift, and its soul jubilant. Let us say to France — "O sister Republic — for we were born of the same mighty travail — we are coming millions strong to your relief, and we will spare neither our lives, nor our treasures until your brave children have avenged the humiliation of 1871 by marching as victor down the Unter den Linden to the inspiring strain of the Marseillaise. 10 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY FRANCE Address of His Excellency, Mr. J. J. Jusserand, Ambassador of the French Republic I A great country should have a great representative. France has only here a devoted one, who, since early youth, has tried to serve her and who, accredited to the United States for now fifteen years, has ever had present before his eyes the good example of his diplomatic ancestors Gerard de Rayneval and La Luzerne: they showed how French diplomats should act towards a country whose leader in their days was George Washington, and how the two tasks of serving France and America are, in reality, as closely con- nected as brother to brother; devoted to them is what I hope I have been. I did not have to choose what my life should be ; events left me no choice; the war of 1870 decided. I was of those who, too young to take part in it, had been left at school, while all the older boys had enlisted: and it was a great day when the survivors re- turned from Belfort, the citadel which had remained unconquered, and showed us with pride how they had managed, to the last, to preserve a gala uniform, which feat consisted in buttoning their mud-stained coat to the left on ordinary days and to the right on great days. A constant flow of troops moving north occupied half the col- lege, and while the news came gloomier every day, our parents and our professors taught us that a much more important and useful duty than hating the enemy, consisted in hating our own faults and weaknesses. Our vain confidence in our lucky stars, our inade- quate knowledge of foreign nations and of what was hatching in the wide world, had been our bane. Work, learn, become complete men, was the ever recurring burden of our tuition. Never think of duty and pleasure; let duty be your pleasure, and you will soon find that there is no greater one. It is not possible to imagine sadder but more resolute little peo- ple than we were, learning four or five modern languages besides WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 11 Greek and Latin, law, mathematics, fine arts. Physical exercise was not forgotten, and we were riding, fencing, swimming, climbing, unaware that this: would be some day of use to one of the group, in order to climb the rocks along the Potomac and swim the river in the company of the President of the United States. There was no merit in all this, the ball had been set rolling by our parents and teachers, and it was rolling. II At the time of the War of Independence, your own Tom Paine, own own Tom Paine, for he was a member of our Convention, and our British friends' Tom Paine, too, for he was born a Britisher, thus belonging to the three Yorktown nations, said a word that fits as well the present crisis as the one he took part in : "These are the times that try men's souls." Yours have been tried and found true, so have ours, we hope. I have seen nothing of this war, and yet I saw what was per- haps most characteristic and telling : I crossed part of France during the mobilization. In the midst of harvest time, knowing nothing of the imperial plots and threatening onslaught, our men had been busy reaping their fields on those glorious summer days ; and as unexpectedly as a thunderbolt from the blue, they had been called to the colours for the greatest trial their nation, in the course of her millenial history, had ever experienced. Without a shout, without a threat, without a word, with serious, not anxious faces, they had left their quiet homes and answered the call of duty ; and we passed them, following the roads, with determined faces, in dogged silence, leading to camp the grey mare and their other four-footed friends. Fit men to fight at the Marne, Ypres and Verdun; their souls had been tried and found true. We thought we knew the kind of enemy we would have to fight; we had met him before on the battlefield, and had visited his country and much too often welcomed him to our homes. We had in truth no idea of what he was. The first revelations were indeed so surprising that we could scarcely take them seriously and were tempted to attribute them to some passing fit of madness. When we were told that war was declared on us because we had bombarded Nuremberg, we were as much tempted to laugh as to be 12 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY indignant. By degrees only, by the ever recurring repetition of the same words and the same deeds, we understood what the reality was and that we had to do with an enemy who wanted to dominate, not our country but the world, relying equally for success on two means, brute force and secret intrigue: the classical attributes of tyrants in every age. To what extent they rely on those means would be unbeliev- able, but the facts are there. They take pride in the false assump- tion that they are the modern Huns. The Huns would not be flattered, for they knew something else than force and perfidy, and were sometimes accessible to sentiment. At the prayer of its Bishop St. Loup, they spared Troyes. No, to meet their equals we must go back to primeval times when crude mankind worshipped force and nothing else, worshipped tempests, fire and earthquakes, found in the violence of elemental forces something divine. The basis of such a cult has nothing very exalted, it is fear. That is the basis of the cult they render today to what has been justly called their own private Hohenzollern God. The life formula of primeval men was a brief one of three words: "Might is right"; they knew no better, they had it in com- mon with the mastodon and the dinosaur. Is it believable that after the lapse of so many decades of centuries, the same formula can have been propagated as an axiom, an ideal of life, as another name for a thing which our enemies are pleased to call Kultur ? Certainly not ; yet it is so. You can open almost at random any of the books in which they speak their mind and you will find that same veneration, coupled with fear, for sheer force. Here is an example. One of their princely Highnesses, Adolf Friedrich, duke of Mecklenburg, ex- plored Africa in 1910-11, at the head of a German botanical and zoological mission, crossed our colonies and went (and this is the title of his book) "from the Congo to the Niger and the Nile"; a thoroughly Germanic expedition, "His Majesty the Emperor hav- ing been graciously pleased to contribute a substantial sum of money towards the expenses." What strikes one most in the account of the stay of those WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 13 Germans in our possessions is that our humanity towards the na- tives inspires them with nothing but derision. Herr Doctor Schu- botz, one of the contributors, drops in a casual way, as a matter of course, those memorable and characteristic sayings : "Might is right must be the motto of every intending colonist; a hundred times have I learned this by bitter experience, for friendly persua- sion will never induce a Sara native to carry a tin box for you. He will do so only if he knows that his refusal will result in his hut being burnt down by soldiers. Unfortunately there were not enough available soldiers." It is exactly the same principle which another German prince, the very one who had been graciously pleased to contribute to the expedition, and who thought he had enough soldiers, applied on August 4, 1914, to the Belgians, treated, as the rest of the world, as if they were natives of Sara. But he was mistaken, he had not enough soldiers ; on a part of Belgium, the Belgian flag still floats, held in the grasp of a model ruler; a sign that for the primeval being of kultur, the day of doom is coming. What scorn would not Schubotz and his peers have felt for the man who having to deal with American savages once wrote : "The basis of our proceedings with the Indian natives, has been and will be justice." That man was George Washington. If you want to see at a glance the difference between kultur and civilization, compare the effusions of Herr Schubotz and the ac- count of his journey, in similar regions, of another huntsman and zoological collector, one of the successors of Washington, former President Roosevelt. That in the Germans' eyes force and justice are the same thing has been superabundantly proved at Louvain, Reims and each of the unfortunate cities or villages occupied by the enemy. Re- proached by the parish priest of one of them with monstrous, in- excusable, perfectly useless cruelties, a German officer answered: "Oh! we were so very victorious" — a lesson for the world as to what would happen if the Germans were to be in the end "so very victorious"; which they won't be. That officer had something of 14 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY the dinosaur. So do, judged from their words, many of the Ger- man spokesmen, Major General von Disfurth, for example, who wrote in November, 1914: "For my part, I hope that in this war we have merited the title of barbarians" (Yes, General; be of good cheer; you have); or Adolf Lasson, professor of philosophy at Berlin, and in whose philosophy are found such unsophisticated gems as these: ''Our army is the epitome of German excellence. We must sacrifice our dearest, our best, our most noble, to fight with Russian beasts . . . Russia must no longer be on our fron- tier. . . . Holland is a mere appendage to Germany." Which all comes to this: what is good to have, we have a right to take, since we possess the force to take it : a philosophy which, if they had any university at all, the dinosaurs must have taught to their young. Ill Concealed, insidious action is the other mainstay of the system, coupled with a quiet assumption and repetition that untruth is truth, as persistent as the saying that might is right, and an exact parallel to it. It seems to be part of the Germanic creed that for meaner creatures, that is those not so big as the dinosaur, it is enough to repeat that two and two make five, two and two make five — for the thing to become axiomatic and therefore indisputable. And we hear them repeating in the quiet tones of a professor of algebra : two and two make five. A variant is sometimes introduced and we hear that two and two make three: that is when the interests of the minor creatures themselves are in question; it scarcely ever happens in their calculations that they simply make four. ♦When one of them ventures to say that it is so, he is never pardoned, and he becomes the object of ceaseless obloquy, as for hav- ing betrayed a secret. A striking example is that of Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg, to whom it happened, in the flush of the early days of the war, to say of the monstrous invasion of Belgium by his people: "We do wrong." At a recent meeting of the Agrarian League in Berlin (February, 1918) Herr von Oldenburg, said to be a personal friend of the Crown Prince, spoke thus : "I do not believe any mistake did such grave and lasting injury as Bethmann-Hollweg has done his sovereign and his fatherland . . . His declaration about the wrong we did in Belgium cannot ever be washed away by any rain." No amount of rain could, of course, wash the stain of his having revealed that secret of secrets, that wrong is wrong and that two and two make four. WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 15 Proofs are superabundant. After the invasion of Belgium and the horrors that followed, the same Lasson wrote: "We Germans have no friends because we are . . . morally superior to all." After the same invasion and the declaration of war on us, because we had bombarded Nuremberg, the Kaiser exclaimed : "The sword has been forced into our hands," and he has never tired of repeating this, in the belief that it would become axiomatic for his hearers that two and two make five. It has not become so in any case, for the President of the United States, who was saying the other day, in his memorable speech at Buffalo : "The war was started by Germany. Her author- ities deny that they started it. But I am willing to let the statement I have just made await the verdict of history." Speaking of the invasion of Belgium, I may quote a personal souvenir. I was, in the early days of the war, at Havre, trying to return here. I desired, before sailing, to get maps. I could not find in all the city one of our frontier bordering on Germany; the answer was the same in every shop : officers have bought them all. But there were plenty of supposedly useless maps of the Belgian frontier ; so I bought one and, contrary to expectation, could follow the events on it for a long time. I never was more tempted to publish an answer than when Dr. Dernburg made public, once for all, the reasons why Germany had dominant rights over Belgium. The statement is of importance because we have it, in one and the same sentence, from a man of standing and education, considered a moderate in his country, that for Germans two and two make five, and for the Belgians three. Here are the words of the Doctor in an article by him, published in the Independent, December 7, 1914: "Geographically, Belgium does certainly belong to the German Empire. She commands the mouth of the biggest German stream." My answer would have been: One should yield to good rea- sons, even when given by an enemy. As soon, and so long, as Bel- gium commands the mouth of the chief German stream, she should be handed to the German executioner, but not before. For the 16 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY present, however, if we trust school books, Belgium does not com- mand the mouth of the Rhine, which flows to the sea across Hol- land; nor of the Meuse, nor even of the Scheldt; she commands, in fact, the mouth of no river at all. This example of serene false assertion is a typical one, rein- forced even by what follows in Dr. Dernburg's article from which we learn that "Antwerp is most essentially a German port . . . That Antwerp should not belong to Germany is as much an anomaly . . . as if New York had remained English after the war of Independence." Of any Germanic War of Independence, liberating Antwerp as New York had been liberated by you, the Doctor, for reasons of his own, says nothing. Only those can wonder who fancy that two and two make four. IV How can this system of force-worship and false pretences be accepted by any nation? It has been accepted by one only, the Prussian, but through it, by degrees, since the war of 1870, by the rest of Germany. The means has been militarism. Militarism does not consist, as some continue to repeat now and then, in having many soldiers. We have as many soldiers as we have inhabitants able to bear arms, and we are not militaristic. One proof among many others : we never at any period of our national life, celebrated the anniversary of any of our victories. The same with you. Militarism consists in the whole nation, male and female, young and old, soldiers and civilian, laymen and priests, blindly accept- ing to be ruled over in military fashion: all obeying whatever the order ; all believing the word received from the people above them, whatever be that word. Magister dixit. The whole forces of the nation are thus placed in the hands of a single man, responsible to nobody, who may use them at his pleasure, the whole machinery thus possessing an extraordinary destructive force; and all the in- dividuals composing it having to act, speak and believe as they are told. They were told of Nuremberg, of the sword having been forced into the hands of their sovereign ; of Belgian maidens goug- ing out the eyes of kindly German soldiers; of the mouth of the WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 17 Rhine being wantonly commanded by impudent Belgium. All that was accepted as a matter of course; of this is made the German "morale." The imperial authorities take pride in allowing British papers to be read in Berlin cafes ; they can do so without fear. The contents are not believed; the readers find in those sheets that two and two make four ; they know very well that it is not so. V When I returned here in August, 1914, I had to make up my mind as to what line of conduct I should follow. The enemy was filling the air with high-sounding statements, spending millions, engineering the most astounding propaganda, the aims of which were not all of them persuasion, as was shown in the Welland Canal affair and similar ones. I was not long in deciding: I would leave the whole field to the adversary ; would take no part in the fray, let him have all the spotlight, save the French millions (I never spent so much as one cent), and so that he be better heard, never myself say a word. This was considered by some very bold; some blamed me ; I would not change, and without swerving one way or the other, persisted. What made me so bold was my unshakable faith in our good cause and in American good sense ; I might add in American sen- timent. Practical efficiency, and soul-moving sentiment are the two poles of the American character. They never showed to better advantage than in this crisis. No Kaiser could lead Americans astray by false calculations, or false geography, nor efface by any insinuations the sentiment they had for France. Eleven years ago, in the city of Independence, Philadelphia, a grand gathering took place, to commemorate the bi-centennial of Franklin's birth. Presenting to the Ambassador of France the gold medal struck on that occasion, in accordance with a vote of Congress, the then Secretary of State, Elihu Root, delivered a brief address of extraordinary beauty, in the course of which he said : "Take this medal for your country as a token that, with all the changing manners of the passing years . . . Americans have 18 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY not forgotten their fathers nor their fathers' friends. Know by it that we have in America a sentiment for France, and a sentiment enduring among a people, is a great and substantial fact to be reckoned with." I had faith in the truth of those words; I knew they would prove prophetic, and they have. The great heart of America had early spoken ; young men from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn- sylvania, Chicago and all the great universities had gone as leaders, as precursors, to France, helping her wounded, fighting for her cause, enlisting in the Legion, or becoming, as Mr. Roosevelt has felicitously called them, the Lafayettes of the air. The American mind had been enlightened by the pen and the word of the best in this land, some of the chief ones are among the orators of tonight. Then the day that had to come, arrived, when the chief magis- trate of this Republic raised his voice and said: "We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquests and no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, and no material compensa- tion for the sacrifices we shall freely make." Almost the very words the French had used in 1778. And President Wilson con- tinued: "Civilization itself seems to be in the balance, but right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy . . . for the rights and liberties of small nations, for the universal domin- ion of right by such a concert of free peoples as will bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world at last free." Memorable words, of far-reaching and lasting consequences. You are a nation that remembers. So are we. The date 1778 is still, as the event shows, engraved in your hearts. I can assure you, Mr. President, you whose "Evidence in the Case" has forecast the decision of posterity, and you all, American friends, that so long as we live, so long as there is a France, all the inhabi- tants of her soil will keep engraved in their hearts the date 1917, when America decided to come in and to help win the day for Liberty. WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 19 THE UNITED STATES Address of the Honourable Theodore Roosevelt For the last three years and a quarter I have had but little to do, when I preached Americanism, save to say "ditto to Mr. Burke" in the person of James M. Beck. It has been my supreme good for- tune to stand shoulder to shoulder with him in the fight for the right as it was given us to see the right ; and naturally it is a matter of very great pleasure to me to be one of those chosen to greet the Ambassador this evening. I doubt very much whether any Ambas- sador ever had closer relations with the head of the country to which he was accredited than was the case with Ambassador Jusserand and myself ; and I am very sure they were closer than those of Mr. Gerard with the representatives of the Hohenzollerns ! And as the Ambassador has alluded to the diversions in which we took part, of a hygenic nature, I may, perhaps, be permitted to say that we did occasionally take walks together. Indeed, it was my great pleasure on one occasion to have the then Judge and afterwards Ambassador Gerard with me on one of those walks. The Ambassador has alluded to the fact that occasionally in the course of the walks we swam. I remember once — I would not venture to repeat this if the Ambassador had not laid himself open to it — I remember once when we were out walking that we came to the Potomac and swam it. We had undressed, and just as we were getting in somebody said to the Ambassador, "Mr. Ambassa- dor, Mr. Ambassador, you have your gloves on," to which the Am- bassador responded, "Yes ; we might meet ladies !" If this were a less formal gathering, I could relate other anec- dotes to show that the Ambassador is not only one of the ablest of diplomats, and a great literary man, but also a dead game sport ! I am sorry to say that your President now actually wants me to enter into a controversy as to which of us won at tennis. I posi- tively decline to mar the happiness of this occasion by any discus- sion of the kind. 20 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY Friends, the Ambassador has been here for fifteen years, and he has fulfilled as very, very few Ambassadors have ever done, the two prime functions of an Ambassador — showing genuine devotion to his own country, and showing genuine purpose to do all that can be done for the country to which he is accredited. The Ambas- sador has proved himself as able a servant of France as France has ever had in her long line of able servants. And he has also proved himself as loyal a friend of America as even France has produced since 1778. We greet the Ambassador and through him we pay homage to France. Thank heaven, at last we stand shoulder to shoulder with France, as one hundred and forty years ago, in our hour of dark trial, the forefathers of the French of today stood shoulder to shoulder with our forefathers here. As you have said, Mr. Ambassador, before we went to war with Germany we had sent our non-neutral Lafayettes of the air to battle with the German war-hawks over the French trenches, and now our troops have crossed and are crossing the seas by the hundred thousand to play against the brutal soldiery of the Hohenzollerns the part that Rochambeau once played against a valiant and chivalrous foe. I wish that all our people would read the book in which Ambas- sador Gerard has given his experiences with the German people: "The German Kaiser and the German People." The book teaches us a needed lesson about our bitter and treacherous foes. It is not too much to say that not for over fifty years has any Ambassador of ours had a more difficult part to play and played it better than Ambassador Gerard did. Friends, we welcome our guest for the man that he is, and for the mighty nation that he so worthily represents. But re- member that our welcome is worthless except in so far as it is an earnest of the tangible aid that with the utmost speed we are to give the French people. The justification, and the only justification for this banquet, is in that service flag which hangs overhead. No Society that can- not produce that kind of a flag to show what its members and the sons of its members have done, has any right to hold a banquet at WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 21 this time. Words are good only and precisely as they are trans- lated into deeds. The words of Franklin have been quoted tonight. Why? Because they were made good by the ragged soldiers who saw through the dark days of the Revolutionary War. It was the men of Valley Forge, the men of Trenton, the men of Yorktown, who have given us a right to speak of the fathers of this Republic. The written word and the spoken word count only when they rep- resent the deeds of the men with sword girt on thigh. We are in this war in desperate earnest, and we are in honour bound to strain every effort on behalf of this nation, and on behalf of France, and on behalf of England and our other Allies. We meet here tonight; we meet here in luxury; we meet at this Dinner in peace, after we have been ten months at war. Why? Because the French and the English armies and navies have pro- tected us with their armed might. They have protected us for more than those ten months; for forty months they have been fighting our battles. We walk with our heads up tonight, instead of cowering before a brutal alien soldiery, only because by the hundred thousand the men of France and the men of England have died, that our souls should be free. This is not a debt that can be paid by even the nicest words. No clapping, no cheering is of any real consequence in paying such a debt. The debt has to be paid by Americans with rifles in their hands, fighting for England and France in our turn. Will we put a million men in France? Yes, and five million if it is necessary in order to see the fight through and win. Let us take care of our foreign foes and take care of our do- mestic traitors, too. I do not wish to copy Germany's example in most things; but I would treat every German spy in this country exactly as Germany would treat an American spy in Germany; and I would treat every American traitor as Germany has treated German traitors. Let us make treason an unhealthy game to play at. Let us remember that when the life of the nation is at stake, it is well to follow the example of those arch-apostles of freedom, Washington and Lincoln, in the way they dealt with the traitors of their time — by martial law. And having dealt with the traitors, then deal with the conditions which have produced traitors; deal 22 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY with the policies of the past which have encouraged men to come hither only on the theory that they were changing one feeding trough for a better feeding trough. Insist hereafter that any man who comes here comes only after having definitely and in good faith made up his mind that he is going to be an American and nothing else. If he adopts the Lot's wife attitude and looks back to the cities of the plain — inasmuch as it is not possible to turn him into a pillar of salt — at least let us send him back to the country from which he came. And there are some native Americans we might with advantage send with him. If I could address a Council of Perfection to the Senators present, I would suggest that inasmuch as we are at war with Germany, there is no reason why we should spare her ; and so I would endeavour to give Senator La Follette to her. I, like your President, am a man who represents in one way at least the Americanism of the future; for in my case, if you try to connect me with old-world nationalities by hyphens, you would need seven of them. I have a certain ancestral right to come to The Pennsylvania Society, for a quarter of my blood is Pennsyl- vanian, and it includes two of the founders of Germantown. Par- don me for just one word about my ancestors, as having a bearing on the present day problem. Two hundred and twenty-five years ago there were some German peasants in Germantown, who had come here because the armies of Louis XIV ravished the Palatinate. There was an Irishman who had left Ireland because Protestants didn't make Ireland a pleasant place for Catholics; and there was a Frenchman who left France because Catholics didn't make France a pleasant place for Protestants. There were some English and Welsh Quakers. There were some Scotch farmers. And there were some Dutch traders and mechanics here in New York. Those people and their descendants gradually grew to speak the same language. They intermarried. If they hadn't I wouldn't be here! And if my ancestors in the male line had continued to speak Dutch, I might have been Sheriff of Nassau County; but I would never have been President of the United States. WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 23 The other day I made a little trip through Wisconsin and Min- nesota, speaking as I am speaking tonight. I took with me two as straight Americans as I know — one a man of German ancestry, one a man of Swedish ancestry. One presided and the other introduced me. Now, supposing that Mr. Butz had presided in German and Judge Nelson had introduced me in Swedish, and I had then burst into oratory in Dutch — why, the audience would each have needed three interpreters in order to tell what we were at. But we all used the same speech. We not only bore loyalty to only one flag, but we expressed ourselves in one language. If any immigrant who comes here does not learn to speak English in five years, let us send him back ; and let us pass a law forbidding the teaching of German in public schools for children under the age of fourteen; after that let them learn it as they would any other tongue; but let them understand that they speak English, that they talk United States, if they are to live in the United States. And now for heaven's sake, friends, don't let your enthusiasm about this matter die with the War. The other crowd won't let it die! Look what the German-American Alliance have been doing- in this country ! They organize against America. We must organ- ize for America. Don't forget that every man who calls himself an American and something else is not an American at all. Either a man is straight United States and nothing else, or he ought to be sent out of the country. Apply this to the War. We must be Americans and nothing else. We must stand by every ally of the United States. The man who is hostile to any ally of the United States is hostile to the United States. If we see this War through with our Allies, we have a right to ask of them that they fight the war loyally to the end, and that which we ask of others we must ourselves do. We came into this War very late. Therefore it is trebly incumbent upon us now to do our full part in it. Help France. Don't just be content, you men here, you men who number in your ranks so many of the lead- ing and the most influential men in our country ; don't you be con- tent with just coming here, passing a pleasant evening, applauding the speeches and then going home and thinking it over. Shoot the way you shout. Back up the War. Thank heaven some of you 24 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY stand by all our Allies and put the war through and make war on all our foes. Don't let us stay at war with Germany and at peace have backed it up yourselves ; others have backed it up with your sons, as the flag shows. See that the country backs it up. Back up France; give money; and I cannot speak too strongly in favour of the way in which the Congress has appropriated the necessary funds. Give the money, give the food, build the ships, and build them with three-shift days ; build them by working day and night. Remember that any delay of so much as a week that is not vitally necessary, represents treason to the Allied cause. Build the guns. We have been getting France, hard-pressed France, to build the guns for us ; .bend every energy to getting our own people to build the guns for us and for the French, too. Build the airplanes. And when you have done all that, remember that no mere expenditure of dollars, that no mere building of machines, will save this nation's soul unless this nation sends its own sons to fight. Uncle Sam must not con- fine himself to the role of a sutler. He has got to be a soldier. That is the only way by which we can permanently earn our own self-respect and therefore the respect of ally or enemy. There must be nothing half-hearted in our attitude toward this war. I don't believe in ever going to war if you can help it, but if you go to war, go to war. I earnestly hope that the day will come when every statesman will feel it incumbent upon him to conduct the affairs of the State with the same nice attention to honour as that by which an honourable man conducts his own affairs. I ask that we scrupulously refrain from wronging others, that we refuse to be wronged by others, and that we stand up for others when they are wronged. Never will we get international fair dealing by passing resolutions, or putting down nice, high-sounding phrases on pieces of paper. In municipal law, in the internal development of any nation, justice comes only when men are willing to fight in quarrels in which they have no immediate interest. That is, never will you get justice in a nation until men are willing to stand up for the rights of others, even when their own rights are not immediately concerned. In international affairs, wrong will stop only when nations like this nation are willing to fight at the drop of the hat when such a wrong is done as was done to Belgium. So WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 25 with two out of three of Germany's vassal States in alliance with her. There are four of the Central Powers. We made war — rather, we didn't make war, but one of them made war on us, ten months ago ; we admitted it eight months ago. And at last we have declared war on Austria. Of course, if for the last eight months we have been at peace with Austria, then our conduct has been so shamefully unneutral that she would by right in any International Court have an enormous bill of damages against us; and if we have been at war with her, it is a pity she didn't know it. It is nearly impossible for any Power to behave worse than Germany; but Turkey has achieved the impossible. It is to be deeply deplored ; it is a stain on our national honour if we stay one day longer at peace with Turkey; and unless we go to war with Bulgaria we are acting treacherouly to Servia and Roumania. Never hit anyone if you can help it, but never hit soft. No- body is grateful for being hit soft. If you hit a man, but if you only hit him a little, he will hurt you ! Don't hit him at all, if you can help it; but if you do hit him, put him to sleep. (I am glad to see the rapidity with which you grasp my mean- ing.) And only by making this war thoroughgoing, by fighting Germany and all her Allies, and fighting them victoriously, can we remove the nightmare of the German threat to the civilized world I wish that all of you here would read an article by a French publicist, Andre Cheradame, in the Atlantic Monthly of this month. Read what he says on the need of radical treatment of the Austro- Hungarian and Balkan and Asiatic situations. Get your friends who have influence with the newspapers of the cities from which you come to read it and set the facts before the American people. Inasmuch as we are in the war, we don't want to fight just enough to make Germany eager to get at us again, and not enough to make her afraid of getting at us again. Belgium must be restored and indemnified. We need not put any punitive indemnity on Germany ; if we just simply impose the indemnity she ought to pay in order to restore Belgium to where Belgium once stood, there will be no need of a punitive indemnity. France must have back, not only the territory that Germany has taken during the last three and a 26 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY quarter years, but Alsace and Lorraine. If she does not have them back, the peace at the end of this war will not be the kind of peace we ought to have out of the war. And now take Austro-Hungary and Turkey. They are not na- tions at all. Each is a tyranny by a minority over a majority. In the case of Turkey, it is the tyranny of one dominant race over several others; in the case of Austro-Hungary, it is a tyranny of two races, which in the aggregate represent the minority of all the people, over the majority which is composed of different races. I think it is most important that our people should emphasize the fact, in dealing with Austro-Hungary, that when we war against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, we are making war on behalf of the majority of the people now dwelling in Austro-Hungary. We cannot do justice to the majority of the people dwelling in Austro- Hungary except by breaking up the Empire. That is the only way to destroy the dual tyranny of the Austro-German and the Magyar. That is the only way in which we can make democracy safe for ourselves, for the subject peoples of Austria's power, and for all the world. Neither democracy nor civilization is safe while these two states exist in their present form ; and unless we fight for the complete independence of the oppressed nationalities within their borders, we betray their rights, we betray the cause of democracy in the world and we are false to our own interests. Turkey should be driven from Europe. If Russia had developed a real and stable democracy, I should have been glad to see Constantinople in her hands ; but until she realizes that the Bolsheviki stand on a par of tyranny with the Romanoffs themselves, until her democracy saves itself from the red extremists who have betrayed it to Germany, then all we can do, if we are wise, is to make Constantinople a free city of the Straits. The Armenians and Syrian Christians and Jews and Arabs should be freed ; and the only way we can stand by Roumania is to stand against Bulgaria. It is idle to try to stand by Roumania or Servia, unless we stand against the Bulgarian who has betrayed his fellow Christians in the interest of his old-time oppressor, the Turk. In Austro-Hungary, I don't want to see either the German or WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 27 the Magyar oppressed by anybody. I would stand against any op- pression of either by anybody; but neither should they oppress anybody. As for the Hungarians, I firmly believe that at this mo- ment over four-fifths of the Magyars, the peasants, would welcome the break-up of the aristocratic tyranny by which they are ex- ploited. Try to make the Magyars of Hungary a real democracy. Let the Italians of Austria join Italy and the Roumanians of Hun- gary join Roumania. Let the Poles of Austria, Germany and Rus- sia become a great Polish commonwealth, stretching to the Baltic, not a sham Poland, under a Hohenzollern, but a real Polish com- monwealth, with Prussian Poland and Austrian Poland included. Let the Bohemians, Moravians and Slovaks become a Greater Bo- hemia — and this would be the key of the whole situation, for as soon as a Greater Bohemia is founded, the German menace to civilization vanishes. Let Servia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzogovina and the other southern Slav lands of Austria become a Jugo-Slav com- monwealth. It is only by insisting on such action that we can make democracy safe in those lands and make civilization safe, make small liberty-loving nations safe, from the nightmare of German conquest. Tonight, in Ambassador Jusserand I greet an old and valued friend. I greet him in the way in which he prizes most, for I greet him as representing the wonderful commonwealth, the mar- velous French Republic, which stands forever as both the most charming and the most heroic figure among all the great nations of mankind. France embodies all of loveliness and all of valour; beauty is her hand-maiden and strength her shield-bearer; and the shining courage of her daughters has matched the courage of her dauntless sons. For three and a half terrible years she has walked high of heart through the valley of the shadow. Her body is in torture, but her forehead is alight with the beauty of the morning. Never in all history has there been such steadfast loyalty in the doing of dangerous duty, such devotion to country, such splendour of service and of sacrifice. And great shall be her reward, for she has saved the soul of the world. 28 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY THE OLD AND THE NEW ENTENTE Address of the Honourable Henry Cabot Lodge, Senator of the United States from Massachusetts It is a very great privilege for me to be permitted by you to take part in honouring M. Jusserand. He and I have been friends and have known each other for many years. He has been to me a kind, loyal and affectionate friend, true and sympathetic always, whether in the sunshine of happiness or in the darkness of sorrow. How admirably he has performed all the duties of his great position is known to the world. With the anxiety of an attached friend, I have watched him through these last three terrible years. If he has ever made a mistake, if he has ever stumbled on his path, sur- rounded as it is by perils and broken by pitfalls, I have not observed it. Affection has a keener eye than enmity, and I have never seen a moment when I even faintly wished that he had selected another course from that which he had chosen. Never absent from his post, labouring night and day with an almost inconceivable industry, always dignified and never forgetful ; whether torn with apprehen- sion or elated by victory and by hope, his calmness, his coolness of judgment, above all his steady courage, have never wavered. In the history of these evil days that is a noble record of great service to a great cause. We gather to honour him as a diplomat, as a statesman, as a scholar, as a great scholar especially in the history and literature of the English-speaking people. We welcome and greet him as the loyal friend of the United States. Most of all do we honour him in that character in which he himself would most desire to be hon- oured, as the Ambassador of France. His are the high privilege and the precious right to speak to us for France, and in the name of the French Republic. It is our part to speak to him of France as, like her own Maid of Warriors in shining armour, she towers in the forefront of the battle for freedom and civilization. WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 29 It is an oft-repeated saying that there is no such thing as senti- ment or gratitude in the dealings of nations with each other. Some- times, however, popular proverbs enclose a fallacy and, as a dis- tinguished Frenchman once remarked, "No generalization is com- pletely true, not even this one." We have had proof of this last proposition in ample degree since the present war began in the feeling shown by the American people to the people of France. France and the United States, in the century and a quarter which has elapsed since the foundation of our Government, have had their differences and their clashing interests. At the close of the Eighteenth Century the two countries were on the verge of war. In the days of Andrew Jackson there was a disagreeable controversy over certain claims. The attitude of the Government of France under the Second Empire during our Civil War aroused some bitter feelings in the hearts of those who fought the battle for the Union, although the sympathy of the French people was with us and only the Imperial Government was hostile. But all these memories, if they had any life left in them, were swept away in an instant when the present war began. Then the American people remembered only how much we owed to France for the achievement of our inde- pendence. The names of Lafayette and Rochambeau became house- hold words, and in countless speeches and in writings of every sort the story of the French Alliance which culminated at Yorktown was told and told again with a passionate gratitude which expressed itself during our days of neutrality in every form of aid and sym- pathy which Americans could give to France and to her people. Thus it is apparent that after all these are moments when senti- ment and gratitude plays a vivid part in the relations of two great nations. And yet, heavy as is the debt which we owe to France for her support of the people of the American Colonies in their war of independence, we owe today a far greater debt to France than even that which was incurred one hundred and forty years ago. If France enabled us to win our independence, she has now in still larger measure helped us to preserve that independence which was so hardly won by Washington with the help of our Ally. In 1914 the storm broke. I happened to be in London at the mo- ment and I saw the great events of those dreadful days from that point of vantage. It seemed to me then, it seems to me now more than 30 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY ever, that when Germany deliberately began a world-wide war, the German Government was guilty of the blackest crime against the hu- man race which the blood-stained annals of mankind can show. Of the organized and scientific barbarism which has followed that crime I had then, like the rest of the world, no conception and no antici- pation, but the war itself was a crime so awful, that it did not need the hideous setting which has since been given to it to emphasize its character at the very outset. It was a world-wide war which was then begun because Germany aimed at nothing less than the con- quest and subjugation of the world. The German plan, backed by a preparation and by a readiness which no other nation could equal, was to capture Paris and break France in the first six weeks, and then turn upon Russia and crush that empire as the French Re- public had already been crushed. I shall never forget the awful days when Germany, overcoming the splendid resistance of Bel- gium, pushed back the French armies and the small but gallant and indomitable army of England until they were almost within reach of Paris. Then the French and English turned. The armies of France fell upon the advancing masses of the Germans and swept them back in utter defeat from the lines of the Marne. When that great battle closed the Germans were fifty miles from the outskirts of Paris, a victory to be marvelled at for all time. The world, even in those days, had been coming to a shuddering belief that the German armies were invincible, and when they were backed not only by complete preparedness but by chemistry and machinery, it seemed as if nothing could withstand them. At the battle of the Marne it became apparent that without the chemistry and the ma- chinery, in the open field, Frenchmen and Englishmen were their superiors. I think that at that moment there must have run through the memories of many Americans the verses of an American poet written more than fifty years before, in the time of our own Civil War: "O land of heroes ! In our need One gift from Heaven we crave , To stanch these wounds that vainly bleed — The wise to lead the brave ! Call back one Captain of thy past From glory's marble trance, Whose name shall be a bugle-blast To rouse us! VIVE LA FRANCE! WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 31 Pluck Conde's baton from the trench, Wake up stout Charles Martel, Or find some woman's hand to clench The sword of La Pucelle ! Give us one hour of old Turenne — - One lift of Bayard's lance — Nay, call Marengo's chief again To lead us! VIVE LA FRANCE I The appeal of the poet was not vain then, it is not vain now in these days of trial. The hero came. He plucked Conde's baton from the trench, he gave us the hour of old Turenne, and he flung back the German armies. You have all seen him here among you — General Joffre, the Marshal of France. It has been the fate of France to save Europe and civilization on more than one stricken field. Charles Martel at Tours stayed the oncoming tide of Saracen invasion and determined probably that Europe should be Christian and not Mohammedan. In the very region where this war has raged Aetius defeated the Huns, who never recovered from the blow. There again at the Marne, France has once more defeated the Huns, the modern Huns, the admirers of Attila, who have made the atrocities of their predeces- sors, which have been infamous through the centuries, look pale and dim, thus demonstrating the superiority in wanton and ferocious cruelty of organized over unorganized barbarism. Twice before, then, France has saved Europe and civilization. When she fought the battle of the Marne she not only saved Europe, but she also saved the New World in which we live from German domination. The German plan of world-conquest ended at the Marne. If that scheme had succeeded, England would have been the second victim and we the next. Therefore, I say, the debt we owe to France far surpasses the great obligation which we incurred when the armies of France joined us in the Revolution. In some measure we are trying to pay that debt and I trust that before the war ends we shall go far in payment, but even if we could pay it all, the gratitude we feel will never be cancelled or fade into forgetfulness. To defeat the German plan of world-conquest at the Marne was the first step. The second is to put the Central Powers in a posi- tion where it shall be impossible for them ever to renew the horrors which they let loose upon the world in 1914. For that end 32 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY we Americans are righting to-day. We have only just begun to fight, and France has been fighting steadily through all these three long and terrible years. Ministries may change, but the French people have fought like one man during all this bitter time. With indomitable courage, without complaint, they have held those long lines of trenches and are slowly but steadily forcing back the invaders. The world has looked on with an admiration which cannot find fit expression in words. As I have watched the French through all these weary days and months, I have con- stantly thought of the story of the two portraits hanging in an old French chateau, portraits of two sons of the house who had given their lives for their country, and under these portraits it was written : "They were very gentle, they cared nothing for their lives." That seems to me to have been the spirit of the French. All, the soldiers and the whole people, with no outcry and no rhetoric, have seemed simply to say, "We care nothing for our lives when the country is in danger and we would far rather die than submit to Germany." Such, as I understand it, is the spirit of France; such should be the spirit of all the Allies. Whatever clouds may lower, how- ever long the road, we must press on with unflinching courage to the end — to the end we seek. There must be no truce and no bargaining. To agree to restore the status quo ante helium would simply be to give Germany a breathing space in which she may pre- pare to renew the war at a later day. Her word is worthless ; treaties are to her government but scraps of paper ; there is no hope for a final settlement except in physical guarantees won on the field of battle. Therefore we must fight on as France has fought, to a complete victory, so complete that for many generations to come Germany will be unable again to let loose her horrors and her barbarities upon an unoffending world. I give you Vive la France t WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 33 THE AMERICAN DIPLOMAT Address of the Honourable James W. Gerard I know that after-dinner speaking is a very difficult and danger- ous sport, but what of before-breakfast speaking? And I shall relieve the minds of those Pennsylvanians who have to catch trains for Englewood, by telling them that I never speak more than nine minutes, because every time I speak after dinner, when I go home my wife asks me whether I went by any stations in my speech where I might have gotten off. And it is a very hard thing for one who is not used to speaking, to come after speakers such as have addressed you tonight. I know that I am a sort of volunteer in the speaking line, a fact that was very forcibly borne in on me not long ago in Los Angeles. After I had addressed a meeting there, as I walked down the street I heard two women behind me talking, and one of them said, "What do you think of his speech?" and the other one said, "Well, he talks just the way we did." They said, "What's the use of being four years in Germany and not being able to speak any better than that?" But they forgot, as Ambassa- dor Jusserand told you, that it was my distinction as a diplomat in Germany, to follow the advice of Talleyrand and be silent in seven languages ; but any American, diplomat or otherwise, who has been in Germany during this war and knows of the hellishness that that nation is preparing against the world, has one duty before it, and that is, to come out and break silence, if he can, in thirty languages. When I went back to the hotel in Los Angeles that night, I told a friend of mine from New York, who often runs for office, what these women had said about me, and he remarked, "Don't mind that, I had a similar experience once, myself. I heard two women talking about me after I made a speech in New York, and one of them said, 'What do you think of his speech ?' to which the other one replied, 'Mamie, I don't know, but his trousers bag at the knees just like William Jennings Bryan.'" 34 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY You know it is superfluous, after what our great ex-Presi- dent has said to-night, to speak about the aims of the war, and especially after the splendid message given only a few weeks ago by our great present President who is leading us into war with an efficiency never before known in our history, and who by that message has stiffened the hearts of every American into breathing steel. And it is superfluous to talk about the beginnings of this war, when your president, Mr. Beck, has, with the clearest analysis and as convincingly as a proposition of Euclid, presented the evi- dence in the case, and what great work he is doing — going about the country in the last six months as a missionary, bearing the flaming cross of patriotism. Col. Roosevelt said that I was never close to the Kaiser during the war. Well, I remember one occasion when I was close to the Kaiser. That was on the twenty-fifth of October, 1915, when he stood very close to me, and he put his face about three inches from mine and with a manner which is quite Rooseveltian — although he did not say, "I am delighted' —he shook his finger in my face and said, "I shall stand no nonsense from America after this war; America had better look out after this war." That is some- thing for you and every one of us to think of, that if they win this war, they mean to come here and collect from our skins its entire cost. And there is one thing, now, about the war that I would like to speak of. We have met new weapons in the war that we have been compelled and will be compelled to adopt, like poison gas, and flame throwers. The Germans are making use of a far more insidious weapon than that — the weapon of Propaganda, and at this very moment, because we do not challenge them in that field, they are propaganding the whole neutral world against us. Take the case of Sweden. In Sweden the Court is pro-German, the aristocracy pro-German; the officers of the army pro-German, but the people, if they only had a chance to be convinced, if we only presented our side of the case, would be with us and with the Allies. The Germans are taking advantage, in their propaganda, of the fact that we have declared a partial blockade — an embargo WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 35 on food against Sweden, but we must have an opportunity to pre- sent to that people the fact that when the mines of Sweden are producing iron which goes into Krupp cannon to be used against our troops, that we do not propose to send food saved in America to nourish the bodies of those who are furnishing artillery to our enemies. And there is a propaganda, that we should meet, news- paper with newspaper, article with article, in South America, in Mexico, in Holland and in all the countries of the world. And then, besides that, we have the propaganda to meet here at home. The other night I was talking to a School Association here in New York and I told them what I found when I was in Chicago during my travels this summer — how in the Grammar Schools of Chicago there is no language taught but German; how the Board of Education of Chicago devised itself a Speller, the first book in English put in the hands of a scholar in Chicago, and that book contained just one piece of writing, just one reading piece, a fulsome eulogy of the German Kaiser. And I thought today that I would find out what was going on in the schools of New York, so I telephoned up from downtown to my secretary and said, "Go and find out, if you can, the books that are used by the Board of Education in the study of German in this city and collect as many of them as you can." When I went back to the hotel tonight she had collected forty-six. I had time to look at only six, and of those I brought, I think, four here, and they are all of them stuffed with German propaganda. If you look over one of these books you will see that the part entitled "Stories and Histories" commences with a story of the founding of Frankfort by Charlemagne, but it does not mention the fact that Frankfort was captured as a free city by the Prussians in '66 and made to pay an indemnity of millions of marks. The next two articles right in the front are about that old bigamist, Charlemagne, with a picture of his coronation. The next is an account of what a good man, another Emperor, Frederick Barbarosa, was. Then there are two extracts from "Faust," but they do not put in the article what Goethe wrote — that the Prussian was born a brute and civilization will make him ferocious. No mention is made of what Goethe wrote of America, 36 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY when he said, "America, du hast es besser — America, you are better off." The rest of the book is devoted to Frederick the Great, with pictures, stating what a fine man he was ; the same Frederick who declared that he went to war, a war in which one-tenth of the whole population of Germany perished in seven years, simply "because he wanted to be talked about" — the Frederick the Great who boasted that he had only one cook, but a hundred spies ! The next article is an account of the war of liberation, and then follow three poems about the Fatherland, Field Marshal Bluecher and the Three Grenadiers, which is about Napoleon, and tells how the dead Grenadier, when the Emperor gallops over his grave, will rise up from the grave to aid him. Then follow two more articles about Bismarck and Moltke, and a poem about the horse of Grove- lotte, and an account, a long account, of the Germans in the United States. In this account the author says that William Penn, whose picture is up there, and who helped found your state, was a failure as a colonist until he called in the services of the German Pastorious, who brought over some of Colonel Roosevelt's ancestors with him. The authors say the Germans won the War of the Revolution and the Civil War and every other war we were engaged in. They do not, however, tell how the men of '48 found a refuge here after they fought vainly against the despotism of Prussia and the other states in the revolution of forty-eight. They relate how the Germans won the Revolution for us, but they do not tell that the Hessians and the Anspachers were sold by their rulers in order to fight against us. There is nothing of that in this history. The authors then tell of how von Steuben organized our revolutionary army for victory, but do not tell that von Steuben was hired as a soldier of fortune by a Frenchman to come over and organize our armies. The book then closes with two poems about the Fatherland. The authors do not put in the statements, for instance, about Von Buelow, the ex-Chan- cellor of Germany, who stood up once in the Reichstag and said : "I experience no embarrassment in saying here publicly that justice can never be a determining consideration for Germany." In these other books, written by German professors at Vassar, all try to show how good and kind these kings and emperors are. In the book of Professor Lillian L. Stroebe, Ph.D., Heidelberg, associate professor WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 37 of German in Vassar College, is given the following anecdote : "A man was having his boots blacked on the streets of New York and the shoe polisher asked him ten cents, and the gentleman said: 'In Washington I never pay more than five.' To which the shoe polisher replied : 'Then you had better go to Washington.' " That is a speci- men of German wit she picked out. Then she shows how good the kings are : "Frederick William IV of Prussia went to visit a school. He called out a little girl and showed her an apple and said: 'To what kingdom does this belong?' 'To the vegetable kingdom,' she replied. Then he showed her a gold piece : 'To what kingdom does this belong?' he asked. 'To the mineral kingdom.' Then he pointed to himself and asked: 'To what kingdom do I belong?' and the little girl replied : 'You belong to the Kingdom of Heaven !' ' : I am sure she got wonderfully rewarded — and the teacher moved up at least two places in the line. Now that is the sort of stuff that the taxpayers of New York are having their children brought up on. Here is another book which has the Prussian royal arms on the outside, containing anecdotes of Frederick the Great and other Prussian kings. The author says in his preface that he does not narrate the story of the lives of these men, but nevertheless gives glimpses of what they were and did and that this may help to show why Germans held them in such high esteem. In here there are anecdotes about the present Kaiser; one of them about his telling a terrible German pun ; another one how he gave an alarm clock to an officer who didn't wake up early enough, and then one about his earlier youth, which tells how he didn't like cold water, but was very fond of being saluted by the sentries and how they persuaded him to take a bath by not allowing the sentries to salute him until he had. Since that time he seems to have developed a fondness for hot water, so much so, that he has gotten himself very thoroughly in it! We have got to meet this propaganda here at home, and as Colonel Roosevelt said, these people who have come here and are disloyal (and whom the Colonel compared to an animal who puts all four feet in the trough) should be sent back where they came from. There is one particular way of tying up that particular 38 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY animal, and that is to "hog-tie" him, as the farmers call it. We should hog-tie every German-American who has abused our hospital- ity and send him back to his Kaiser. We honour Ambassador Jusserand not alone because he repre- sents France, but because of himself, because he is a successful Ambassador; and I tell you that there is no more difficult trade nowadays than that of being an Ambassador. I saw an editorial in the Evening World in which the writer suggested : "What is the use of having Ambassadors? Why keep such 'Animiles'? Let us transact all our business by cable." Just imagine if during this war a cable had come signed "Woodrow" and addressed to "William," saying "Treat the prisoners decently." What would the answer have been ? Wouldn't he have received the same answer to a protest against the murdering of our women and children on the high seas? If any of you had been in Germany and Berlin in the first days of the war and seen the whole of the Wilhelmplatz filled with Ameri- cans without passports and without money, all trying to see one of these "Animiles," you would perhaps have believed that after all there was some use for a diplomatic service. Ambassador Jusserand, during the painful period of our neutral- ity, has acted with a tact as exquisitely balanced as that of scales that weigh to the one-thousandth part of a milligram — he has won a high place in our affections and we congratulate him on the honour that we know that his own country will pay him. Both he and Col. Roosevelt told you of the steeplechase course which Col. Roosevelt established in Rock Creek Park in Washing- ton. He had a line of obstacles there to climb, places to swim. I had the honour once of being taken on one of these walks and early in March had to swim the creek there, where Col. Roosevelt did not break the ice — and he is the greatest human ice breaker that there is — I had to bite my way through with my teeth. And of all the steeplechasers on that steeplechase course, there was none who climbed and swam and tennissed more successfully than Am- bassador Jusserand. We hope that he will surmount all obstacles of his career as gracefully as he negotiated those in the Roosevelt Steeplechase Park. WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 39 We know that it is going to cost us something to stand by the side of France in this war, but before we win, many of the men who are represented by the star on that flag will have paid on the battle fields of Flanders, perhaps, the greatest sacrifice of all. There is one saying made at Verdun, that has gone out all over the world, the words of the French, "They shall not pass,'' and there is one saying that comes to-day from every corner of America, "They shall not win." And France can be sure of one thing, and that is that the brutal yoke of Prussian autocracy shall never be put upon the civilization and the Christianity of the world. 40 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY A MESSAGE FROM THE BRITISH AMBASSADOR Address of Brigadier General William A. White, C. M. G. I have been asked to read a message from the Ambassador: "As friend, colleague, and Ally, I have had the advantage and privilege, day by day, of seeing M. Jusserand at work and I can bear witness in my own person to his untiring labours, his undaunted courage, his sober and penetrating sense, his brilliant gifts as a talker and man of letters, his courage in evil days, his caution in bright ones ; and above all, his constant and abiding love for this country, where he has spent so many years of his most distinguished career." Those words, I might say, are written by a personal friend of M. Jusserand and I should like to add, as a British soldier, my tribute to a representative of France. I have been at the front on and off for two and a half years and I have lived in the billets in France beside the French people, and I have seen the French soldier go over the top, and I have also had the privilege of having French officers in the mess to which I had the honour to belong; and I can tell you that every British soldier in France looks upon the soldiers of France not only with affection and admiration, but, I might almost say, love. And before I close — it is very late — I would like to ask all you representatives here of this vast Republic to give a thought to the man in the trench to-night. He, you may remember, is giving his all for you here. If you will help him, will back him up and will put your shoulder to the wheel, he is going to succeed. When you go back tonight, give him a thought and just say to yourselves: Can I do anything more to help in this business and to help him over there? If you do that — we have been holding the line over there for the best part of three years — if you do that and put your shoulders to the wheel, I can assure you that at a future day your men, the French and our men, are going forward and we are going to dictate the terms of peace that we want in Germany. WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 41 ADDRESS BY M. STEPHANE LAUZANNE* It is a great pleasure for me to address such an audience at such a moment. This is an historical moment. May I say that we in France, we were awaiting it since thirty-two months. Since thirty-two months we were repeating to the world and to you Amer- icans, who in the world are our oldest and dearest friends, we were repeating that somewhere in Europe there was a Nation in which no one could trust ; a Nation for which the most solemn treaties were mere scraps of paper ; a Nation which was a danger for the whole of humanity ; and we were not the only ones to say that. Men in this country, men guided by courage and by conscience, repeated it with us, claimed it with us. You know these men. One of them is sitting by me, Mr. Wickersham, and another one is not there, and I regret it — Mr. Beck. When we said that, when we re- peated that, you were listening to us, because you are friends ; but very often you smiled and doubted and thought that we were ex- aggerating. Then, we said: "That is all right, let us wait and see. Truth is stronger than speeches; let us wait; truth will be known one day." Gentlemen, those days have come. There was, first of all the day of February 3, when you, the most liberal and most peaceful Nation of the world, you felt that you could no longer sit at the same diplomatic table with a Nation without honour and without dignity, and you broke off with Ger- many. Then there was another day, there was the day of April 2, when you did something more. You felt that your duty was not only to keep away from brutes and savages, but that it was also your duty to defend civilized men against brutality and savagery, and you declared war on Germany. ♦Delivered by M. Stephane Lauzanne at the Annual Meeting of the Society at the Bankers Club, April 17, 1917. The Hon. George W. Wicker- sham, Past President, presided. M. Lauzanne is Editor-in-Chief of Le Matin, of Paris, and a member of the Mission franchise in America. 42 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY We were awaiting these days since thirty-two months, but we knew that they would come ; we knew that they would come be- cause we were fighting, struggling, suffering and bleeding for one thing for which you, yourselves in your history you had fought and struggled, suffered and bled ; not for money, not for domination, not for territories, but for something which is much higher and much nobler — for an ideal. Our ideal, your ideal, is to restore in Europe a spirit of freedom, of justice, and above all of respect of international law. That spirit will be restored only when the other spirit, the spirit of brutality, of domination and of autocracy symbolized by Prussian militarism will have been extirpated from Europe. That Prussian militarism must go. It will go when those who are affected by it will understand that they are not the strongest but the weakest ; that they have not to dictate terms of peace, but that they have to agree to terms of peace ; when they will under- stand that they have not to grant any pardon, but that they have to ask pardon on their knees to God and to men for the crime that they have committed against humanity in starting such a war ! When they will understand that they haven't to offer, as an aim, not to annihilate this or that Nation, but that they have to respect the independence of every Nation in the world, big or small, strong or weak as the supreme law of Europe and of humanity. For this, gentlemen, we will fight, and we will fight to the bitter end — what- ever may be the sufferings of the nation, whatever may be the hard- ness of destiny. In the dark days of the Battle of Verdun, General de Castelnau once said: "The whole French race will perish on the battlefield, rather than be subject to Germany." Well, this is as true today as it was a year ago. This is even more true today than it was a year ago ; and the whole French race would perish gladly, rather than to live in a degraded humanity — for humanity would be degraded if ever Germany would be victorious all over the whole world. But today there is no question of dying ; today it is most heartily that we will continue to fight, and it is most heartily that we will continue to fight because we know that some help is going to come to us. WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 43 There is a new combatant with us. You have given us your hand, the clean hand of a free people ; and we have given you our hand, the clean hand of an unsubjected people. Gentlemen, I told you about two great days which will remain eternally engraved in French hearts ; but there will be a third one. There will be the day when American soldiers, with their American flag, will pass under our Arch of Triumph in Paris adjacent to Champs-Elysees before going to battle. That day, when it comes, will be a day of tremendous joy all over France. It will be a day of tremendous joy all over France, because we will know that not far distant in the future is the day of victory. Understand me, gentlemen, not the victory of France, not the victory of England, not the victory of Russia or of the Allies, but the victory of right,. of justice and liberty and civilization. I thank you. 44 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY LUNCHEON for M. HENRY FRANKLIN-BOUILLON September 7, 1917* ADDRESS OF THE HONOURABLE JAMES M. BECK Gentlemen, may I have your attention for a few minutes? I think this little luncheon, which has been arranged very hastily in honour of our distinguished guest, would be incomplete if we did not have a few words from him as a message from France. He would come to us well accredited, if he came in no other capacity than as a citizen of France. I do not think there is any expression, to which the voluminous literature of this war has given rise, which is so full of truly eloquent meaning as that phrase, that lingers so lovingly in our memories and trips so lightly from our tongues, "somewhere in France." It sounds the abyssmal depths of human suffering and self-sacrifice, and rises to the supremest heights of heroism and nobility of soul. M. Franklin-Bouillon, let me say to you that all that Homer ever wrote in his immortal Iliad may not more powerfully impress unending generations of men to come as that expression "somewhere in France." Therefore, if our distinguished guest came to us simply as a citizen of France, we would bid him thrice, and indeed a thousand- fold welcome ; but we welcome him today on his own account, be- cause he is here, not only as a very distinguished member of the French Chamber of Deputies, the leader of one of the greatest polit- ical parties in that country, but he also comes to us on an errand of peculiar interest and value. He has come to this country to This luncheon was given by President Beck to M. Franklin-Bouillon at the Bankers Club, September 7, 1917. The members of the Council and a number of other gentlemen were present. M. Franklin-Bouillon is Chairman of the Interallied Parliamentary Committee and President of the French Radical Party. On his return to France, which imme- diately followed President Beck's luncheon, he became a member of the short-lived Cabinet of M. Painleve as Ministre charge des Missions a l'Etranger. WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 45 interest our Government, as he has already interested those of Eng- land and Russia, in an inter-parliamentary union between the coun- tries of the Grand Alliance. In the little that I have been able to contribute to the contro- versial history of the war, I have endeavoured again and again to emphasize the point that if there be one thing that this war has taught above all others, it is that a union of all nations is, under present conditions of fact, an absolute impossibility, because you cannot have honest men and murderers sitting down at the same council board in the spirit of good will, without which there can be little efficacy in their deliberations ; and therefore I have endeavoured to say that the closest approach that we can come to building the foundations of a future and better civilization is to have an alliance of the democratic nations, or at least, of the nations that have kin- dred ideals, and common conceptions of international righteousness. This is something that M. Franklin-Bouillon is trying to put into a concrete and effective method by the suggestion that the great legislative bodies of the democratic nations, to which I have re- ferred, shall have some form of union, which shall give at least an approach to an organic unity of the democracies of the world. I am very confident, if such a thing could come to pass, it would be an immeasurable blessing, because the cablegrams that the New York Herald has been reproducing in the last two or three days between the Kaiser and the Czar, show that it is dangerous that the destinies of nations and the peace of peoples should rest in the ex- clusive power of executive rulers, whether they be Kaiser, Czar or President, or any name which they may be given ; that, in other words, the moment the supreme issues of peace or war are put into the power of a few individuals, dealing with the destinies of nations more or less secret, that moment you have, of necessity, the oppor- tunity, the fruitful soil out of which intrigue and ambition and self- ish interest may grow ; whereas, if you take the parliamentary bodies of these nations, always assuming that those parliamentary bodies truly express the will of their respective peoples, then you have, not perhaps so efficient as one-man power, but there is a composite expression of the popular will of a number of countries, and if they are devoted to the traditions, to which the French revolution gave 46 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY origin of liberty, equality and fraternity, then indeed, such an inter- parliamentary union, however crude it may be as an approach to a greater world state, yet gives the promise of some effective com- bination, not between the rulers of peoples but between the peoples themselves. And upon that great, lofty, splendid mission, M. Frank- lin-Bouillon has come. One further word before I introduce him. We welcome him, as I have said, for his own sake, and also because of his name. I gave this lunch as President of The Pennsylvania Society not only because it was my great privilege to meet M. Franklin-Bouillon in London last year and join with him in speaking to English audiences, but because he not only bears but takes peculiar pride and pleasure in the name of Franklin, the first President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and that brings up a name to conjure with, either in France or in America. Let us recall what the relations between France and the English colonies were before the Revolution. It is little to say that on the part of the colonists there was the traditional feeling of the Eng- lish squire against France, a feeling that was as old as centuries of continuous strife. On the part of France its people only looked at the English colonists as an alien and hostile people who had wrested their western empire from them on the plains of Abraham. The man who was chiefly instrumental in bringing together France and the American colonists into a concert of aggressive action was Benjamin Franklin. After Franklin came to Paris France began to know America better, began to love America as she had never loved America before. Franklin was for a time the great central figure of the Court of Versailles in those stormy days that preceded the revolution, and when he walked down the Gallery of Mirrors and paid his respects to Louis the Sixteenth, he was the "observed of all observers." He was hailed and greeted as the incarnation of the democratic spirit, then about to assert itself, and upon the other hand, when this extraordinary man — I think the greatest man of the eighteenth century, in some respects the greatest man intellec- tually of all times — when Benjamin Franklin, after those eight most fruitful years in France came back to America it was then that America began to love France not only because of the distinguished WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 47 honour that had been shown by France to their representative, Franklin, but on account of the potent aid that it had given to us in our hour of supreme need. And so, M. Franklin-Bouillon, we welcome you here because you bear a name that we honour greatly, and we want you to carry back to France this message from representative business men of New York: that while there may be no vociferous enthusiasm in America as to this war, because we entered it slowly, and of neces- sity the capacity for indignation was somewhat dulled; but there is a spirit among us that may be better than enthusiasm, a quiet, steady determination, east and west of the Mississippi, in all classes and among all races, to see this war through to a conclusive vin- dication of the basic principles of civilization. We will see it through because we love France, and will not see France perish. We sympathize with you in your infinite suffering; we envy you in your hour of supreme glory. When I am at a loss to say anything, which is only too frequently, I always turn to the master of all speech, the greatest poet that ever lived, and I want to quote these lines which seem to me not merely to describe the Kaiser and all that the Kaiser represents, but to describe, the spirit, M. Franklin-Bouillon, in which America joins hands with France today in the resolute purpose of seeing the war through. See how apt these lines are from King Richard the Third: "The wretched, bloody and usurping boar, That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines, Swills your warm blood like wash and makes his trough In your embowelled bosoms, this foul swine Lies now even in the centre of this isle, In God's name, cheerily on, courageous friends, To reap the harvest of perpetual peace By this one bloody trial of sharp war." There Shakespeare says, "cheerily on, courageous friends" ; and it is in that spirit that America greets you as the representa- tive of France today, and it is in that spirit that it is my honour and privilege to introduce you to these citizens of New York. 48 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY ADDRESS OF M. HENRY FRANKLIN-BOUILLON I have never felt more deeply what is the value of a true friend- ship between men than I do at this minute, after having listened to the words of my friend Mr. Beck. I know you are very busy men, but I will detain you only a very few minutes, and I simply wish to state how much I appreciate the privilege which he has given me of meeting you today in one of the few minutes of leisure that you have. I will simply tell you first on what mission I came over here. After eighteen months of this war, we felt in France that probably the largest part of the mistakes we had made resulted from the want of true cooperation between the Allies, and we felt that how- ever heroic might be our soldiers, however far-seeing might be our statesmen, it was absolutely no use to try to carry out a war as be- tween an alliance and one centralized power, if we were not able to bring about the perfect unity which we otherwise would manage to get. And therefore, the French Parliament — of which I have nothing to say save that I hope that later on it will be proved by facts that it has done as much to save our country as our army has done, and that is the one privilege we claim, and we know, sir, that history will vindicate us in that claim — entrusted me with this mission of going over to London and trying to explain to our English friends how much we had suffered from want of knowledge of one another, how much it was necessary for us to do away with these diffi- culties by bringing together the two peoples, or rather, the repre- sentatives of the two peoples, that is, the elected members of their Parliaments. Before I go further, will you allow me, in a few seconds, to call your attention to this fact — some thoughts which I believe those who are studying these problems, and other men have in their mind. Those who have not studied these problems may, perhaps, not have distinguished this fact. It is one of the main facts. We are here ; we are an alliance between peoples who knew little of one another WAR ADDRESSES : 1917 49 before they began to fight together against their enemy. Look at the facts : With England we fought for centuries and we misunder- stood each other for centuries. There was no alliance between our country and England — there was no possibility of that alliance — and suddenly, in a few seconds, between July 31 and August 4 we had to call for the full support of England. Whatever may have been the differences between your country and England — and I may say that we had more than you ever had — we must say today, simply as men who know what is the value of words, that when we called for the support of England, England gave us more than we ever could hope or ever asked for. But still here we are, the oldest foes of England, in a battle in which we are to save the life of our nation. With Italy we have been determined enemies for twenty-five years — with Russia, allies ; but I may say it is our fault. We knew nothing of this ally with whom we had been bound in formal alliance for more than thirty years save that at times a powerful international request invited us to subscribe to loans, and we did it, and I hope no man here will reproach anybody for subscribing to these Russian loans. That was all that we knew of our allies, and I may say that in the whole history of the world, there is not another instance of such a paradox, that the greatest of all alliances has been concluded in form, been wrought in the bloodiest of wars, among people who knew little of one another. The only conclusion you must deduce from this statement is that it is the finest test and the best proof of the value of the alliance for which we are fighting, that in a brief interval, although we knew little of one another, we were so soldered with one another that nothing has ever been able to dissolve or break up this alliance, and nothing will ever break it. And that being the case, this is the fact: we knew nothing of one another, and here we were going into a war which we knew was going to be a long war, a war not of governments, but of na- tions, in which we were pledged for the support of every man, every woman, every child, everything — money, blood, every possible thing, even the stones and the steel, and even, I may say, the very air. They have found the means of poisoning even the atmosphere in which we fight. We were pledged to call for every one of the 50 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY energies of these different allies, knowing nothing of one another, having misunderstood each other for centuries, and having fought against one another. What was the result? During the first month it was prac- tically easy, the sense of common duty impelled us to do what we were to do ; but the higher the sacrifices we were to ask of every nation, the more we were running the risk of some becoming tired. After all, you belong to a democracy, like myself, where you are going to ask the people to lay down their lives for a cause, where they may ask you why, and they are entitled to know what they are fighting for, since they know they may die tomorrow in the cause for which they are fighting. I can see, and you can see, I believe, what is the logical trend of mind of the men of my nation. I can say that since we were face to face with this problem of making effective a new alliance, and the necessity of getting the people interested in the war which their governments were fighting, the only thing we can do is to go to the people and explain the situation and tell them, "we have made a mistake ; we must repair it, we must do what we should have done before" ; and to combine the strength of the alliance into an efficient unit is the object for which I have come to ask the support of the United States. What have we done since we began ? I went over to England ; I was fortunate enough to convince Mr. Asquith and the members of Parliament, and those members agreed upon the plan which we have to follow. I was sent over to Italy. The Russians came over to France. Then we formed the Interallied Parliament, as we call it now, between the four nations which were really the basis of our alliance. I will not go into details ; it is not the time for that ; I will simply tell you what are the lines upon which this movement has been carried out. First of all, Mr. Chairman, the things that must work in times of war must be simple ; they must be clear so the people understand the purpose. They must be simple, because we have no time for details, and it is a very great task to have a movement carried out on many lines. In every one of these countries we ask the Parliament to appoint a committee of twenty-five members — eight from the Senate WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 51 and seventeen from the Chamber of Representatives. These mem- bers form the body of the national section of the Interallied Parlia- ment. There were two conditions only. We insisted that every one of the parties should be given a proportion of the representation, and therefore we had a true representation of the Parliament, and the nation. The second condition we insisted on was that they should meet regularly, meeting every three months in one of the capitals of the Entente, according to the political necessities of the hour; and the third condition, which may surprise you at first, in people accustomed to speak, we insisted upon the secrecy of our deliberations. We wanted two things : the maximum of information, and possibilities for action, and we knew that the best thing to ob- tain in gaining these two ends was to act as gentlemen with gentle- men, to discuss between ourselves what we had to discuss, to be prepared to say all that was necessary, but at the same time we understood that there were certain things which could not be pub- lished — that the best method was to keep the deliberations confi- dential. Gentlemen, as we were responsible men, elected by our Parliaments, with a mandate and full responsibility, we under- stood that if we were going to meet together, we would, little by little, learn to know each other. We learned to appreciate each other's motives, and we have at once the feeling of respect and of mutual confidence, which is necessary for the working of such a body. Those are the principles ; you see how very simple they are. We have adopted them in the different countries, and since that time we have met four times, England and France in Paris and then in London, France and Italy in Rome, and then in Paris, and last in Paris, when the three Parliaments worked together for five days. Before I finish with these very few details of the scheme, I want you to get the lines on which it has been conducted. In France we chose the President of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Chamber, M. Clemenceau ; in England, Lord Bryce, whom you al 1 know; in Italy, Signor Luzzatti, the former Prime Minister; and in Russia, our friend M. Miliukoff, who, unfortunately, has been unable to join in our session, because you know the Russian Revolution has forced all these men to remain in their country. 52 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY I believe, sir, in those few words, I have summed up the whole of my movement. One point — and I have often omitted it — the only difficultly in a movement of this nature is that national govern- ments naturally feel very chary of delegating some of their powers to constituted bodies, even to a Parliament. Our difficulty was to impress the government with this idea, that far from any such organization being dangerous to their work, they ought to under- stand that we were their best helpers. I had this work to do, and I suppose they considered that because I knew these different languages, I might be of some use. I had, in succession, to convince Mr. Asquith, then Signor Salandra, then my own Prime Minister, Briand. Mr. Asquith told me, "It is impossible ; you propose to take all power out of their hands ; we cannot delegate these powers." I told him that perhaps he had better reconsider his decision, and that after all, when men of a certain type have decided to do something, it is wiser not to stop them, because the thing would be done, and then he would not have the benefit of having helped them; and thus all temporary objec- tions by some form of persuasion gave way. Now, our only pride is to think that in every one of these meetings, we have brought the Prime Minister of the country in which we met, to preside at the luncheon at which these members meet ; and if my friend Mr. Beck is kind enough to allow me to send you a small pamphlet, a resume of the work we have done up to now, you will see that in every one of these cases the Prime Min- ister of the country, whether it be Mr. Asquith, Mr. Briand. or both, felt some regret at his temporary opposition, and felt it his duty to stand up and to say publicly that nothing in the world had helped them so much to carry out the work as the movement we have originated. Gentlemen, that is for the past. We came over to Washing- ton ; I have seen your President ; I was the bearer of a letter from the President of the Republic to explain to him the mission. I have seen your members of the House and of the Senate. Now, the thing is in their hands, and I can say no more than to express a hope that they will join in this movement. In any case, you understand this movement will not be stopped and the man who is WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 53 now speaking to you — I hope you will excuse me for being per- sonal — has refused for two years in succession to enter the Gov- ernment of his country in order to devote his life to this work. Because I have seen so many of the mistakes I know were made because we knew nothing of our Allies, that I thought, since it was in my power, I should devote my life to this work ; and I hav^ done it. That is my simple share in this work. I hope I have employed my energies to the best results, and for the best purposes in the common cause which now unites us. And now I am with your Congress. I hope that they will de- cide to come with us. Even if they think it is impossible, at all events we, as Allies, have done what was our duty : we have come to you, and the first moment it was possible for me, I did it. We have come to you and invited you to join in a movement which I know is the only one which can effect real cooperation between the Allies. I would only press upon you this further point, which, I may say, is practically the one which I have always kept in mind since the beginning of these events. We are in a war; it is quite enough for me to know what is your race, sir ; to know that when- ever America has given its word and begun a work, America never desists, and America will be there to the end — I know that. But I think that we, who have been in this war from the first days, have a duty to you. First of all, without even attempting to offer anything in the way of advice, or anything which is not absolutely in the spirit of cooperation that is between brothers, we have a duty towards you. We have suffered from want of experience; we had to learn everything in this war from experience. We have, as Mr. Lloyd George so truly said, "Alas, we have blundered from blunder into blunder until we came to something better," and we have not yet attained our ends. We, who have been in this war even before England — have, as our first duty to you to come over to you and to try to save you from the experiences which we suffered. That is our first duty, and we intend to carry it out. Whatever we may tell you, I beg you to take it in this spirit of men who have seen their country go through terrible hours, and are going to try to spare you what they have learned, alas, at such heavy cost. 54 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY This is, I believe, the only thing upon which I would like to talk to you today — remember this, we might even now have hours to go through and difficult times to pass. That is nothing when you keep in front of your eyes the ideal for which you are fight- ing; everything then is easy, and then it is a question that we have a choice simply between life and death. I mean that the fate which has been prepared for us is worse than death ; we are face to face and have to choose between these two things, and everything is easy. But there is one thing which we must keep in mind, and that is this problem is such a huge one that there is not a single man in the world whose efforts are capable of mastering it. If Napoleon came back now, he would be a small personality in the presence of the problems which we have to fight and to solve. This thing is such a big thing that no man, however strong, however intelligent, in any country, mind you — no man can do that alone. Therefore, what are we to do? What you have done here, in your business world. You are to concentrate your energies, you are to build up and you are to remedy this impossibility by not leaving things in the hands of any one man, but by building up an organization in which everything will be turned to the needed purposes. Therefore, let us start in this war with this idea: we are to mobilize, not only the armies — much more, we are to mobilize the nation. But everything, as I said in the beginning, the stones, the steel, the men, the women, the children, every particle of energy, every atom of intelligence, we must draw to us and try to turn it to the use which is needed in this cause ; and therefore, when you find men, when you go to those who represent this country, if they be in industry, in commerce, or in politics, we must only have one idea, to try to enlist them in the movement, to try to draft them — that is the military term — to draft them for the war which we are waging now. We have only one thing to do, which is to consider that we have not the right for one moment to leave aside a single one of the men who now are necessary to carry out the work to its vic- torious end. We are doing it for the men in the army. We have WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 55 done it in our countries for the women and for the children. You will have to do it in every sphere of activity of your life. It has been my privilege and my pride that at this minute and this hour I have been allowed to come over to the public men of your country and to explain to them what was really the pur- pose for which we entered this war. I hope that later, when all things are going to be oragnized a little better than they are now, you will see what has really been the idea, the inspiration, I may say, of our country in our dealings with the Allies. We have un- fortunately lived so long apart that I understand there are many things which we have to explain. I have come over here and I am going to try to do my best for the time I will remain; but, at all events, I wish you to understand that if there could be something which is the reward of a man, who, like myself has been entrusted with some mandate like this in these difficult times, that the privi- lege of addressing you gentlemen and telling you in very plain terms what are the aims of the French, with whom you are fighting, is a sufficient reward. There is one thing for which I can find no words ; it is to ex- press to you the sympathy of the people on the other side of the water for your nation. At the times we may have been saddened at the thought that we were not together and that probably because we did not explain well enough, all that was not settled in the first days of the war; but there is one thing which remains, and one thing which will remain forever: we know what you think of our country ; we know what is the feeling of fraternity which unites us. It will have been one of the few things to be gained by this war. that we will have been able to know our friends. Sir, I will say no more. We have learned to respect and to love you so much that nothing, and no words, will ever express it in the mouth of any Frenchman. Deacidified using the Bookkeeper pi Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxic Treatment Date: ,,>, PreservationTechnolo