r LIBRAE V CAL - N:A SAN Di'GO , UNIVERSITY LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO Donated in memory of John W. Snvder by His Son and Daughter THE NATION AT WAR JAMES A.B.SCHERER A WAR BOOK "COTTON AS A WORLD POWER; A SrtJDY IN THE ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION or HISTORY" BY JAMES A. B. SCHERER An expansion of Dr. Scherer's lectures at Oxford and Cambridge Universities on "Economic Causes in the American Civil War," which Dr. Holland Rose said should compel a re-writing of American history. This book not only treats of the fascinating r61e of "King Cotton" in the present War, but makes out a powerful case for the domi- nance of economic motives in almost all wars, and closes with a lucid philosophy of peace. OPINIONS: "The romance of commerce and its part in determining history was never more forcibly presented." Boston Globe. "The most interesting, complete history of cotton ever written. " Wall Street Journal. "No economist nor business man can afford to miss the illumination of this remarkable book, while Dr. Scherer's light touch and easy style will carry even the casual reader deep into a volume which typifies that new history which digs deep beneath the apparent fact to find the underlying cause of things," Broadus Mitchell in Baltimore Sun. "Opens with the fascination of romance and closes with the philosophy of statesmanship. . . . One seldom finds anywhere in one work such a comprehensive range of historic interest as this volume affords." Literary Digest. THE NATION AT WAR BY JAMES A. B. SGHERER FOR ONE YEAR CHIEF FIELD AGENT OF THE COUNCIL OF NATIONAL DEFENSE, STATE COUNCILS SECTION; PRESIDENT OF THROOP COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA; AUTHOR OF "COTTON AS A WORLD POWER, A STUDY IN THE ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY," "THE JAPANESE CRISIS," ETC. NEW ^ar YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY Copyright, 1918, By George H. Doran Company Printed in the United States of America TO Cr. hi. tl. IN SCIENCE ILLUSTRIOUS AND CONSUMMATE; IN FRIENDSHIP NOBLE AND SINCERE.' Adapted from Browning. PREFACE The Council of National Defense is not responsible for this book, let me say in acknowledging the invalu- able assistance derived from the use of its files and from suggestions furnished by its members. "The Nation at War" is the record of a personal experience, and should be accepted as such. The book is not a history of State Councils, and far less does it pretend to be an account of all Ameri- can war work. The treatment of the States is indeed deliberately uneven, certainly not from partiality or prejudice, but simply because, within the limits of a single handy volume, I have tried to give the casual reader some general idea of what the State Councils are doing as a whole. This I have thought could be more effectively done by "picking out the high lights" here and there rather than by covering my canvas with a flat uniformity of detail. Quite frankly, too, I have occasionally dwelt with emphasis on the less known parts of the country, and on parts that are misunderstood. It has been the most interesting year of my life, and I hope I can impart to the reader some notion of the thrilling story of the States as this has unrolled vii viii PREFACE itself before my own fortunate eyes in more than a hundred thousand miles of national travel. JAMES A. B. SCHERER. WASHINGTON, D. C, August 12, 1918. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE i "THE CONFESSION OF A DE-HYPHENATED AMERICAN" . . 13 II AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 19 III AN AMERICAN WAR 30 IV " WASHINGTON AND THE COUNCIL OF DEFENSE . 44 v "DOWN SOUTH": THE CAROLINAS .... 58 VL "DOWN SOUTH": THE FARTHER DIXIE . . 76 vn "UP NORTH": NEW ENGLAND 87 VIII "OUT WEST": NEBRASKA, COLORADO, NEW MEX- ICO, CALIFORNIA, NEVADA 107 ix "OUT WEST": UTAH, IDAHO, OREGON, WASHING- TON, MONTANA 122 X ZIGZAG JOURNEYS 152 XI THE RESEARCH COUNCIL AND THE SHIPPING BOARD .- l66 XII PERSONALITIES 183 XIII PAUL PERIGORD, THE SOLDIER-PRIEST . . . 189 XIV AMERICA TO-MORROW 205 APPENDIXES: A. THE AUTHOR'S RESIGNATION, ETC. . . . 225 B. A BRIEF ECONOMIC ARGUMENT AGAINST AN INCONCLUSIVE PEACE 239 C. WHAT THE SIERRA MADRE CLUB THINKS OF "THE LOS ANGELES EXAMINER" . . . 243 D. A LETTER FROM COLONEL ROOSEVELT . . 250 INDEX 275 ix THE NATION AT WAR THE NATION AT WAR CHAPTER I "THE CONFESSION OF A DE-HYPHENATED AMERICAN" GERMANY a name to conjure with ! Ever since I can remember, its traditions, historical, educational, and religious, have been reverentially instilled into my mind. My paternal ancestors came to North Carolina from the Palatinate about a century and a half ago, and from that day to this have furnished an un- broken line of Evangelical Lutheran ministers. Some of them fought in our Revolutionary War, and not as Hessians for that Hanoverian King, George III., but as Americans under the leadership of Washington following the illustrious example of the Rev. J. P. G. Muhlenberg, who, at the close of a patriotic sermon in the old Lutheran church at Woodstock, Virginia, in 1775, dramatically flung aside his Lutheran gown, so exposing the uniform of a Continental soldier, and then led his fellow-Lutherans into the war for Ameri- can independence. 1 My family were "de-hyphe- 1 To a relation who complained that he had abandoned the Church for the State, Muhlenberg said: "I am a clergyman, 13 14 THE NATION AT WAR nated" more than a century ago. I have never been a "German-American;" I am an American of German descent. But it is almost impossible to exaggerate the inten- sity of the pro-German educational influences to which I and many others like me have been subjected. Above all, we were taught to admire the German Reforma- tion, and everything that came of it, including the State Church of modern Germany. Whenever, as sometimes seemed to some of us, the fruits of the German Reformation in this country did not wholly justify the all-inclusive claims set up by dogmatic teachers for the ancient tree, we were told that for Teutonic institutions to be properly appreciated they must be observed growing on their own native soil; that the modern Vaterland, in other words, was a liv- it is true, but I am a member of society as well as the poorest layman, and my liberty is as dear to me as to any man." Muhlenberg at once marched with his army to the relief of Charleston, S. C, and his "German regiment," the 8th Vir- ginia, gained a reputation for discipline and bravery. Made a brigadier-general in 1777, he became major-general before Wash- ington's victorious army disbanded. He had been in 1774 chair- man of the Committee of Safety of his county, a member of the House of Burgesses, and in 1776 was delegate to the State Convention. On returning from war to civil pursuits (in Pennsylvania) he was at once elected member of the Penn- sylvania Council, was in 1785 chosen Vice-President of that State, with Benjamin Franklin as President, and served as presidential elector in 1797. Elected to the 1st, 2d, and 3d Congresses, he was in 1801 chosen to the U. S. Senate (as a Democrat), but resigned before Congress met, having been appointed by President Jefferson Supervisor of the Revenue from the District of Pennsylvania. THE DE-HYPHENATED AMERICAN 15 ing witness to the spiritual power and pre-eminent ethical superiority of German Protestantism. This we accepted on faith. Any one curious to see the personal reaction liable to be produced by this kind of education may find it in my first book, "Four Princes, or, The Growth of a Kingdom" ( 1903), writ- ten on the basis of other books and of reverently re- ceived hearsay, and culminating in a treatment of Ger- man Protestantism as a shining example of "the full corn in the ear." In 1907 I made my first visit to Germany. The result was a violent disillusionment. I went intent upon further studies of German Protestantism, and I came back resolved never again to open my mouth in glorification of the pre-eminent spiritual and ethical power of modern Germany. In my opinion, it is wholly unfair to measure the world-wide movement set up by the Lutheran Reformation, as I had been told by dogmatic partisans to do, by contemporary Germany clutched in the grip of a Prussianism which, so far as my own eyes can see, gives not a fig for Luther's faith or for vital Christianity of any kind. Subsequent visits only confirmed the impres- sion of the first one. Efficiency I found to an im- pressive and depressing degree; it did not take long to find out that Kultur is a very different product from culture. Prussianism I came up against, as against a solid brass wall, everywhere; but Lutheran- ism, as a spiritual power, had to be looked for. The Prussian Church has been dominated by the State; too often it has been the mere tool of state-craft. 16 THE NATION AT WAR Far from being the obvious fountain-head of dom- inant Teutonic conduct, as I had been taught to be- lieve, German Lutheranism seems confined, as a vital religious power, to fruitful obscurity. I am aware that some of my best friends profess a different ex- perience; I can only recount my own. In fact, the Germany I had been taught to believe in seems, in a word, to have undergone a complete metamorphosis ; the Germany of Luther and Goethe and Beethoven, big and warm and tender and free, has been shaped by the iron hand of the Hohenzollerns into a mar- vellous but soulless machine, tended by a comfortable people going blind. That is the dominant impression Germany produced on me, utterly to my surprise, in the year 1907; and the pride I take in my German an- cestors, who came to this country a hundred and fifty years ago, is scarcely diminished by the fact that they came from old Germany rather than new. It is not easy, however, to throw off wholly the shell of a shattered tradition, and it is almost impos- sible to escape from the deep reverences and sym- pathies ingrained by prolonged education in one un- deviating direction. I was in Europe in the summer of 1914. Returning just before the War broke out, fresh from the liberalising influences of European con- tact, which every traveller knows how to appreciate, and startled by the apparent rashness of the outbreak, I shut myself in my study for a fortnight and tried, for the sake of old blood and old ties, but above all for the sake of fair play and justice, to get the mod- THE DE-HYPHENATED AMERICAN 17 ern German point of view regarding this War. Not only did I read the White Paper when it appeared, but also, again, the history of modern Germany, the life of Bismarck, the speeches of the present Emperor, and the works in part at least of Bernhardi and Treitschke. As for the German White Paper, no one, however sympathetic, could read it carefully without wonder- ing over the cool suppression of fundamental parts of Serbia's amazingly acquiescent reply to the severe ul- timatum of Austria, which reply is really the hinge in which turns the whole heavy responsibility for this War. The further I read into German books, seeking the German point of view, the more was I led by these writings themselves away from all possibility of sympathy to a conviction which has gradually become most profound, that the German Government, with its highly efficient Kultur, has, in deliberately willing this wholly unnecessary War, with its much boasted "frightfulness," reverted to a barbarism infinitely more revolting than that of the pre-Christian epoch. With a cynicism that strikes the heart cold, this Prus- sic Germania tears the sacred law of contract, on which all civilisation is founded, into scraps of paper, massacres Belgium, stealthily murders American women and children on the high seas, and outrages the decencies of international hospitality by convert- ing embassies into nests of intrigue and dishonour. This is only the ABC of the Hohenzollern alphabet of crime ! 18 THE NATION AT WAR I had been a pacifist of the Norman Angell School. Because I believe in evolution, I still believe the time will come when an international tribunal will super- sede national wars, just as wars among nations have superseded successively those of religions, of tribes, and of families. But since the spring of 1916, I have postponed my pacifism indefinitely, and devoted such strength as I have to the cause of civilisation against Germany. CHAPTER II AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR ALTHOUGH convinced of Germany's guilt in the summer of 1914, I did not speak out until the spring of 1916, when, incensed by a German- American news- paper, I wrote and published the substance of the pre- ceding chapter. 1 Because of my German name, this hyphenated New York newspaper had had the ef- frontery to rebuke me for permitting a speech on American preparedness to be made by James R. Gar- field at the College of which I am President away out in Pasadena, California! Those were strange days. It is difficult now to realise the extent to which we were bullied and muz- zled by the hyphenated press propaganda, which at length so over-reached itself that the German Emperor himself issued a public warning to "his people" here in America to be more discreet and less noisy. For my part, I was "boiled in oil" in the German-Amer- ican press, and "drawn and quartered" that is what they actually said should be done to this "renegade" * In the New York Times, April 20, 1916. Reprinted (in large part) by the Literary Digest. Widely circulated as a tract by the American Rights Committee, New York City, and other similar agencies. 19 20 THE NATION AT WAR who had "turned his back on his people even as cer- tain base scoundrels, in American pioneer days, for- sook their white kinsmen to consort with blood- thirsty savages!" On the other hand, I received from many Amer- icans of German ancestry letters commending my stand, most of them, however, adding that considera- tions of a business or social character must prevent the publication of names. Some of these letters I published (without naming the writers) in the New York Times of May n, I9I6. 1 Here is one, from a beloved teacher of my youth, an honoured professor in a Lutheran college, a man of pure German descent, and of intimate acquaintance with Germany: "My own conviction," he wrote "one that grows stronger every day is that the military oligarchy of Germany has been actuated by a purely bandit spirit, and that the future peace of the world depends on the crushing of this dominant power in that country. Furthermore, I am growing very tired of German plotting and agitation in this country. The German press is treasonable; and were the editors to suffer the fate that would meet them in Germany I should not shed a tear." The very day I wrote my "confession," and quite by coincidence, there came a communication from one of the most prominent Lutheran laymen in America in which he complained that certain Lutheran periodicals were "so strongly pro-German, and so strongly in- clined to be anti-American, that we have come to the *See also the Literary Digest, May 27, 1916, pp. I537-I53& AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 21 pass at which non-Lutheran readers of such journals put Lutherans down as antagonistic to their own Gov- ernment." One of my chief reasons in writing my own brief "confession" was the desire to efface as much as I could of the treasonable stigma that had been affixed on Americans having German names by the noisy effrontery of a few bigots, and long tolerated by a silent forbearance that at length ceased to be virtuous. It was an interesting coincidence, at least, that every attack on my position that came to my notice contained also an attack either on the national Administration for its failure to surrender wholly to Prussia, or on American institutions as a whole ; while the essence of my own offense was expressed in the copious use of such epithets as "renegade" and "traitor," the c in my name outweighing, in the minds of these hyphenates, a hundred and fifty years of un- broken American lineage ! Among the commendations of my "confession" was the following letter from a prominent Lutheran clergy- man: "I can not forbear taking time, in Holy Week though it be, for thanking you for your very fine letter in this morning's New York Times. I have myself been deterred from attempting just such a statement solely because I did not wish to give offense to my friends and parishioners. It is a wholly admirable statement and tells the story for many of us who have been in grave danger of confusing religion with mod- ern Germanism. One sees now where our extreme apologetics brought us and how near we have come to being wrecked on the rocks of Teutonism rather than 22 THE NATION AT WAR borne along on the great deep currents of an Evan- gelical faith which is not confined anywhere, least of all by the wretchedly narrow limits of one very con- stricted people. ... I feel very keenly a certain hu- miliation at having been submissive to the roaring bull- dozing of the pro-German defenders of our Church, who have so long held the whip over us and made us believe in their little type of self-conscious religion. So easily may we be fettered when we forget what is 'the eternal price of liberty/ national or religious." The Lutheran Church has now officially purged it- self from the Prussian blot with which it was stig- matised by a few of its followers. The great "Gen- eral Council," at its meeting in Philadelphia (on Oc- tober 24, 1917) unanimously adopted the following clear declaration, to be emulated by other general bodies: We, the Members of the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, in convention assembled in this notable year of the Quadri-Centennial of the Reformation, representing over 800,000 communicant members, conscious of our sacred duty before Almighty God in these trying times, and deeply moved by the great and serious task which they have imposed upon our Government; and mindful of the heroic deeds and noble sacrifices of our forefathers at every crisis in the history of our beloved country, do hereby present the following preamble and resolutions: WHEREAS, We are mindful of the good order and happiness flowing from attachment to the principles upon which our Government is founded, and sin- cerely hold and believe that it is the bounden duty of those in authority to provide for the enactment and enforcement of laws to the end that the rights, pre- AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 3 rogatives and obligations of American citizenship may be secured, maintained and met; WHEREAS, The doctrinal basis of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, expressed in the principles of the Augsburg Confession, to which the ministry and mem- bers of the Church are solemnly obligated, commands loyalty to the Government of the United States: Therefore, be it resolved: i. That we remember before God and record before man, our deep gratitude that the United States have rightly maintained liberty of conscience, freedom of worship and a separation of Church and State, which are precious heritages of the Reformation and under which our Church has enjoyed unbroken prosperity. 2. That we pray Almighty God to grant us, the American people, together with our Allies, a complete and decisive victory over our enemies, in order that our ancient liberties may be preserved and deepened; and that justice, righteousness and that freedom, which is our sacred heritage, may be enjoyed by the nations of the earth. 3. That we express to the President of the United States our Christian sympathy and loyal devotion, and beseech our Heavenly Father to sustain and strengthen him with all needed grace, and that we most earnestly pledge to him our support in the exer- cise of his constitutional authority as the Commander- in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, in his high and earnest purpose "to make the world safe for democracy." 4. That we express our earnest co-operation in all constructive efforts to bring this great war to a just issue, and that we encourage all our people to give their enthusiastic support to the efforts of our Govern- ment for the conservation and control of food sup- plies, to all Liberty Loans, to the work of the Red 24 THE NATION AT WAR Cross and to all agencies which promote the welfare of our soldiers and sailors. 5. That we record with just pride the fact that so many of our young men have gone forth from our congregations at their country's call ; that we pray that they, and all the young men of our Army and Navy, be found courageous and chivalrous, strong and heroic, pure, temperate, manly and just; that we be- seech God to defend them in all danger and save them from temptation; that we urge all men cheerfully to respond to the call to arms and utterly condemn those who in any way falter or obstruct the carrying out of the laws of our land ; holding, as we do, that upon the declaration of a state of war every loyal man and woman becomes a trustee of his time and talents, life and fortunes for our country. 6. That we unite in prayer to Almighty God to give us as a nation a due sense of His overruling providence, so that we may enjoy that security which can only be obtained by a unity of purpose and effort which will command and receive the respect of the whole world ; securing in the end victory to our arms, and the blessing of a speedy, honourable and lasting peace. 7. That a copy of these resolutions be transmitted to His Excellency, the President of the United States, and to all Lutheran chaplains at their posts of service. Of almost equal importance, and certainly of equal interest, are the following resolutions, prepared by Dr. Theodore E. Schmauk, and adopted by the Penn- sylvania "Ministerium" of the Lutheran Church, May 21, 1918: WHEREAS, there appears to be an impression widely prevalent that the Lutheran Church in America is a AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 85 foreign Church, and that the members of this Minis- terium are newcomers in the State of Pennsylvania, we hereby lay down the following declaration of fact and principle: 1. That the Lutheran Church is a world Church, and not the offshoot of any State Church in Germany. It was found in England, France and Italy four cen- turies ago. It is found in Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Russia, Australia, Canada, the United States, no less than in Germany. In no case has the Lutheran Church in the United States any connection with any Church in Germany, least of all with that of which the Kaiser is the head. The Kaiser himself is not a Lutheran, but he and his father and grandfather are of Reformed stock, and the Prussian Union, which they founded, is composed of Reformed and Lutheran elements. Up to 1907 this Prussian Imperial Church had no organic association even with the International Lutheran Conference, with which the General Council of the Lutheran Church in North America has had affiliation, so far as great meetings for representing a world Lutheranism was concerned. But since 1907, in which year the Imperial Prussian Church acquired some control of the International Conference, the General Council of the Lutheran Church in America, to which this Ministerium belongs, has been in an atti- tude of protest against the International Conference, and has stood for a re-organisation of this World Conference of Lutherans on American principles. 2. The Ministerium of Pennsylvania is not an exotic Church in America. Fifty years before William Penn its very earliest membership was in- vited to settle in Pennsylvania. The Ministerium was organised and in full operation a quarter of a century before the American Revolution. Its leaders and its membership were all patriots in the colonial era, and S6 THE NATION AT WAR they have participated in a marked and effective de- gree in all the wars of our nation from the French and Indian and the Revolutionary War down. The original members of this venerable Ministerium took an illustrious part in the founding of our American nation, and at its birth many of them sealed their loyalty with their life-blood on the battlefields of the Revolution. To-day this Ministerium stands squarely with its President in his actions and utterances. It not only supports the Government of the United States in the present war, but it stands for and believes itself to be an exponent of those free principles of govern- ment to secure which, throughout the world, the present world war is being fought. This Ministerium believes that the principles for which Martin Luther stood out against the Church and the Imperial State in his day, in behalf of the conscience and liberties of the people, are the principles for which the United States is contending at this moment; and it here and now pledges itself anew, even to its last drop of blood, in its attempt to make sure that a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, shall not perish from the earth; and that in religion every in- dividual shall have the right to worship God in ac- cordance with the dictates of his own conscience; and we believe that our words and acts will ever testify to our Synodical loyalty to American ideals and Ameri- can institutions. My belief, as expressed in May, 1916, has been ful- filled : "that in the event of war between this country and Germany, fully ninety per cent of American citi- zens with German names would be loyal to their citizenship, but that the remaining tithe, who do most of the talking and writing, would constitute a very grave menace." AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 37 The "ninety per cent" of us were long restrained from utterance not by any vestige of sympathy with Prussia, indeed, but by the solemn injunction of our President. President Wilson's first acts on taking office in 1913 had won from me a very high regard. Besides the respect due to his office, I felt for him on account of his attitude on the Panama Tolls question pre- eminently, but also because of such Acts as the re- vision of the tariff and the reform of our banking and currency system a personal regard so profound that in spite of my own deep convictions concerning the War, I did my best to obey his neutrality procla- mation of August 19, 1914, when he said: "I venture, my fellow countrymen, to speak a sol- emn word of warning to you against that deepest, most subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking sides. The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men's souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our senti- ments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the strug- gle before another." 1 Obedience to this last injunction was impossible; I could not be neutral in thought. But from August, 1914, until April, 1916 in spite of the Lusitania crime of May, 1915 I obeyed the President's other 1 President Wilson's State Papers and Addresses : New York, 1918; p.: 219. 28 THE NATION AT WAR requests scrupulously. Then I gave way. The ver- bal safety-valve of my "confession," however, was as nothing compared with the satisfaction I got in at- tending the Monterey Training Camp our Califor- nia Plattsburg in the summer of 1916. But there is no use trying to express it: the emotions that thou- sands of Americans suffered, until we finally entered the War in April, 1917, can never be set down on paper. When my only boy not yet twenty years old decided for himself in March, 1917, that he must leave for the battle front, and left, I remember that my first act was to answer a long-unanswered letter from my best friend in England, the aged Sir William Mather, and to begin it by telling him that now at last I could once more look an English gentleman in the face without blushing. When the news had reached us in California on the morning of February 3, 1917, that the President had announced the severance of diplomatic relations with Germany, I remember weep- ing with a sense of relief from deep shame. And I shall never forget that April night in San Francisco when the great War Message came over the wires! Then again did we glory in our President : the most pa- tient man in human history, not excepting the patri- arch Job; and now we looked to see the traditional anger of the patient man when fully roused, and our hearts burned within us as Americans! Now at last one could speak out, his country sanc- tioning. At Throop College we "speeded up" com- mencement by a month, so as to turn the campus into a training camp. In that bright May of renewed na- AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR 29 tional splendour I spoke to our boys of "Our Prob- lem." And because this book is nothing unless a "human document" the story of an American life in relation to the Great War I will set down some of the things I then said to them. I have another reason, too, for reprinting some of those words. This book is called, "The Nation at War." The Hearst papers used to be fond of saying (until the Sedition Act of May 1 6, 1918, muzzled them) 1 that this is not Amer- ica's war, but Europe's war. I tried to show my boys in 1917 that this is America's war, just as truly as the Revolution itself was. Perhaps such a chapter is necessary to a book on America at War. It is impossible to write such a book at the present time without getting more or less into politics. Per- haps I may be permitted to say once for all that I have always been an Independent in politics. I owe al- legiance to no party, but judge it by its platform, and especially by the personality of its chosen leader. But personal partisanship is in my judgment quite as mis- chievous as party partisanship. On this point Lin- coln gave us good advice when he said : "Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong. In both cases you are right. To desert such ground is to be less than a man, less than an American." *See Appendix A, final article. CHAPTER III AN AMERICAN WAR FORTUNATELY, it is now ancient history I said to my college boys at their commencement in 1917, but America has been involved in intellectual strife during the last few months. Controversies breed epithets ; and so we have heard one hostile camp denouncing the other as militarist, while they, in turn, have been branded as pacifists. Speaking more broad- ly and less offensively it would be fair to say that one of these groups has emphasised in these perilous times the need of efficiency, while the other has clung to its faith in idealism. It takes no prophet to discern that the great problem for the future of America is involved in the question whether these conflicting forces can be reconciled, and national efficiency be combined with democratic ideals. That Americans are capable of high efficiency is known to all men. We demonstrate it in our capacity for business and industrial organisation. I shall never forget the celebration of the fiftieth anniver- sary of the "Boston Tech." To take part in it I did not go to Boston, I simply rode down to Los Angeles. Allowance having been made for the difference in time, the Tech alumni in Los Angeles sat down at 30 AN AMERICAN WAR 81 exactly the same moment as the alumni in Boston, and banqueted. A little rubber disk lay beside each plate, while in front of the toastmaster stood a tele- phone transmitter. At the close of the banquet we placed the tiny receivers to our ears, and heard the Boston speeches and the toasts, and the "rah, rah, rah!" of the Boston alumni. Nor was that all. A score or so of cities were linked by wire with Boston just as we were; and we could hear New Or- leans singing "Dixie," while New York sang "Yankee Doodle" and Washington thrilled all our hearts with the strains of "The Star Spangled Banner." San Francisco and Los Angeles and the two Portlands; Chicago and St. Louis; the Gulf of Mexico and Puget Sound ; the hearts and voices of a thousand men all over this broad continent were linked by magic spokes to the Boston "hub" through the genius of American efficiency. We learned, moreover, that when the morning hour of three should strike, all this vast network of wires would be placed in the hands of the Govern- ment, and then deep would call unto deep, most lit- erally, across a thousand leagues of mountain and valley and desert. For the ships in the Atlantic then shout through the air to the great wireless stations on shore; the American telephone system catches their cry, and flashes it here to the Pacific; whence once more the sound waves roll off through the air to our vessels out in the ocean, and the two seas are blended into one at the touch of American skill. This is one instance out of a thousand that might 32 THE NATION AT WAR be cited of our demonstrated capacity for efficiency as applied to the organisation of business; but when we consider national affairs alas, that is another story ! Take the conservation of our natural resources, and the story is nothing short of lamentable. Forest fires, which could be stopped at an expense of one-fifth the value of the merchantable timber burned, cost us $50,000,000 a year, to say nothing of the fact that our lumbering is so unintelligent that of each thousand feet we cut, 680 are wasted. Damage from floods is preventable, and yet since 1900 the direct yearly in- jury from them has increased steadily from $45,- 000,000 to over $238,000,000. We utilise $62,000,000 worth of natural gas every year, the most perfect fuel known, and permit an equal amount to escape into the air; and our supply of petroleum cannot be expected to last beyond the middle of the century. Our spend- thrift agriculture is indicated by the fact that our average yield of wheat has until recently been only fourteen bushels an acre, as against twenty-eight bush- els in Germany and thirty-two bushels in England. It is the same with our personal vitality. There are constantly about 3,000,000 people seriously ill in the United States; but more than half of this ill- ness is easily preventable, and if we only used our knowledge we could at once add fifteen years to the average length of American life yet the president of a life insurance company told me the other day that whereas in the year I was born a man of my present age had an expectation of twenty-one years of life, AN AMERICAN WAR 93 to-day he has but twenty, showing that in spite of our increase in knowledge we are actually making prog- ress backwards. There are 85,000 young men in our colleges and universities to-day, but I am told by an eminent physician that there are 87,000 young men in our lunatic and idiot asylums. There are 400,000 feeble-minded children in our public schools, while between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of our school children are afflicted with serious physical defects. West Point rejects for physical deficiencies 30 per cent of its applicants for admission, while Annapolis is able to admit only 30 per cent of such applicants; and only one out of five recruits is able to get into the army. 1 If "national service" should accomplish nothing else it will be of great value to our people by imposing a check on our threatened physical degen- eracy. But we ought to introduce efficient and economic management into our army. We have been spending enough on a standing army of fifty thousand men to support, according to the more intelligent methods used by Japan, an army of a million men on a peace footing; or to enable Europe to maintain an efficient army half that large, together with reserves of regu- lars varying from two million to five million men, whereas we have had no reserves of regulars what- soever. We have been scarcely more efficient in army management than in "conservation." As to the navy, Admiral Fletcher recently testified that a foe could land at any time on almost any foot of our two 'This was tinder the old conditions, on a peace footing. 34 THE NATION AT WAR thousand miles of coast line for anything the navy cotild do to prevent it! The people of the country are going to find out within the next few months (this was in May, 1917) that conditions have not been exaggerated regarding our army and navy, but that it would be almost im- possible to exaggerate the inefficiency that obtains in numerous vital particulars. They are going to find out that a Government training school is conducted at which forty or fifty of the flower of our youth arrive every day without the necessary clothing being pro- vided for them, and where three hundred of them are huddled into a single room with only one wash basin for the lot, and the nearest bath a quarter of a mile away. The men who are coming to Camp Throop are coming because the bounty of a few individuals makes 'this camp possible, and where we are lucky to get from [the Government any equipment at all. Those who go to the Presidio are going to find a splendid group of officers endeavouring to stretch a yard of supply to cover a mile of need, and distributing pamphlets, to keep up the spirit of the men, showing that the British democracy had to put up with similar in- efficiency in 1914. Democracies to-day appear in sharp contrast with autocracies in the matter of ef- ficient national administration. Here in America we are notable for effective business organisation, but notorious for ineffectual Government administration. There is no question whatever that if democracy ig to survive as a form of government it must con- AN AMERICAN WAR 35 duct its affairs in a business-like manner in a word, demonstrate its efficiency. One cause of our national inefficiency is found in our fondness for idealism. Foreign critics greatly err who characterise the Americans as lacking in this quality or tendency. As a matter of fact, we are a highly romantic and imaginative people. This is not to say, however, that our idealism is always sound; sometimes it is far from it. Lotus-eating has nothing to do with idealism; it is merely a euphemism for luxurious sloth. Rich Americans whose literary edu- cation expresses itself in the soft philosophy of Omar Khayyam "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou," minus the "book of verse," are not idealists in any true sense of the word, but may be more truth- fully described as parasitic degenerates fattening off a body politic of which they are wholly unworthy. Softness should not be confused with idealism, and neither should sentimentality. Let me show what I mean by an incident illustrated with a few verses. Some of us within the past few weeks have seen our boys stirring to the high call of duty, and have bidden them farewell and Godspeed as they enlisted under the banner of a militan* democracy. For reward we have received from certain of our compatriots criti- cism amounting to denunciation; we have been called un-American, un-Christian, and even inhuman. But other voices have reached us besides these. Dean Healy, for example, of the University of Southern California, has sent me verses that I shall venture to read to you. They were called out by a poem that 36 THE NATION AT WAR Edwin Markham wrote for a meeting of the "Inter- national Workers," in which these lines occur: O mothers, will you longer give your sons To feed the awful hunger of the guns? What is the worth of all these battle-drums If from the field the loved one never comes? What all these loud hosannas to the brave If all your share is some forgotten grave? To that question Dr. James L. Hughes, of Canada, wrote the following answer. Greater significance is given to his poetic answer, I may say, by the fact that his own son was killed in action some time ago and now lies buried in France. He entitles his reply to Markham, "The Truly Unselfish Mother's Answer." God gave my son in trust to me. Christ died for him, and he should be A man for Christ. He is his own, And God's and man's; not mine alone. He was not mine to "give." He gave Himself that he might help to save All that a Christian should revere, All that enlightened men hold dear. "To feed the guns"! Oh, torpid soul! Awake, and see life as a whole! When freedom, honour, justice, right, Were threatened by the despot's might, With heart aflame and soul alight He bravely went for God to fight Against base savages whose pride The laws of God and man defied; Who slew the mother and her child ; Who maidens pure and sweet defiled. AN AMERICAN WAR 37 He did not go "to feed the guns," He went to save from ruthless Huns His home and country, and to be A guardian of democracy. "What if he does not come?" you say; Ah, well! My sky would be more grey, But through the clouds the sun would shine > And vital memories be mine. God's test of manhood is, I know, Not, 'Will he come?" but, "Dm HE GO?" So long as America clings to its idealism we need have no fear of militarism, which has never in all the history of the world been associated with any system of democracy. Democracy is essentially ideal- istic; its danger comes from a totally different direc- tion from that of militarism, and springs from slip- shodness, from lack of foresight and preparation, from the silly dictum that "everybody's business is no- body's business." The great problem of democracy is to combine efficiency with idealism if it is to sur- vive and see its ideals triumph in the world. By all means let us be faithful to our national ideals, but let us be sure that we know what those ideals really are. In times like this we need to refresh our spirit at the historic fountains from which our na- tional ideals arose. In 1914 the steamship in which I crossed the At- lantic touched at Plymouth, where unexpected circum- stances compelled me to remain for a fortnight. Com- pact masses of old brown brick houses crowd in rows on the rolling hills, which suddenly plunge down a 88 THE NATION AT WAR steep declivity into the bay. The top of the hill near- est the sea is swept clear and smooth as a plaza; it is the famous "Hoe" where Drake was playing his game of bowls when the Spanish Armada was sighted, and where a heroic bronze statue of Drake gazes out over the waters, a religious inscription on the pedestal tell- ing the story as the Puritans saw it : "He blew with His winds and scattered them." Often I climbed to the Hoe, "the soft tread of history under my feet," never without a thrill; but the deep religious surge of emotion came when I clambered down through the crooked narrow streets to the "old town," and stood level with the waves on the dock, where a tablet marks the exact spot from which the Mayflower sailed. By an effort of the imagination one calls back the scene of that sailing. So I could see at length in my mind's eye the frail little cooped-up shallop drawing away through the bay to the ocean; faces crowding each square port-hole, kerchiefs waving, as the sails caught the wind and the waves began tossing the cockle-shell out to sea ; the very dock on which I was standing crowded with brave women striving to keep back the tears and smile a farewell to the loved faces that were now only a white blur against the black side of the diminishing ship. Seeking liberty, these pilgrims breasted the stormy waves, subdued the wilderness, struggled with blood- thirsty savages, and built up in rock-ribbed New Eng- land a commonwealth which remains the most jealous and viligant watch-tower of American liberties to this day. AN AMERICAN WAR 39 It was the liberty of the seas that made a pathway for our fathers to this continent, and that liberty has always been precious to us. After our national free- dom was achieved, we depended for a living through- out a long period on oceanic trade to a degree now difficult to realise. The Napoleonic wars interfered with this trade. Bonaparte, notable for his tyranny, interfered with us seriously when he attempted a starvation blockade of England, strikingly similar to that which Germany undertook in this War. But notice particularly that even Napoleon, notoriously high-handed as he was, never dreamed of threatefltfTjf with destruction American vessels entering the war zone, although he might easily have done so. He lim- ited his interference with neutral rights to the Berlin Decree, forbidding any ship that had touched at an English port admittance to a port of France or her allies. This was bitterly resented in America, though not so much as the retaliatory measure of England. To cripple Napoleon, England issued Orders in Council requiring all American ships trading at a European port from which British ships were excluded to call at British ports and pay a duty. This, together with interference with our shipping on the high seas, caused the War of 1812, fought with England, and won, squarely on the issue which is now raised again, in an infinitely aggravated manner, by Germany. So firmly did the War of 1812 establish in inter- national law this principle of maritime freedom that the United States, fifty years later, was forced to rec- 40 THE NATION AT WAR ognise the principle in England's behalf at the cost of our national pride. You remember the Trent affair? The Confederacy was sending two mischief-makers to England, Slidell and Mason. England did not want them, but they travelled on an English steamboat, the Trent. A zealous Yankee skipper, Captain Wilkes, overtook and stopped the Trent, and removed these dangerous Confederate agents. The North went wild with delight But England immediately loaded great quantities of cannon, muskets, and ammunition on shipboard for Canada, with thousands of soldiers, and sent an ultimatum to America, allowing but seven days for reply. Lincoln bravely released the prisoners and disavowed the act of Captain Wilkes, declaring that "we fought Great Britain for insisting by theory and practice on the right to do precisely what Captain Wilkes has done." It is interesting to note that the Count Bernstorff of that day, probably the father of the late German ambassador at Washington, wrote from Berlin : "Pub- lic opinion in Europe has with singular unanimity pro- nounced in the most positive manner for the injured party/' England. More than a hundred years after the War of 1812, Germany proposed to do a thousand-fold over the iniquity for which we fought England and for which England was willing later on to fight us. Germany now establishes huge arbitrary sea zones, which, if respected, would blockade not only England, but in- nocent neutral nations, and deprive some of them of the means of life. She also audaciously says that if AN AMERICAN WAR 41 our vessels so much as enter those zones she will de- stroy them just as if they were belligerent warships; and this after solemnly covenanting with us to respect our vessels in war zones, on pain of our positively de- clared intention to sever relations should she not do so. She proposes to wrest from international law its one most precious immunity, the freedom of the paths of the seas, and to enslave the ocean paths perma- nently, by this atrocious precedent, to the will of Mars. The pseudo-Napoleon of Germany out-herods Herod, and calmly announces a permanent Lusitania policy in international law making crime not the exception, but the rule. Had our Government refused to act we should have been unworthy to survive; as the present Count Bernstorff has said: "There was nothing else for the United States to do." Freedom of the paths of the seas was necessary to the settlement and establishment of this Nation; was requisite to our national existence; is bound up with the woof of our history to such an extent that the War of the Revolution itself was not more an American war than is this War. How wonderful, too, as our President has pointed out, that we find ourselves allied in a clear-cut strug- gle between democracy and absolutism. When that struggle is won, however, we must not for a moment think that our task is ended. To do our great work of reconstruction and rehabilitation in the enormous world-labour that lies before us, we shall be compelled to wed the trained mind and the skilled hand to the ennobled heart if the fruits of our victory are to be 42 THE NATION AT WAR permanent and if civilisation is to triumph on the earth. ... So far, my 1917 commencement address. Camp Throop collapsed. Three of our College sup- porters were putting $20,000 into it, with the ardent assistance of the Western Department of the Army, whose headquarters are at San Francisco. We thought, moreover, that we had the support of the War Department at Washington. The Camp was to be subsidiary and preparatory to that at the Presidio, and we enlisted over a thousand young men who could not get in up there, and who were to pay their own living expenses at Camp Throop in order to take pre- liminary training for the new national army. ( It must be remembered that this was long before the Draft Act was passed, or even deemed possible.) We bought everything that money could buy, includ- ing tents, uniforms, and a commissary outfit for fif- teen hundred men, the City of Pasadena most gener- ously co-operating in putting in water, drainage, and lights. The only equipment that money could not buy comprised the two items of instructors and army rifles, although we discovered perfectly competent retired army officers that were eager to serve as instructors, and quantities of unused Krag-Jorgensen rifles at the Benicia arsenal and reported these to the Govern- ment with a respectful request for their use. Sud- denly and summarily, as in the case of similar college enterprises throughout the country, Washington abso- lutely refused all assistance, for reasons that were never explained. AN AMERICAN WAR 43 Camp Throop collapsed, but the College of course adopted other plans for war work. It was a keen satisfaction to learn from a recent bulletin of the United States Bureau of Education that no college in the country except the war and navy colleges them- selves have exceeded this California school in concen- trated devotion to war work. 1 But when the summer vacation of 1917 came (we had not yet adopted the all-the-year schedule for war work), what was / to do, without my Camp? Being a bit past the age limit, alas! for acceptable service in the fighting line, I asked the same question of myself that many thousands such men were anxious about everywhere: How can I "get into the game" and be of some real service in the War? Could I not follow my boy, and the other young Throopers, even from afar, in this greatest of all Crusades? So I did what common sense suggested, and sent out an "S. O. S." call to a friend. He himself was already in Wash- ington, where no man has rendered greater service. He is the sort of friend that never fails when needed. So it was a glad day when the telegraph brought an answer from Washington, offering service at a dol- lar a year with the Council of National Defense. My board of trustees lent me to the Government, and I took the next Santa Fe train. 1 Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Higher Education Circular No. 6, Jan., 1918, pp. 10-11. CHAPTER IV WASHINGTON AND THE COUNCIL OF DEFENSE WASHINGTON in the summer of 1917 what westerner that then came into it can forget it? Gor- geous with its shining palaces set upon hills, its miles upon miles of rolling avenues lined with pleasant homes, but with no place for the stranger-man to lay his head ! Beautiful and refreshing beyond words in lush green foliage from many lands, but insufferably, humidly hot ! Feverish with aimless activity, a great disordered ant-hill just stepped on by the giant of War the most interesting and ineffectual city in the world ! Hundreds of new people were here, tripping one another up with kind intentions. There was a vast amount of criss-crossing and cross-wiring and cross- firing; duplication of effort, waste motion, even con- flict; not alone among the bewildered newcomers, but in the overwhelmed departments and bureaus. Cranks, too, filled Washington : cranks in Congress, cranks in the corridors of all the hotels and of the one stately modern office-building of the town, the famous Mun- sey Building, now defiled by Brisbane's Washington Times; every crank revolving industriously his own panacea for the War, like a hand-organ jangled out 44 COUNCIL OF DEFENSE 46 of tune. Secretary Lane put it with delightful whimsicality in his phrase depicting Washington as "a valley surrounded by a horse-shoe of mountains into which, by some strange law, the miasmatic vapours of the country drop and set up strange states of mind." It was not a discouraging place we must banish that word from our vocabulary; but depressing it cer- tainly -was one year ago. And it is yet, although less so as the huge war machinery begins to bang and jostle down into some sort of chaotic order. To change the figure here we were in the very vortex of demo- cratic 1 disorder, in the very storm-centre of the cy- clone of war, with no cyclone cellar in spite of two years of warnings from the international weather bureau ; and it was refreshing and tonic to get out into the periphery of the States, and feel the War as a strong North wind, bracing the popular endeavour. There is one recourse even in Washington: that shrine across the river, that sacredest and placidest spot in all the world, Mount Vernon, where, as Owen Wister has said, the calm spirit of the father of our country is almost palpable. I went there again only yesterday; one goes there when oppressed and hot at heart; and always the calm Presence broods over the place, so that people go about talking in whispers. You feel his vast spaciousness in the broad greens- ward lined with stately trees that forms the unsur- passable approach to the mansion. You feel his sim- ple serenity in the box-bush and hollyhock garden laid out by his own patient hands. At the tomb there is a 'Note the small d, please. 46 THE NATION AT WAR certain splendor of solemnity nowadays : the great bronze leaf that Marshal Joffre laid there in the name of France surrounded as it is by polyglot tokens from the thirty nationalities that went across the river with President Wilson on the last fourth of July and pledged a new meaning into our old motto, "E pluribus unum." But it is in the house itself that the spirit of Wash- ington most intimately communes with you, as you see the desk at which he wrote, the very clothes he wore, the bed on which he died; and the tiny room still above that holy upper chamber the room from which Martha Washington looked out toward his tomb in the days that remained to her after his death. What means most to you, though, in these times, is to stand once again in the entrance hall below, before his three swords hanging on the wall now unsheathed! and read the words which he decreed in his will should evermore accompany his swords: stoorbg ate accompanieb toitf) an injunc* tion not to tmsfjcatfje tfjem for tfje purpose of gfteo- tring fcloofc, except it be (or self bef ens'e, or in bef entfe of tfieir countrp anb it* rijjfjte; anb in tfje latter case to feeep tfjem unstyeatteb, anb prefer falling toitf) fljem in tftfir fjanb* to tfje relinqutefjment thereof." We have called him first in peace; these words, re- minding us that he was also first in war, speak to us to-day from his undying tongue a message that sends COUNCIL OF DEFENSE 47 us away stilled and steeled with holy resolution to be true children of Washington. Coming events casting their shadows before, the Council of National Defense was established by Act of Congress (in August, 1916) to create "relations which will render possible in time of need the immedi- ate concentration and utilisation of the resources of the Nation." It is an advisory body, comprising in its ultimate reduction six cabinet officers: Newton D. Baker, chairman, with the other secretaries supposed to be specially concerned with the War Daniels of the Navy, Lane of the Interior, Houston of Agriculture, Redfield of Commerce, and W. B. Wilson of Labour. On March i, 1917, the Council and its "Advisory Commission" are said to have settled down to work. Walter S. Gifford was chosen as the (salaried) Direc- tor of both bodies, with Grosvenor B. Clarkson as sec- retary. When I reached Washington late in June the Advisory Commission comprised: Daniel Willard, chairman, in charge of transportation and communi- cation ; Howard E. Coffin, munitions and manuf actur- ing, including standardisation, and industrial rela- tions; Julius Rosenwald, supplies, including food and clothing; Bernard M. Baruch, raw materials, min- erals, and metals; Dr. Hollis Godfrey, engineering and education; Samuel Gompers, labour, including con- servation of health and welfare of workers; and Dr. Franklin Martin, medicine and surgery, including general sanitation. Director Gifford is a brilliant and affable man, still in his thirties, lent to the Government by the Amer- 48 THE NATION AT WAR ican Telephone and Telegraph Company, of which he is chief statistician. Two courses lay open to him at the outset: the development of the Council as a powerful organism, on the one hand, or the use of it to incubate a brood of useful independent organisa- tions, on the other. The latter course has prevailed : They must increase, although I must decrease, might well have been the motto of the Council, thus far. For example, there was organised at the outset, as one of the fourteen or fifteen committees of the Council and its Advisory Commission, a Munitions Standards Board, with Frank A. Scott as chairman. This was done because Mr. Gifford discovered "early in the game" that we should require quantity production of munitions; for we had no quantity production in this country, and we had no designs and specifications to enable us to manufacture our own types of ammuni- tion in quantity as they had been made up to this time. So, knowing that the Government arsenals were pro- ducing output, not by specifications, but considerably by "rule of thumb/' the Munitions Standards Board was formed in order to standardise our specifications, so that, as required by the exigencies of modern war- fare, we might go into quantity production of muni- tions. But this first step rapidly developed the immediate need of some system to prevent competition between Army and Navy when we actually began to place contracts. Because of this necessity the General Munitions Board evolved from its predecessor, and still later this grew into adult size and walked out COUNCIL OF DEFENSE 49 alone under the rechristened name of the present War Industries Board, and under the chairmanship of "Barney" Baruch. In the same way, one of the early committees of the Council and the Advisory Commission was the Commercial Economy Board, formed at the sugges- tion of Mr. A. W. Shaw, of the System Magazine, to strip business for action and take care of conservation and waste. Having been fostered by the Council, however, it now takes shelter under Mr. Baruch's friendly wing, and becomes the Conservation Division of the War Industries Board just described. There were many sporadic efforts on the part of women to utilise the invaluable woman-power of the country. The Council succeeded in the co-ordination of these efforts under a Woman's Committee of the Council, which, with the leadership of Dr. Anna How- ard Shaw, has rendered incalculable service in the mobilisation of the national resources, but has natur- ally tended to self-determination and the prerogative of standing alone. As for labour, the experience of Europe had shown that at the outbreak of war labour standards are liable to be broken down, resulting in dissatisfaction on the part of labour, in the suspicion that wars are run by capitalists, and that "profiteers" are to get the sole gain. So Mr. Gompers, as a member of the Ad- visory Commission, created committees of representa- tives of both labour and capital, and very early they and the Council adopted resolutions as to labour stand- ards and the proper activities of labour, thus convinc- SO THE NATION AT WAR ing the public, but especially labour itself, that the Government would not tolerate the breaking down of standards built up on behalf of workingmen. The Council, through the advice and assistance of commit- tees on labour, considered from time to time seriously the best methods for handling the whole labour prob- lem, finally ending in the presentation of a compre- hensive labour plan to the President, with the recom- mendation that it be carried out through the Depart- ment of Labour itself which thus, by the Council's own act, takes over this lusty "offspring." Realising the difficulties of our Allies regarding food, the Council early discussed the food problem, cabling for Mr. Herbert Hoover with the idea of -creating an organisation to advise as to how food matters should be dealt with. The creation of the Food Administration by Congress relieved the Coun- cil of this important function. Largely in the same way the Committees on Coal Production and on Trans- portation have been superseded by the Coal Admin- istration and the Railroad Administration. Experience in previous wars has shown that no phase of warfare is more vital than proper medical attention and sanitation, while the present War has proved the necessity of safeguarding the welfare of civilians. The Federal Government had three agencies in charge of these matters; nevertheless, civ- ilian medical talent had not been mobilised or trained in a manner that would enable it to be most effectively used. The General Medical Board was formed to co- ordinate this work, and State and County committees of 51 physicians are now organised throughout the whole land. In the judgment of the present writer no organi- sation called out by the War is rendering more im- portant service now or will prove of greater perma- nent value than the National Research Council, of which George Ellery Hale is president and founder. While still maintaining a nominal connection with the Council of National Defense, it has recently received uie sanction of an Executive Order, and is rapidly evolving an organisation not merely of national but of great international import. Finally: the problem of utilising local energies on a large scale was early suggested to the Council by offers of help from many States, cities, towns, com- munities, and clubs; for in those early days the Coun- cil was the only reservoir for these valuable offers of aid. All of this miscellaneous activity was ultimately organised by the Council under forty-eight State Councils of Defense, which in turn formed County Councils, and are now reaching out to assemble "Com- munity Councils" in school-houses, with the school dis- trict as the ultimate unit of the national organisation for war work. Representing the States rather than Washington, and occupying a building of its own, there has grown up a State Councils Section, 1 of which I have been the Chief Field Agent. To tell of my experience in this position is the chief object of the following pages. 2 1 Formerly called the "Section on Co-operation with States." " In the preparation of the foregoing account of the Council I have had the invaluable aid of Director W. S. Gifford. 52 THE NATION AT WAR An excellent summary of what the State Councils have accomplished is contained in the following letter from Secretary Baker, chairman of the Council of National Defense, to President Wilson : COUNCIL OF NATIONAL DEFENSE WASHINGTON July 24, 1918. My dear Mr. President : As Chairman of the Council of National Defense, I beg to report to you the noteworthy accomplishments of the State Councils of Defense in the forty-eight states of the Union, and to indicate the war activities for which they seem to me to be peculiarly fitted and peculiarly responsible, and to ask your advice and assistance in a matter vital to their future effective- ness. The State Councils of Defense, as you are well aware, were instituted at the suggestion of the Council of National Defense shortly after we entered the war. Almost from the day of their organisation they took a prominent part in recruiting our armed forces. Since the early months of the great struggle they have rendered particularly valuable service on behalf of the Department of Agriculture in increasing the pro- duction of foodstuffs. Before the creation of the United States Food Administration they led the na- tional campaign for food conservation. Most of them took a leading part in the institution of Home Guards to take the place of the federalised militia. They met many another state emergency by prompt local action. As time went on, in the natural course of events many of the fields of action which they had occupied were officially taken over by especially created Federal Ad- ministrations. But new problems constantly arose COUNCIL OF DEFENSE 53 and the work of the State Councils, instead of dimin- ishing, has notably increased in scope and in signifi- cance. To accomplish this work they have built up an organisation uniquely suited to its purpose. Every State Council of Defense has active County, or equiva- lent, Councils of Defense under it, while in nearly every state the organisation of Community Councils in the school districts, bringing the Government to the people and the people to the Government, is progres- sing rapidly. Through their speakers, their war conferences, their contact with the press and their contact with the peo- ple themselves through their Community Councils, the State Councils are now in a special sense the guar- dians of civilian morale in each state; carrying on a work of education and information which we look to see continued and strengthened, in order that the will to win and the knowledge of how to make that will effective may be everybody's possession through- out the war, in the dark hours of trial as well as in the hour of victory. In states with a considerable population of for- eign origin, the State Councils of Defense are leaders in the work of Americanisation, establishing war in- formation bureaus, correlating existing Americanisa- tion agencies, increasing as far as possible the educa- tional facilities available to the foreign-born, and see- ing that such facilities are used. The State Councils are engaged in preparing the young men of the country for the high duty of selec- tive service, advising and informing them in particular upon the adjustment of their legal affairs and upon military conditions and requirements and social hygiene. They are bringing their great influence to bear on 54 THE NATION AT WAR behalf of economy and thrift throughout the country. It is also their special task, in the interest of economy, to supervise the solicitation of funds for war relief by voluntary agencies, and to co-ordinate the efforts of these agencies, seeing that they work harmoniously and to a common purpose, and determining what agencies shall be approved and what discouraged. They act also as the state representatives of the Highways Transport Committee of the Council of National Defense in the increasingly important work of extending and facilitating motor-truck transporta- tion, in order to reduce the tremendous burden on our railroads and to stimulate the production of food by providing means of transporting it to market In addition, they are doing notable work in con- nection with public health; in connection with voca- tional education ; and in studying and assisting in the solution of the difficult housing and rent-profiteering problems which the war has brought to many a locality. Last, but far from least, their ramifying organisa- tion enables them to play a valuable part in the prac- tical execution of the policies of the Department of Agriculture, the Food Administration, the Fuel Ad- ministration, the Labour Department, the Shipping Board, and the other Federal agencies which are ex- tended into the states. We expect the state represen- tatives of these Federal agencies to feel in the future, as they have been able to feel in the past, that the organisation of the State Council of Defense is their ready right-hand. Most of the State Councils are incidentally performing the special service of bring- ing these Federal representatives together for fre- quent and regular consultation, and in most of the states these Federal representatives are actually mem- bers of the Councils of Defense. COUNCIL OF DEFENSE 55 These, in general terms, are the broad lines upon which the State Councils are now acting, and I have said nothing of the local industrial and social emer- gencies which it is their special province to meet by local action. The existence of this great national system, valu- able for each and every Government department, makes, of course, for economy of effort and renders unnecessary the creation of much local Federal ma- chinery which would otherwise have to be set up for the performance of specific tasks. May I suggest, then, that you ask all Federal Departments, Administrations, and Commissions, when planning new work or extension of their organi- sations, to consider carefully the possibility of using the State-Council system so as to prevent duplication ? A better understanding on this point throughout Washington, would, I think, make for the general efficiency of the war machine. Furthermore, will you not remind the heads of all Federal Departments, Administrations and Commis- sions, that all requests and suggestions for work on the part of the State Councils should be submitted through the State Councils Section of the Council of National Defense? This Section has attained a strong position as the agency to which the State Coun- cils look for authority and guidance in the pro- grammes committed to them for execution. It is clear that in the interest of efficiency, all requests for action from the Federal Government should go to them through this single channel. In the past Fed- eral authorities have, not infrequently, caused confu- sion by going directly to the State Councils with recommendations sometimes with conflicting recom- mendations. I believe a word from you would pre- vent such misunderstandings in the future. 56 THE NATION AT WAR It is difficult to estimate the importance of the service rendered, since our entrance into the war, by these State Councils, their County Councils and the multitude of workers banded together under them, whom we estimate to number at least one million. I feel sure that you, as their Commander-in-Chief, will be proud of their unique contribution in the war and will use your authority to broaden the scope of their activities as conditions permit, so that they may go on to still greater achievements. Very sincerely yours, NEWTON D. BAKER, Secretary of War and Chairman of Council of National Defense. To this letter the President replied as follows: THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON July 30, 1918. My dear Mr. Baker: I have read with great interest your account of the achievements of the State Councils of Defense and your general summary of the activities in which they are now engaged. It is a notable record, and I shall be glad to have you express to the State Councils my appreciation of the service they have so usefully ren- dered. I am particularly struck by the value of ex- tending our defense organisation into the smallest communities and by the truly democratic character of a national system so organised. I believe in the soundness of your contention that in the interest of economy and efficiency such machinery as that provided by the State Council system for the COUNCIL OF DEFENSE 57 execution of many kinds of war work should be utilised as far as possible by Federal Departments and Administrations. May I suggest, therefore, that you communicate to the heads of all such departments and administrations my wish that when they are consider- ing extensions of their organisation into the States or new work to be done in the States, they determine carefully whether they cannot utilise the State Council system, thus rendering unnecessary the creation of new machinery; and that they transmit all requests for action by the State Councils through the State Councils Section of the Council of National Defense? Cordially and sincerely yours, WOODROW WILSON. Hon. N. D. Baker, Secretary of War. CHAPTER V "DOWN SOUTH": THE CAROLINAS THE OATH I swore on joining the Council of National Defense gave me profound relief. Like many thousands of other Americans, I had been chok- ing with unsworn oaths ever since the sinking of the Lusitania; now I could not only swear without being profane, but to be very serious I could solemnly pledge my fealty as a servant of the Republic in the time of our gravest need. Here is the oath; there will be occasion to refer to it later i 1 "I, James A. B. Scherer, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reser- vation or purpose of evasion; that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, and that I will not disclose any information contained in the schedules, lists, or state- ments obtained for or prepared by the Council of National Defense, to any person or persons, except those designated by the Director : so help me God." My first job in Washington, after reading all the Council "literature" minutes, bulletins, and corre- 1 See Appendix A. 58 "DOWN SOUTH": THE CAROLINAS 59 spondence accumulated during the three or four months of its actual operations, was appointment as "liaison officer" with the Food Administration. In the attempt to reduce somewhat the duplication and even conflict of effort resulting from the "planlessness" of things, these "liaison officers" have been appointed by various bodies, especially by the Council of Defense. Acting, as it does, as an intermediary between the Capital and the States, it serves as a clearing-house in so far as permitted to do so for all the federal agencies as these reach out to State Councils. Con- sequently our State Councils Section has its liaison of- ficers (although they are not officially called that) for the War and Navy Departments, the Departments of Labour and Agriculture, the Food and Fuel Adminis- trations, the Committee on Public Information, and so on all along the line. Although unsuccessful in the first task assigned to me the attempt to get the Food Administration to abandon "Hooveralls for women," as its proposed universal uniform was humourously called I derived from this brief experience a personal knowledge of Mr. Hoover that will always remain an inspiration. The State Councils of Defense being still in process of organisation, and sending in emergency calls now and then for "first aid," it was decided to let me try my hand as a sort of trouble doctor. From this be- ginning my position developed rapidly into that of Chief Field Agent for the Section, and I became an incessant traveller. The State Councils of Defense are organisations in 60 THE NATION AT WAR behalf of public safety. In some States, indeed, such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, they are known as "Committees of Public Safety": safety from mili- tary attack, safety from spies and the otherwise sedi- tious, safety from the harmful acts of well-intentioned but ignorant or irresponsible persons, frbm the waste caused by carelessness or idleness, from disease, hun- ger, unhealthful surroundings, and from immorality and crime. 1 These apparently negative functions become active the moment they are organised; the prevention of food waste, for example, becomes conservation, and this immediately suggests the stimulation of production. The earliest acts of the Councils had to do, as a mat- ter of fact, with food conservation and production, so that Mr. Hoover, when Congress at length unham- pered him, found fields fallowed to his hand. South Carolina, the first State visited for the Na- tional Council, is a good illustration of this. The State Council, organised under the chairmanship of David R. Coker, inevitably emphasised improvement in agricultural methods, since Mr. Coker himself con- ducts what is probably the best privately owned experi- mental farm in the country. The "war interest" and the war organisations enable Mr. Coker and men like him to get a hearing they never have had before. Anybody that knows the South remembers how long and how vainly agricultural educationalists have en- deavoured to induce Southern planters to abandon the 1 Woman's Committee News, Delaware State Council of De- fense, June, 1918. "DOWN SOUTH": THE CAROLINAS 61 economic fallacy of putting all their land into cotton, "the money crop/' 1 and sending out West for "hog and hominy," their foodstuffs as well as their feed- stuffs, instead of producing these at home. Since the War began in Europe these philanthro- pists have at last got a hearing ; the war interest creates a psychological opportunity for "forcing home" truths that otherwise have pattered on deaf ears. You there- fore find that Southern States, such as Alabama, are for the first time since long before the Civil War now feeding themselves; not buying a pound of hominy or a can of lard from the West; and then putting their surplus lands into cotton. The South is better off than it was before materially, and it is better off spiritually, because it has learned a new self-reliance and a new self-respect. It will never go back to the old plan. It is being made over by the War. I was born in a little old State that has not thought very much of itself, because its neighbours used up all the conceit there was. I was born in North Carolina, that valley of humility between those twin peaks of pride, Virginia and South Carolina. It did me a lot of good to get down into the "Old North State" and see how these tar-heels are sharpening their wits in Uncle Sam's service. Take the matter of "publicity;" and this much abused word has great import in these days when the proper information of our people has been perhaps the greatest problem that perplexed us. In North Carolina they believe that even doctors have their uses, so they have organised the physicians of *See "Cotton as a World Power," Scherer, ch. 68. 62 THE NATION AT WAR the State into a patriotic league, and nowadays when a doctor goes into a tar-heel home to relieve a patient who is shaking with fever and ague, he not only gives him quinine, but while he has him "down" he injects into him the spiritual hypodermic of a more intelligent patriotism, so that if the doctor has luck the man not only gets up well, he gets up better a better patriot than when he went to bed. They have also quaintly organised the women down there; they have what might be called a company of three-minute women, on the principle, I suppose, that women can say more in three minutes than the Four- Minute Men can in four (and say it much more to the purpose). They have put these three-minute women at the telephones; it is easy enough to get the co- operation of the telephone companies. So every day at noon when the North Carolina farmer puts his ear to the telephone he not only gets the latest market quotations on "butter'n'eggs," and corn and cotton and hay, but "central" drops into his ear at the same time just a little dose of the proper patriotic "dope" that Uncle Sam thinks he needs at the moment. I was glad to go down into Dixie, because, born and bred in the South, I wanted to see for myself just how far the German Emperor's nefarious programme had succeeded in stirring up the black man against the white. Senator Overman said the other day that there are 400,000 German spies in this country ; surely enough to go 'round. Well, when I first went South for the Government I wished for the loan of a spy, that he might with me "spy out the land," hear what "DOWN SOUTH": THE CAROLINAS 63 I have heard, see what I have seen, and then report to his Kaiser truthfully (if he could) his observations in the form of a letter. In Atlanta I would introduce him to a burly black soldier, immeasurably proud of his khaki, who chucked himself in the chest when I was in Georgia last summer and exclaimed : "Ah don' wondah dat dem Chutones hab had eb'ry t'ing their own way so fah; who's dey had to fight ag'inst? Nobuddy but jes' ha'f-strainers English- muns an' Irishmuns an' Frenchmuns. But you all jus' wait till us Angry-Saxons gits over thah and gits aftah 'em; we'll sho* show 'em whut's whut!" I told that story at a great War congress of black/ people and white people in Birmingham, Alabama. The Negroes jumped to their feet and shouted almost as one man, "Sho' we'll show 'em!" The other speaker that night was Major Moton, the distin- guished Negro who succeeded Booker Washington as President of Tuskegee Institute. He said that during the brief period of this War and by reason of it more has been accomplished in the improvement of rela- tions between the blacks and whites in the South than during his entire life-time previously. German spies please note carefully! A year ago Washington was much concerned about the danger of an acute labour shortage in the South. The Pennsylvania Railroad and other big corpora- tions had sent agents down there to induce a Negro exodus, to make good the labour shortage caused by -the draft in the North ; and the Negroes were leaving 64. THE NATION AT WAR pell-mell. Not only the Council of National Defense but the Departments of Agriculture and Labour asked me to look into this matter for them. While I was in Mississippi the problem gave promise of beginning to settle itself. At Jackson an officer of the Cham- ber of Commerce gave me a letter he had just received from a Negro that had gone "up North;" it was so delicious that I copy it verbatim: "To my kind loving white friends whom I worked for over eight years, I wish to express my gratitude to you all for all my loving kindness towards me since , I first knew you. You have been so good to me I can never forget it, and it gives me a great deal of pleas- ure to sit down here and tell you how I appreciate all your good deeds, and to ask you to be more gooder. "Facts is, I am worried and stirred up in my hart up here. I am not comforted here at all, and I want you to all forgive me and forget me for leaving, and to plead with you for my job back. I know it is all my foolish mistakes. Please grant me with enough money to come home on and take it out of my wages. I started to work to-day at $2 a day, but if it was $10 a day I want to come back to work for you and die with you, and my family. There ain't no place like the South. I could do a lot of good preaching to my race the great deanger that is in the north, because they don't know what it is. If you don't send me the money to come I will just hafter stay till I get enough myself, but please send it at once. I am working in a bag and sack factory trucking 1,000 pounds of baled sacking and I am awful weak from it. I don't weight "DOWN SOUTH": THE CAROLINAS 65 but 127 pounds and you know I can't last long. I want to come right now and please don't take this for jokes. I never tells jokes nor lies no more. God knows this is the truth. Please deliver me from up here as quick as you can." They sent him the money and delivered him from up there as quick as they could. While I was in Mississippi, two big steamboats came chug-chug-chug- ging down Mark Twain's Mississippi river loaded to the "gunnels" with a thousand Negroes coming "back home" with a homing instinct almost as strong as that of the carrier pigeon itself. Beneath all superficial disturbances there is a strong bond between the South- ern white man and the Negro. This War has greatly strengthened that bond and I predict that in conse- quence of such State Council movements as that of the "Sumter County plan" in South Carolina, the race problem is going to be far less acute in the South in the future than it has been in the immediate past. That is what interests me chiefly about these State Councils. Important as they are for the winning of the War, they will have a far-reaching influence, if their activities continue to be properly directed. I am not an apologist for war; far from it. But, out of the terrible evil of this War, it takes no prophet's eye to see good coming to America. Can we not al- ready discover the awakening of a new national con- sciousness? President Wilson himself said, in New York City, that the Nation has been more closely knit together by one year of war than would have been 66 THE NATION AT WAR possible in a hundred years of peace. 1 One can see, also, an opportunity for the economic regeneration of the Nation. If we teach our people for the period of this War (and for my part I detect no early jprospect of its conclusion) methods of thrift and economy and efficiency, these methods will tend to become habits; and we can have a saner, healthier and more efficient America when the boys come marching home from their Great Crusade. The distinctive contribution of South Carolina to National Defense plans is, in my judgment, "the Sum- ter County plan," for co-operation with Negroes in war work. It may best be described in the words of Mr. E. I. Reardon, Secretary of the Sumter County Council of Defense: "We first interested R. W. Westberry, an intelli- gent leader of the coloured race," writes Mr. Reardon, "in our plans for organising the white people. We had Westberry attend our first County Council of De- fense meeting, and all subsequent meetings. We en- gaged his services for thirty days, paying him $5.00 a day or about three cents per mile expense of his auto- mobile, he really charging nothing but his actual expenses. We had him to call about twenty mass meetings of coloured men, women, boys, and girls, at coloured rural schools, coloured city schools, churches, and other public places. We had two or iw ln my own mind I am convinced that not a hundred years of peace could have knitted this nation together as this single year of war has knitted it together ; and better even than that, if possible, it is knitting the world together." From the President's Red Cross speech in New York City, May 18, 1918, as reported bf the Washington Post of the following day. "DOWN SOUTH": THE CAROLINAS 67 more leading business men, bankers, lawyers, and merchants, from among the whites to meet with these coloured people at every township meeting and address them; together with coloured ministers of these townships and other influential coloured citizens. "We distributed thousands of packages of seed, such as several kinds of beans, peas, corn, and other garden seed, and millet seed. We distributed 50,000 cabbage and 25,000 sweet-potato plants, besides 35,000 papers of United States packages of five dif- ferent kinds of garden seed, each package containing instructions how to use. We organised coloured women's auxiliary committees, with Westberry as leader, in cities, towns and rural districts. "We have kept up these township meetings at in- tervals, including a whirlwind campaign among the coloured population of ten townships, Westberry and coloured ministers talking at every meeting. We in- terested coloured teachers also and we have the coloured pupils taught all about the War and the causes that led to the War; the importance of food production and conservation, the fact that 'Food will win the War.' We organised or induced coloured people over the county to organise Red Cross chap- ters and to subscribe to the Red Cross, to buy Liberty Loan Bonds, and to educate coloured people that this is as much their War as the white man's War. "Executive committees (coloured) were formed in nearly every township. We had the members of the white township committees visit every coloured fam- ily and preach the doctrine of extraordinary food pro- duction and conservation and the reasons therefor. "We had hundreds of white land-owners to help their coloured tenants and 'share croppers' to plant plenty of corn, wheat, oats, vegetables, sweet and Irish potatoes, rice, tobacco, velvet beans, soy beans, 68 THE NATION AT WAR peanuts, field peas, and to raise chickens, hogs, and in many instances to buy dairy cows. "We let the coloured people know that we were working with and for them. We helped them every way we could and are still doing it. We had several big county meetings in Sumter, the county seat, ad- dressed by congressmen, U. S. Government agricul- tural and live-stock and grain experts, and we had the coloured people to attend these meetings with white people. "We got the Negroes to doing just what we were and are still doing. There is more prosperity in Sumter County this fall than ever before in the coun- ty's history. Thousands of coloured farmers have paid clean out of debt, paid old debts from tobacco money received, and have their fall cotton money clear. We have fought to induce thousands of them to deposit their money and to buy Liberty Bonds with their surplus cash. Hundreds will do this. Others will of course buy automobiles and other useless com- modities. But by getting into close elbow-touch with the coloured men and women and helping them we have made this one of the most prosperous counties in the South. Where twelve months ago poverty pre- vailed and actual want was in evidence, nearly every coloured family in the county has plenty of chickens, eggs, sweet potatoes, and hogs to do them for a year, and we have induced thousands of coloured families to can and preserve thousands of cans of vegetables and berries and fruits. "We placed great stress upon the teaching of col- oured women and girls how to preserve and can. We employed an expert (coloured) 'home demonstrator' and opened a school in Sumter which thousands at- tended long enough to learn how to preserve food. "Our coloured people are loyal, patriotic, and as "DOWN SOUTH": THE CAROLINAS 69 proud of the United States as the white people are. They know now that the Sumter County white people are their best friends. They work with us in all matters for public welfare. They listen to the advice of the white men and to their coloured leaders. We have coloured ministers meet with us occasionally at the Chamber of Commerce and other places, where we discuss the War and its economic problems heart to heart, as fellow citizens. "We are delighted with the results obtained from the coloured people's efforts. We are keeping it up and will continue to do so. All the coloured man needs is intelligent leadership from among his white fellow-citizens and intelligent co-operation. By hav- ing the loyal and intelligent coloured leaders in close touch with white leaders, and giving the coloured leaders support, financial and moral support, we easily line up the rest of the coloured population for their good and our good. But we had to go to them and have them come to us, and work with them and they with the white people. No social restrictions were broken down. We worked on purely business principles and they understood this." Two years ago I quoted with reluctantly pessimistic approval the clever comparison of the race problem with a fog: "the Southern people are inside this fog, and cannot see out, while the Northerners, outside of it, cannot see in." 1 My knowledge, acquired during the past year, of changed conditions such as Mr. Rear- don's remarkable letter describes, now leads me to believe that the storm of the War is blowing the race fog aside, for the moment at least. White men and 1 "Cotton as a World Power, a Study in the Economic Inter- pretation of History," Scherer, p. 323. 70 THE NATION AT WAR black men in the South, warmed by the common cause of humanity, thrilled with the knowledge that their two races are clad in common khaki on the fields of France, fighting in the Great Crusade, white men and black men in the South now see eye to eye, be- cause their kinsmen are fighting shoulder to shoulder "over there." North Carolina leads the whole country in canning campaigns, Mrs. Jane McKinnon's achievements be- ing nothing short of marvellous. Between 1910 and 1916 this remarkable "director of Home Economics" brought the number of cans up from 10,000 to 400,000, and under the War impetus this number was increased in 1917 to over 7,000,000! North Carolina was also the first State to organise a "Business Aid and Legal Advisory Committee" for the soldiers. A soldier cannot do his best in camp, to say nothing of the battlefield, if he knows that a mort- gage hangs over his home, or is uneasy abouts debts that he could in the natural course of events have re- paid had he not been snatched into war. It is simple enough, if only you have an organisation of authority, to get competent lawyers to volunteer their services for advice and business aid to such soldiers. This praiseworthy movement has now spread to practically all the States, with its scope so enlarged in several States as to provide employment for soldiers on their return and to undertake the re-education of the maimed or disabled. When we were selecting the title for this book, my publisher suggested that it bear a double meaning: "DOWN SOUTH": THE CAROLINAS 71 "the Nation at war" against a foreign foe, and "the Nation at war," with equal determination and inten- sity, against those foes of our own household who have threatened its integrity from within. This sug- gestion cleverly formulated my own latent intention, an intention derived from experience. Our people have been long-suffering beyond any people in his- tory; but they are now resolved not only to break the tyranny of Prussia, they are equally determined to dis- solve insidious sedition at home. I found in the Caro- linas, alas! certain Americans with German names whose names meant more to them than their birth- right those "creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy, not many, but infinitely malignant," as the President once said, who, even in the so-called re- ligious press (God save the mark!) flouted American institutions and subtly incited to disloyalty. I found, too, a growing bitterness against them on the part of those truly constituting the Nation. Ways and means were considered for counteracting their influence and assisting the Department of Justice to punish them. In some cases the Department sue- ceeded; I have the satisfaction of knowing that at least two of the gentry who "boiled me in oil" are now stewing in a juice of their own brewing behind prison bars. But the most effective service has been rendered against "German-Americans," in the Caro- linas, as elsewhere, by Americans of German descent a distinction with a very great difference. And of these no man has done more than Dr. George B. 72 THE NATION AT WAR Cromer, of Newberry, by such utterances as that printed in the "South Carolina Handbook of the War" : "We might have kept out of the War," said Dr. Cromer, "By admitting that Germany has the right selfishly to treat her solemn contracts with other nations as 'scraps of paper.' "By admitting that Germany had the right, with mailed fist and iron heel, ruthlessly to crush and de- stroy Belgium, a weak nation whose neutrality she was under sacred obligation to protect. "By admitting that Germany, while enjoying our hospitality and professing to be our friend, had the right to maintain an army of spies and carry on a campaign of lawlessness in our own country. "By admitting that Germany, while professing to be our friend, had the right to embroil us with Mexico and Japan in an effort to destroy the integrity of our country. "By admitting that Germany, while professing to be our friend, had the right, with ruthless and devil- ish disregard of law and humanity, to destroy our ships and murder our citizens, men, women, and chil- dren, travelling on peaceful missions and within their perfect legal rights. "By admitting that might is right ; that there is no law of nations above the will and power of the Im- perial German Government; that our flag is no longer an emblem of sovereignty and national honour; that "DOWN SOUTH": THE CAROLINAS 73 we have a spineless and nerveless Government or a nation of slackers and cowards; and that our Con- stitution and the Declaration of Independence are 'scraps of paper.' "Being unwilling to admit these things, we are in the War. We will come out of the War by the gate of Victory victory that will vindicate the rights and freedom of our own people, and victory for justice, liberty, and humanity. But we must overcome an army at home as well as vast armies in Europe. In our own country are spies, so-called pacifists, traitors, and demagogues, who are diligently sowing the seeds of sedition and treason by criticising the methods and policies of our Government and by creating division and dissatisfaction among our own people. They are trying to shackle the Government, and, in effect, they are attacking our army in flank and rear. Our army is entitled to the undivided support of a united coun- try. To this end and to the utmost limit of its Con- stitutional authority, the Government should put down the sinister Pro-German influences that are at work in our country. There is no middle ground. Our citi- zens who are not Pro-American are Pro-German. Those who are not for us are against us." Of course one cannot write of the Carolinas with- out saying something about the two Governors. Julian Street admonishes me, however, very solemnly. He says that when he was in Raleigh it seemed to him that the Governor had a look both worn and appre- 74 THE NATION AT WAR hensive, and that, while they talked, the Governor was waiting for something. He doesn't know how he gathered that impression, but it came to him definitely. After leaving the executive chamber he asked the gen- tleman who had taken him there whether the Governor was ill. "No," he replied. "All our Governors look like that after they have been in office for a while." "From overwork?" asked Mr. Street. "Yes, from an overworked jest the jest about 'what the Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina.' Every one who meets the Governor thinks of that joke and believes con- fidently that no one has ever before thought of his application of it. So they all pull it on him. For the first few months our Governors stand it pretty well, but after that the) begin to break down. They feel they ought to smile, but they can't. They begin to dread meeting strangers, and to show it in their bear- ing. When in private life our Governor had a very pleasant expression, but like all the others, he has ac- quired, in office, the expression of an iron dog." 1 I myself am inclined to think that Mr. Street's friend was mistaken, and that Governor Bickett's iron jaw is due not to an overworked joke, but to his de- termination to help win the War. Certainly he is one of the wisest War governors in the country, and close in his touch with the common people. But when I was in Raleigh he was bothered. A letter from an 1 "American Adventures," Street, pp. 276-277. "DOWN SOUTH": THE CAROLINAS 75 equally determined war-worker had just been re- ceived, beginning as follows : "My dear Governor: "Have I as a private citizen the legal right to shoot a man who utters slanders and seditious threats about the President and the Government?" Then, after a description of highly provocative lan- guage on the part of one of his neighbours, this rough- diamond patriot proceeds with much earnestness to his conclusion : "Please let me know whether or not I have the right as I asked at the beginning of this letter to shoot any one I hear abusing and making threats against the President and our Government. If your reply is in the affirmative, I will proceed at once to a good hard- ware store and buy myself the biggest six-shooter I can find." Governor Manning of South Carolina bears the proud distinction of the starriest service flag to which any Governor is entitled. Six of his seven sons are in the service, and so this glorious Southern Governor (successor of Blease!) leads the Palmetto State in a martial devotion worthy of Marion and Sumter and Hampton. 1 1 In a letter to the author (Aug. 8, 1918) Governor Manning writes : "Yes, I have six sons in the service, and one sixteen years old. My regret is that he is too young and I am too old !" CHAPTER VI "DOWN SOUTH": THE FARTHER DIXIE CITIES have always had for me infinite charm. Somewhere I think in the judicial deliverances of those amiable young Solons who conduct The New Republic I have read contempt of that "affectation" that pretends to find individuality and even person- ality in cities. In that case I must accept the con- tempt of the court; for a new city always rushes out and gets me at grips until by wrestling with it I know it and it becomes to me almost a soul. Some cities tease me a long time. New Orleans challenged me mightily when as a boy I first saw it. Going there many times afterward, I never seemed to get fully acquainted with it until after we entered this War. Even so I cannot analyse its charm or depict its rare personality ; for that you must go to the pages of Lafcadio Hearn or Grace King or George W. Cable. Julian Street is too crude by far reminding you of one of those men who amuse you by saying they know all about women! Feminine New Orleans is; to that extent Julian Street is right. "She is a full-blown, black-eyed, dreamy, drawly creature," he says, "opulent of figure, 76 "DOWN SOUTH": FARTHER DIXIE 77 white of skin, and red of lip. Like San Francisco she has Latin blood which makes her love and preserve the carnival spirit; but she is more voluptuous than San Francisco, for not only is she touched with the languor and the fire of her climate, but she is without the virile blood of the forty-niner, or the invigourat- ing contact of the fresh Pacific wind. In my imagin- ary picture I see her yawning at eleven in the morning when her Negro maid brings black coffee to her bed- side such wonderful black coffee! whereas, at that hour, I conceive San Francisco as having long been up and about her affairs. Even in the afternoon I fancy my New Orleans beauty as a bit relaxed. But at dinner she becomes alive, and by midnight she is like a flame." 1 Very well written, Mr. Street, but not subtle ; your portrait is too vivid, and stares at you out of its frame, whereas the Creole City is a will-o'-the-wisp, all-elu- sive. Certainly San Francisco is always suggested when one thinks of New Orleans, if for no other rea- son than that the two termini are the great outstand- ing attractions of the Southern Pacific Railway. But these two far-sundered cities are to me associated also in this : they possess the strongest and most chal- lenging individuality of all our American cities, bar none. Not the greatest charm there is Charleston; not the greatest beauty, here is Washington, to say nothing of Pasadena the incomparable; but what I have written I have written. New Orleans, like no other city in the world, 1 "American Adventures," Street, p. 622. 78 THE NATION AT WAR whips up the froth of my fancy. Last winter when I visited it for the Council time and again, it gripped me as never before. I remember one late afternoon, when riding back alone into town from the Country Club, how "sub-conscious cerebration" startled me from incipient reverie with the chaotic phrase, "a quaint magnificent tumult of splendour and squalor," which at once I set down in my note-book to keep the words as a clue. Two hours later, and more, New Orleans gripped me again ; the quaintness and sombre- ness and, above all, the poignancy of its always tragic beauty came on me as I sat on the rear platform of the Washington train, in that gloomy old "L. & N." station, separated from the thronged street that crosses the railway tracks behind the train only by a thin double gate of latticed steel. This street was thronged with a scurrying New Orleans crowd : black- amoors, as one should call the Negroes in this roman- tic atmosphere; turbaned Laskars from some tramp steamer in the harbour; our own "jackies" in their silly caps and bell-shaped trousers; Creoles from "the Quarter," shamefaced smiling lovers, children chat- tering over their sticky "lagniappe," slouching tramps. I remember wondering whether the gates would be stronger than pasteboard if the train took a notion to back ; and then wandering off into one of those eldritch musings that grip the mind once in a long while like some visualised poem by Coleridge with a touch of De Quincey at his elbow. Then I wondered about the power of this city to work black magic framed in silver musings. I felt foolish ; New Orleans had "got "DOWN SOUTH": FARTHER DIXIE 79 on my nerves"; so I roused myself, and said to the "commercial man" seated at my side: "Isn't this a strange old town?" "Yes," said he; "haven't sold a dam' dollar's worth to-day !" This jarred me, but not wide-awake. Deeper still I sank again into witchery, charmed by the scene: looking out from this Plato's cave of a station at the rainbow-coloured crowd, silhouetted under the lights; passing, passing always under the fitfully dim arc lights; until, bemused by the spell of the sad mad old city (not "the city care forgot," as Creoles claim) < until, like the toll of some sunken bell, the words: "Impending doom, Impending doom, Impending doom," intoned themselves to my fancy and began to ring through my head like some tune one would like to forget. Then, suddenly bang! We were shot backward through the gates like a catapult! Train men shouted, passengers screamed, the frightened peo- ple scurried from the tracks, and I could swear that we shaved the varnish from the tail of a bob-tailed trolley-car, jammed with people, that bumped and hob- bled out of our way just in time. There was an open switch, sheer inside the station yard itself; and the onrushing incoming train from New York had plunged into our locomotive with such speed that before our borrowed momentum was spent the rear Pullman was cuddled alongside a sugar factory, whence the acrid smell of over-abundant sweetness added the last touch of strangeness to this intagliated mental adventure. I write it as it happened. On reflection, however, I 80 THE NATION AT WAR wonder how much of my reverie was due to the "mint- smash" served on the lawn at the Club, and the "toast" half of the "cinnamon-toast"? For Creoles concoct quaint comestibles. At Galatoire's, The Louisiane, or Antoine's, one gets the best meal in the world ; better even than any- where in France. "Meal," however, is a coarse mis- nomer for it ; New Orleans administers food as a sac- rament, so that to say grace comes natural. Results are not always salubrious, but it is worth a pinch of indigestion, to say nothing of the tip, to be nursed and coddled and escorted through a meal by that precious old animated netsuke, Frangois, with his wonderful smile. He used to "attend" at the Louisiane, until they descended to vulgar American dishes; Antoine's is of unsullied splendour, like dear old Frangois. Al- ways, in going to New Orleans, I try to save up enough money for one visit to Antoine's, and after that I go to Galatoire's. Mayor Buehrmann, however (another American of German descent), served a War lunch at the New Orleans War Conference that combined delicacy and deliciousness, parsimony and patriotism, simplicity and elegance, to a degree that can never be surpassed. It was Hooverised throughout; with a meatless piece de resistance, the biscuits wheatless, syrups supplant- ing the sugar pot, and "fats: just enough" but dainty enough for Diana, substantial enough for a German, and costing just twenty-five cents ! The French thing I mentioned a moment ago was Gumbo-aux-herbes, containing hidden fat shrimps; the crisp biscuits were "DOWN SOUTH": FARTHER DIXIE 81 made of the finest potato-flour; and, best of all, the lunch was made up and served by a cooking-class of girls, schooled at the city's expense in conservation as they qualify in Home Economics. Louisiana busied herself with food-preparation for the War long before the Council was organised. A "food preparedness commission," directed by Harry D. Wilson and Professor W. R. Dodson, spread to all the parishes of the State the new farm gospel of which John M. Parker has been the bright particular evangel. Ten years ago it was believed throughout the country that Louisiana, famous for her rice and sugar crops, could never raise corn or hogs ; that she must forever buy "hog and hominy" from the West. Mr. Parker, believing otherwise, formed corn clubs among the boys throughout the State. There are now thret mil- lion boys in the corn clubs, and Louisiana grows fifty million bushels of corn. The pig clubs are only five years old, but boys now have blooded swine in every parish, whereas the only porcine product of Louisiana in former years was the "razor back," whose peculiar efficiency was supposed to reside in the fact that he could "outrun a nigger." - A few years ago the Federal Department of Agri- culture said that wheat could never be grown in Louisi- ana except "as of necessity an uncertain crop." Mr. Parker now has a wheat farm averaging 30^ bushels to the acre, while Mr. Clarence Ellerbe gets on his plantation an average of forty-three bushels, as against the old average for the country at large of fourteen! Boys' wheat clubs are now being organised, supported 82 THE NATION AT WAR by the Council of Defense, and there is a lusty Boys' Baby-Beef Club two years old. Registered bulls are coming into Louisiana from all of the great beef and milk producing States, and the livestock industry promises to become one of the most prosperous. I heard Mr. Parker tell the Farmers' Union at their great meeting in New Orleans that they had no busi- ness bragging about a "four-gallon cow"; that up in Michigan he had recently seen sixty-odd cows averaging seven gallons apiece, and that if they would visit him out at St. Francisville he would show them samples of the same milk-producing kine on his own farm. I shall never forget the preliminary meeting of the Louisiana Council of Defense, in the old St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans. Governor Pleasant, young and intelligently patriotic, presided. Before him, an honoured member of the Council, sat John M. Parker, whom he had just defeated. Two former Governors, Blanchard and Hall, were also there; every political faction forgotten in devotion to the one great cause. Besides, every interest in the State was notably well represented. The largest lumber dealer in the world and the largest rice producer a Polish immigrant who began as a peddler and who now grows two-and-a-half million bushels annually are examples; and organ- ised labour was there. It was a magnificent body of men; touched not only with lingering French grace and dignity, but quietly impassioned also with love for the gallant tri-colour as well as for the star-span- gled banner. "DOWN SOUTH": FARTHER DIXIE 83 The organisation meeting at Baton Rouge, a fort- night later, was no less impressive. Miss Hilda Phelps (now Mrs. Hammond) was there deserving infinite credit for the superb women's- work of the State. It was in connection with the question of the registra- tion of women that the most interesting discussion arose, revolving around the somewhat heated point of the registration of coloured women as well as white. Had this question been settled off-hand affirmatively,, it would not warrant special attention. Its signifi- cance lies in the fact that it was settled affirmatively after a thorough discussion of the subject in all of its phases. Some of the most thrilling and touching ad- dresses to which I have listened in a long time were made by white-haired Southern gentlemen of the old school, pleading with the Council to give proper rec- ognition to the "humble but earnest" efforts of the Negroes to show their patriotism during the War. A new era is coming to pass in the South. The sting of Reconstruction has been healed by the passage of time, and it is most heartening to see concrete and positive evidences of the generous attitude of former slave-owning families toward their coloured fellow- citizens; not in the mere relationship of employer to employee, but in far more important relationships, where the principle, Noblesse oblige, appears to con- trol. Mississippi I visited three times, addressing the leg- islature once and also addressing the State War Con- ference in the spacious legislative chamber, both houses attending. It was on this latter occasion that 64 THE NATION AT WAR I derived as great satisfaction as I have ever had in public speaking anywhere. Feeling that I could not conscientiously speak and ignore Vardaman, whose disloyalty was just then notorious, and yet desirous to observe the proprieties, I said (quoting from mem- ory) : "I am going to be frank and tell you that in some parts of the country I hear Mississippi's loyalty ques- tioned. Understand, I do not question it, but here and there I do find it called into question. Why? Is it because you allow yourselves to be misrepresented? Do you tolerate in any public forum anywhere any official spokesman who damages the good name of your whole State by flouting the War? Of course," I added, "I do not allude to that great and gifted Senator, John Sharp Williams." That was enough. Pandemonium broke loose, as a young reporter might say. I had not expected an outburst of approval; I had only sought, by some sort of oblique denunciation, to clear my own conscience without violating the political proprieties. When the prolonged tumult of applause had died down I said: "If that be politics, then make the most of it." (Vardaman was up for re-election.) "Remember," I went on, "that, after all, you are responsible for your misrepresentatives. Remember that you have it with- in your power, if there is any 'political prima-donna' from Mississippi who is singing off-key, either to make him change his tune or else stop singing altogether !" Then the tumult broke out again, and it lasted even longer than before. The "red-necks" were there, too, "DOWN SOUTH": FARTHER DIXIE 85 as Vardaman's backwoods supporters are humorously called. It was to me a keen satisfaction to go into this demagogue's stronghold and find the people ready to welcome denunciation of his stand on the War. The Nation indeed is at war against those who assail from within, as well as without, the cause for which it is fighting. In Alabama, the boll-weevil missionary has aided the agricultural educators in securing diversification of crops. For the boll-weevil has "played hob" with Alabama cotton. Montgomery, formerly the "ban- ner county" of the State, used to produce 45,000 bales annually; last year it produced only 7,800 bales. But the people rejoice in the fact that Alabama is now feeding herself ; and, in so far as the boll-weevil con- tributed to this result, he is nothing less than a bless- ing in disguise. The Alabama Council of Defense, although late in "getting down to business," is now giving a good account of itself. I visited Georgia oftener than any other State seven times; and secured less net results than in any. The last time I was there, at the dismal "War Con- ference" in Atlanta, the Governor introduced me as "the father of the Georgia State Council of Defense." I fear I was not wholly gracious in replying that I was not very proud of my offspring, but I certainly was truthful. The women, under Mrs. Sam Inman, have done excellent work from the beginning, but the men in Georgia who seem to be most outspoken and influential about the War are such blatherskites as Senator Hardwick and Tom Watson. Georgia has 86 THE NATION AT WAR been a State of great men. In the more recent years of her history one has only to recall Ben H. Hill, John B. Gordon, Henry W. Grady. What is the mat- ter with Georgia to-day ? I confess I don't know. The same rare hospitality is there, as of old ; nowhere was I more royally entertained; but hospitality will not win the War. 1 1 The attention of the Georgia Council of Defense is respect- fully directed to the general observations on page 112. CHAPTER VII "UP NORTH": NEW ENGLAND NEW ENGLAND I visited for the Council of National Defense several times during the winter of 1917, in connection with the War Emergency Em- ployment Service. The Council co-operated with the Department of Labour in endeavouring to extend to all the States effective systems of labour exchange such as those established by the independent initiative of Ohio and Pennsylvania. While the shipyard emer- gency provided the acute occasion for this undertak- ing, the plans were sufficiently comprehensive to take care of all needful war work. New England was chosen to begin in, both because of the large number of shipyards and munition plants within its territory, and also because its compactness afforded a good opportunity to "try out" a zone system of labour exchanges. Everybody is familiar with the ordinary labour ex- change, operated privately for profit. That for house- hold servants is the most common, but the large cities have many for supplying industrial plants, although these latter now commonly operate their own ex- changes. Some of the most progressive States have 87 S8 THE NATION AT WAR made labour exchanges a part of the machinery of the commonwealth. The chief cause of labour shortages is not an ab- solute deficiency of labour, but lack of facility in dis- tributing it from points of over-supply to the seats of acute need. By the establishment of zone ex- changes, Vermont, for example, can lend large bodies of workers to relieve Massachusetts in some indus- trial emergency, and Massachusetts will also be ready to help Vermont harvest her crops. The chief weakness of the ordinary labour exchange has arisen from failure to examine and classify mate- rial. For example, Fore River calls for several hun- dred anglesmiths. An unassorted body of men, un- der the old humpty-dumpty arrangement, would be dumped into Fore River, whose managers and fore- men, after costly waste in time and experiment, would be likely to find that only a few of the applicants could be used. This rejection in turn reacts unfavourably on the workingman, who finds himself out of a job at the end of tedious days of waiting. There are nu- merous cases in which a turnover of several thousand workingmen has been necessary to secure a few hun- dred fitted to their jobs. It is perfectly feasible for the labour exchange itself so to examine and classify its human material as to send to the seat of demand only labourers well qualified for the undertaking in hand. It is also feasible for "industrial Plattsburgs," such as the famous shipbuilding school at Newport News, Virginia, to convert relatively unskilled labour in a "UP NORTH": NEW ENGLAND 89 very short time into skilled workmen earning good wages. Thus an ordinary house-carpenter, trained in- tensively for a brief period in beveling, becomes a ship-carpenter; or a blacksmith, trained to swing both arms instead of one, becomes an anglesmith. There are at least eighty-eight ordinary and relatively un- remunerative vocations from which men can be speed- ily transformed into shipbuilders. Connecticut was the first State I visited in New England, arriving at Hartford in time to attend a most interesting meeting of manufacturers assembled to hear Sir Stephenson Kent (November 7, 1917). To listen to this great Englishman describe the results obtained in Great Britain by the application of gov- ernmental firmness, fairness, and foresight to labour problems occasioned by the War, was to realise witlj dismay what a chasm divides the labour policies of our overseas cousins from the chaotic conditions that have existed here. I remember Sir Stephenson' s say- ing that if England had had one-eighth of the labour troubles from which the United States has suffered, she would have had to conclude a disgraceful peace with Prussia long ago. Public opinion, according to this great leader, is the giant compulsive force that in England brings the would-be strikers back to work. Trades unions, he furthermore declared, had been of the greatest pos- sible assistance to the Government in overcoming in- dustrial resistance to the War. I was particularly struck with the figures given by Sir Stephenson Kent to show the participation of 90 THE NATION AT WAR Englishwomen in practical and indeed essential war work. Women in munitions industries alone had in- creased since the outbreak of hostilities seven hun- dred per cent, and men fifty per cent. When a woman or unskilled worker supplants a regular worker in England, discontent is allayed by promoting the lat- ter to a better position immediately. The laws are so organised and administered, moreover, as to pro- tect working people against high costs of living. A British farmer who had recently sold potatoes at too high a price had been promptly fined $25,000! At the very beginning of the War a law was passed in England declaring strikes illegal and punishing with life imprisonment any one who incited to a strike. "By itself," says Mr. Burton J. Hendrick 1 in describing English labour conditions, "such a dras- tic law would have made a desperate situation even more desperate. But this same law gave the Minister of Munitions (there is as yet no such officer in Amer- ica) power to control munition factories to operate them if necessary and limited the profits of manu- facturers to one-fifth more than the average of the two years preceding the war. The unions agreed, on their part, to accept the wages existing at the time of the agreement with a proviso to increase them, if nec- essary, three times a year, in accordance with the in- creased cost of living. These increases are paid, not by the manufacturers, but by the national exchequer. In consideration of these conditions, the unions aban- doned, for the duration of the war, all the union re- 1 In Collier's Weekly. "UP NORTH": NEW ENGLAND 91 strictions limitation of output and apprentices, em- ployment of women, etc. the understanding being that, when the war is finished, the old unionization standards shall automatically be revived. This agree- ment settled the labour problem in England and en- abled England to pile up the enormous war materials that are now doing such service. Precisely this sys- tem might not succeed here, but we shall have to adopt some scheme that will produce the same result." During the present year a War Labour Policy Board has been appointed by the President to co- operate with the Department of Labour in carrying into effect the labour programme prepared by the Council of National Defense. 1 We are still very far, however, from a practical working agreement such as that which has just been described. Temporary ex- pedients, instead of a carefully planned and firmly exe- cuted policy, are the scaffolding on which our great industrial undertakings uneasily rest. It is refreshing, therefore, to know that in the matter of the Employment Service, at least, we are beginning to substitute well ordered machinery for haphazard opportunism. A report just received from Connecticut declares that the most interesting phase of the entire work of that model State Council is the readjustment of the labour power of the State to meet the emergent demands of the munitions factories, food growers, and other essential war industries. Just here let it be noted that in Connecticut the vital necessity of supplying farmers with competent help *See p. 50. 92 THE NATION AT WAR is recognised as at least equally important with mu- nitions, on the practical ground that men must be fed or they can't fight; and so, in regard to labour, Con- necticut's key-note ideas of efficiency stand out in Fed- eral Director Korper's insistence on unity of purpose, direct responsibility, and adequate authority to secure results in production and delivery. The Govern- ment's plan for a State Advisory Board and for local Community Boards, with competent members from both employers and employed, provides for full and fair representation of all interests concerned; so that when it comes to carrying out the policies and plans agreed upon, for recruiting, placing, and moving la- bour, and transferring men from less essential to the most essential industries, Director Korper and his counsellors make effective appeals for loyal serv- ice, being remarkably successful in securing the enthu- siastic co-operation of all concerned, with the backing of a solid public sentiment. There are now eight branches of the United States Employment Service in Connecticut, with central of- fices at Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Water- bury, Meriden, Stamford, New London, Willimantic; and through these offices labour is placed in the essen- tial war industries. The United States Public Service Reserve, which is undertaking the great task of trans- ferring labour from lesser essentials to war work, has established fourteen recruiting agencies in Connecti- cut, with central offices at Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury, New Britain, Stamford, An- sonia, Middletown, Norwich, New London, Williman- "UP NORTH": NEW ENGLAND 93 tic, Torrington, Rockville, and Danielson. Each office of the Employment Service has a superintendent, and each station of the Public Reserve is in charge of an organiser. The Reserve Organiser's duty is to se- cure at once complete and accurate data concerning every worker in non-essential or less-essential indus- tries in his district, and to lodge this information with the Employment Service. Both of these branches are under the direction of Federal Director Korper, and the big work of enlisting and placing the man-power of the State where it is needed to be most effective in the great cause, is now going on with efficiency and despatch. In a recent address Mr. N. A. Smyth, acting as the Assistant Director General of the United States Em- ployment Service, laid down as follows the four fun- damental principles on which the Service must build itself up: First, that war work must have the men it needs at any cost. The war work of this country has got to have the workers. That may mean the closing of industries which are not essential to war. It may mean sacrifice and loss to man after man, but never- theless war work has got to have the men, because without the workers we can't win the war, and we are going to win the war. It means something, too, in our own relationship to it. It means that excuses on our part won't go. It means that when we have the task of equipping a plant with workers, we have got to equip it, and it doesn't make any difference how good the reasons or how good the excuses are why we can't do it. Of what value are the best 94 THE NATION AT WAR reasons and excuses going to be to our children if this country doesn't win the war? The second is that in forcing the country and in- dustry to make releases of men that are necessary we must at every step try to keep the burden, as between localities and industries, just as fairly divided as we can; we must not levy it all on one set of employers; we must not be unfair as between individual em- ployers; we must equalize the burden. The third fundamental principle upon which the work of this department is based is that, although all the force of the Government, if necessary, is going to be applied to make industry give up the necessary workers, we are going to stick to the volunteer prin- ciple when it comes to dealing with the individual worker. And the fourth principle is one that we must re- member everywhere and practice, that we have got to put fit men into war industries. You are 'not doing any good if you just fill up your reports with large numbers of men you have directed to war plants. You only do good if you send men to those plants who are fit to work there. In every step you take remem- ber that the question of the fitness of the individual sent is of the highest importance. To send men unfit for the work, or men who won't stay, or men who are disloyal, or men who haven't ability, is an offense against the war industry of this country. Connecticut has been notably prompt in meeting all her responsibilities in the Great War. The State Coun- cil of Defense, co-operating with the National Council, was organised in April, 1917, and Governor Marcus Holcomb took the unique step of securing a complete census of the man-power of the State, in order to be "UP NORTH": NEW ENGLAND 95 ready for a quick mobilisation of the industrial re- sources as well as military. Through the co-operation of the towns each male citizen of the State was called upon to fill out a detailed blank, telling just what he could do to help. There was quick and universal re- sponse, with a grand total of no less than 503,000 cards, which are now on file at the State Library, and from which, by means of tabulating machines, a com- plete and accurate list of the men in any particular occupation can be secured in a very short time. These lists have proved invaluable in helping Connecticut organise her civilian forces for the War. The key-note in Connecticut has been unity in or- ganisation, definite leadership, clear responsibility; with the result that the State has "done things" and is doing them right along, in co-operation with "Uncle Sam," in a manner that has won very cordial com- mendation from Washington. The members of the State Council of Defense have been constant and ac- tive in comprehensive plans and have taken care to choose competent sub-committees that would work. The State Council meets at the Capitol every Monday, and some epoch-making sessions have been held. The various sub-committees, as on food, fuel, labour, san- itation, industrial survey, finance, are in constant touch, and make their plans in full co-operation, while the people of the entire State stand solidly back of the activities of the Council. Particularly noticeable among the many activities of this truly great Council is its excellent publicity system. For example, knock-down bulletin boards 96 THE NATION AT WAR (costing three dollars apiece) have been posted all over the State not only in the 168 municipalities that make up this commonwealth of towns, but at all the crossroads of rural districts. They emblazon these boards with such graphic educational material as our poster, "The Prussian Blot." The National Council has sent 340,000 copies of this poster throughout the country, and has more for proper distribution. Andre Cheradame wrote for the Atlantic Monthly erudite articles on the Pan-Germanic scheme; and he has shown that at present Germany has realised nine-tenths of her ambitious dream, to say nothing of the potential domination of Russia. Our people at large, however, do not read "high-brow" articles ; and it is exceedingly difficult to explain by word of mouth to popular audiences just what the "Prussian Blot" means. You can do it, however, with a poster, and Connecticut has lit up the land with these posters, which any man or woman can comprehend in five min- utes. It is a plan that ought to be widely copied throughout the Nation; for, when once our people realise the world domination threatened by the present war-map of Germany, they will show scant patience to any movement for an inconclusive peace, because they will know that a peace without victory is a yellow peace for which our sons will have to pay the price of our cowardice. The Community Councils are organised to carry forward this process of popular education. We Americans are all "from Missouri"; we have got to be shown. But we can be shown. What we have "UP NORTH": NEW ENGLAND 97 got to do is to take the remarkable "Red, White and Blue" books, prepared by Dr. Guy Stanton Ford, of the Committee on Public Information, and get them into the hands of communities assembled in the school- houses. Certainly every leader ought to possess at least that remarkable volume, "Conquest and Kultur," and put it into the hands of the people. When once they pass the facts and principles of this War through the mills of their minds, this stuff will come out as the grist of patriotic nourishment, and we shall have behind our effort the push of a determined intelligence that will not relax until the Allies have crossed the Rhine and the German military despotism is forever despoiled of its chance to destroy the peace of the world. If it had been possible for the Administra- tion to act when the Lusitania was sunk, the emotions of our people would have been engaged, but that was not possible; consequently, we have had to substitute an intellectual process, which is slow and exceedingly difficult. But it can be done; and in this crisis we are reaping the benefit of popular education; for I can testify that the American people are getting hold of essential facts with astonishing rapidity, and that it is like taking a thermometer out of the cellar into the sunlight to travel through the land and observe the rise of our civilian morale. Maine was the only New England State I failed to visit the State whose Council of Defense has recently developed an admirable scheme for dealing with ship- yard slackers. Going from Hartford to Boston in behalf of the 98 THE NATION AT WAR War Employment Service last winter, I found a large group of the big men of Massachusetts literally giving up all of their time to the Committee on Public Safety, as they call their defense council there. With offices under the old gilded dome of the State House, men of affairs whose names are "names to conjure with" in the Bay State work day in and day out to keep Massa- chusetts mobilised for the War, having turned over their own business interests into other hands. Here, as in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island, I found: first, an insistence "to be shown"; and then the most alert and intelligent endeavour to respond to advices from Washington. The description of the Connecticut War Employment Service exemplifies what is being done throughout New England. In the very month that we entered the War, Massa- chusetts led New England in a joint undertaking of great value to Old England, and of picturesque inter- est to everybody. Learning that the historic forests of England and Scotland were being sawed into lum- ber for essential uses on the Western front, and aware that American sawing machinery is greatly superior to that of Europe, the descendants of the Pilgrims sent overseas ten saw-mill units, accompanied by 360 "officers" and men, with 120 horses, to operate them. Following is the tabulated list : "UP NORTH": NEW ENGLAND 99 10 portable mills and equipment, . . $46,848 38 Horses and equipment, 43*659 71 Logging camp equipment, 2 5>7 2 5 X 3 Millmen and woodsmen, 7,797 3 Packing and storage, 1,813 31 Passport expense, . 621 60 Transportation, 1,412 (X) Miscellaneous, 1,298 82 Total, $129,176 25 Perhaps it is worth while to record the text ot the cable message sent by the committee to a representa- tive of the British government tendering the gift of these saw-mill units. APRIL 23, 1917. Understanding skilled lumbermen needed in Eng- land to supply timber for forces in France, New Eng- land gladly offers its services to Old England in assembling men and material for ten complete work- ing portable saw-mill units, all to be shipped from Boston, each unit to consist of thirty experienced men with portable saw mill, ten suitable horses, harnesses, wagons, saws, axes, other tools and camp equipment ready for business on landing, men all civilian volun- teers with capable man in general charge. The cost of the portable mill, horses and all equipment, includ- ing freight and other expenses, to steamer side, about and not over $10,000 per unit. Wages per month per unit about $2,000. Have not yet consulted lum- ber companies because not certain English government would desire these outfits, but sure New England would want to contribute five of these outfits delivered at steamer side. We assume if desired English gov- ernment could arrange space on steamer sailing from 100 THE NATION AT WAR Boston. We prefer men and outfits all on same steamer. The official reply of the British government to this tender was received from the British Ambassador at Washington in the following letter : BRITISH EMBASSY, WASHINGTON, D. C, MAY 16, 1917. I have received a telegram from the foreign office stating that the war office accept with gratitude your generous offer of ten complete saw-mill units for work in England. The war office request me to convey to you an expression of their high appreciation of the very welcome co-operation of the New England States in this matter; and I wish to add a word of personal thanks to the gentlemen who initiated a movement of such immense practical importance to the successful prosecution of the great struggle in which our two nations are so happily united. I have the honor to be, sir, Your obedient servant, CECIL SPRING-RICE. Besides notable pioneer work in food and fuel ad ministration, the mobilisation of school boys for farm' service, and extraordinary achievements in the settle? ment of strikes, Massachusetts had accomplished by the close of 1917 many temporary activities in advance of proper organisation by the Government for War preparedness. "Trucks and motor cars have been listed," said the Committee's report, "and several com- plete units of specially qualified men prepared for mobilisation in the Quartermaster's Department of the "UP NORTH": NEW ENGLAND 101 United States Army. A plan for emergency help and equipment has been completed. The efforts of vari- ous patriotic societies have been co-ordinated in part under the Red Cross and in part under the supervision of the Safety Committee. The general problem of hygiene, medicine, and sanitation has been considered and met, and an industrial survey made in co-opera- tion with the United States government to enable a fuller participation and a larger output of materials needed for the prosecution of the war. The purchas- ing department organised by the Safety Committee was a large factor in securing the necessary military equipment and supplies both for the National Guard Regiments and for the newly created State Guard. Publicity and education in patriotism have not been neglected. Through the co-operation of many for- eign-born but patriotic American citizens the work of patriotic assimilation and Americanisation has been going forward. The stirring war messages of the President have been translated into many languages and widely circulated. Meetings have been held in various parts of the State not only to educate and inspire citizens in performing their concrete duties, like garden planting, bond buying and the like, but also to instil the larger patriotism which is necessary for a clear view and a triumphant ending of the war. Co-operation with the Boy Scouts has been undertaken as a method of introducing boys to the farm and in- creasing home patriotism. The closest relationship has existed with the National Council of Women in all their many activities and successful work in con- 102 THE NATION AT WAR serving the resources of Massachusetts. Fortunately there has been no need of putting in use concentra- tion camps for aliens, but the field was gone over by an adequate committee and plans prepared to meet such a contingency. The Safety Committee 1 early became a factor in the organisation of the Coast Patrol and Naval Reserves. For many months the offices of the committee were a clearing house for recruits for naval training and aviation. One of the first things done by the Safety Committee upon its organisation was to lay a clear plan for the transpor- tation of troops and supplies within the State from point to point. Th)anks to the co-operation of the rail- road systems all this work has been effectively accom- plished." Until going to the New Hampshire Concord (pro- nounced Konk'-erd up there, whereas in my native State we call a town of the same name Con-cord), I had never seen a real interior New England town, al- though more or less familiar with the cities. I felt myself greatly puzzled, the moment I stepped off the train, with the feeling of being perfectly at home. The Yankee rustic with his buckboard at the station, the village green, the neat and thrifty homes, all seemed strangely familiar. Then I recalled that the same feeling had possessed me on first visiting London and England, and had greatly puzzled me there, until I had reflected that as a child I was saturated with Dickens. So here had I not grown up on The Youth's Companion? In both cases it was a singular tribute to the ineradicable influences of literature on "UP NORTH": NEW ENGLAND 10$ the plastic mind of childhood. Coming into an actu- alisation, at length, of the imaginative scenes of early youth, we feel like wanderers returned home, although our fleshly eyes look for the first time on novel yet singularly familiar surroundings. Whether I owe it to The Youth's Companion and the boys' books of J. T. Trowbridge I cannot after all be sure, but certain it is that New England has for me, a stranger, a charm of cozy contentment, and a feeling of being at home, that I have never felt more strongly anywhere. My chief opportunities to enjoy New England came on two occasions after I had resigned from the Coun- cil of National- Defense. Going by request of Director Gifford to his home town, Salem, to make an address on war work for which he had not the time, I spent a day rambling through the House of Seven Gables, with its witch-stairways and other weird oddi- ties exploring the alcoves of curios in the wonderful Marine Museum, and then meeting real American people out on the greensward at Ferncroft, that makes up one of those rare days in memory like some golden picture from a dream. Most delightful of all my field agent's year, how- ever, was the journey through New England, with Perigord, as the guest of the Connecticut Council, in the last days of a shimmering July. I did not know the "reason" for the trip until, on returning to Hart- ford from three days of unalloyed pleasure, I found the following rollicking explanation in the daily Times: 104 THE NATION AT WAR Dr. Scherer and Compensation Commissioner George B. Chandler of Hartford accompanied Lieu- tenant Perigord in a speaking and organizing tour through the Rocky mountains and Pacific coast States last May. Mr. Chandler is president of the Hartford Automobile club, and thinks that the sun of motoring and scenic supremacy rises and sets in New England. Dr. Scherer, who is president of the Throop College of Technology at Pasadena, California, is likewise an enthusiastic motorist, and, like all Southern Calif or- nians, a "booster" of his section. While killing time on sleeping cars and about hotels on the western trip, neither Mr. Chandler nor Dr. Scherer showed any of the qualities of the shrinking violet in portraying the virtues of their respective localities. This "boosting" contest afforded much amusement to Lieutenant Peri- gord and Dr. Guy Stanton Ford, dean of the graduate school of the University of Minnesota, who was the fourth member of the party. When they got to Los Angeles Dr. Scherer gave his guests a demonstration and now Mr. Chandler, through the good offices of Captain Wickham, whom he succeeded as president of the Auto club, is giving a counter demonstration. The French lieutenant is apparently to be the umpire. "The fact is," said Mr. Chandler, "that Scherer nearly turned our hair white in Southern California. He slipped on ahead from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and when we arrived from Phoenix, Arizona, he met us at the Los Angeles depot with a high-powered car and a chauffeur x who drove as though he hadn't been in captivity more than three weeks. He whirled us by Fox City and Universal City and the Lord knows how many more cities, until the whole flower-laden country seemed to be a moving picture. Then, the 'Both lent by that ever thoughtful friend H. M. R. "UP NORTH": NEW ENGLAND 105 first thing I knew, we were reeling around the curves and whizzing up the grades of Lookout Mountain. "Scherer, of course, didn't tell us that we were on a one-way road, and that chauffeur wasn't tame enough to talk. Down one side it would be a sheer five hundred or a thousand feet; up the other side ditto. I remember one hairpin turn so sharp that it couldn't be negotiated without backing. Wild Bill took those blind curves like a New York taxi driver catching a train for a two dollar bonus. Every time we shot around one of them I expected to be cata- pulted through the landscape by head-on collision. "The lieutenant smiled quizzically. I laughed in a ghastly manner, and poor Ford couldn't even make a bluff at it. Scherer's face was an amused enigma. The one-way sign at the top of the mountain ac- quitted the chauffeur of downright insanity, and we breathed a bit easier as the big machine careened around the curves and smoked down the grades on the other side. Now that it's all over I'll admit that the doctor scored heavily that day. The roads were good and the view of Los Angeles, Catalina and the Pacific was magnificent. So, too, was all the wonderful coun- try in and about Los Angeles and Pasadena. "This trip is my innings. John Haynes, with his Vanderbilt Cup record, and Captain Wickham's car are a combination New England won't have to apolo- gise for. We Yankees may be effete, decadent and all that sort of thing, but we don't propose to be shown up by Southern California before our distin- guished French guest. "Really, though, Dr. Scherer's country is unique. I recall it as a sort of dreamland. It is not like any- thing else in America. So, too, is the Columbia river Highway, at Portland, Oregon, grand and inspiring. But there is a reposeful beauty and sophisticated 106 THE NATION AT WAR grandeur about our New England motoring country that has no American counterpart. We also have our New England highways. If you doubt it ask Lieu- tenant Perigord when we get back. Dr. Scherer, of course, is incorrigible." Before beginning my "war speech" at Hartford I mentioned this story in The Times, which had greeted us on our return; and then said, as I recalled that wonderful parallel series of valleys verdured by brimming rivers and jeweled with homes, that the right word for New England is "homely" not in the upstart modern meaning of this noble ancient word, of course but fragrant with the very soul of Home. Let me now tell at length of that great Western journey with Perigord, Chandler, and Ford. CHAPTER VIII "OUT WEST": NEBRASKA, COLORADO, NEW MEXICO, CALIFORNIA, NEVADA "SPY!" I would cry to the supposititious stranger that has accompanied us thus far on our journeys, "come with me out to the West, now, and let's see how the Kaiser cult is succeeding in the fields of its special adoption! How about Southern California, infested with spies? or the far Northwest, with its massive propaganda ? or the Central West and its German- Americans? Let us see/' Nebraska, perhaps, quite as much as any other State in the Union, had its disloyalty problem, on account of its large "hyphenate" population; and the way it was handled in one of the larger cities by Mayor Harms, a "de-hyphenated" American if ever there was one, furnishes an ideal example. At the Nebras- ka War Conference (where Mr. Gurney Newlin of Los Angeles kindly took my place) , this American of German nativity made a speech utterly without ora- tory, yet movingly eloquent. When America went into the War, he said, he locked himself in the house for three days, "to find himself to try out the feel- ing that had not only been born and bred in him, but had also been further strengthened by education. At 107 108 THE NATION AT WAR the end of that time he knew that his teaching had been false, and that the salvation of the world de- pended upon the crushing forever of the Prussian idea and spirit"; and then as the tears rolled down his cheeks : "This should be done by kindness, by education, by persuasion; but if it cannot be done that way, by jail; and to put the people of the same country as that of my birth in jail is hard for me, because I am afraid that they have not been able to see the light as I know it. But even though it may be hard, if they cannot be reached by kindness and education, they must be reached by force, which is what they have been ac- customed to; and in my city we have now no pro- German element, and have now no Pacifist element. Those that were pro-German have been educated by kindness or by force." That is perfect. It should stand permanently as one of the valuable "human documents" of this War. Certainly I should wish my friend the German spy to enclose it in his letter to his Kaiser! I crossed the continent nine times during my year of Government service, twice for the Industrial Ser- vice Department of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, three times for the College of which I am president, and four times for the Council of Defense. Far and away the most interesting of these trips was made in May, 1918, attending a group of War Conferences in far western States, accompanied by George Brinton Chandler, of Connecticut, Dr. Guy Stanton Ford, of "OUT WEST" 109 the Committee on Public Information, and Lieutenant Paul Perigord, of the French Army. Our first War Conference was at Denver. I had already visited Colorado twice, once in the preceding September, for the National Council, and again in April, 1918, for the Shipping Board, or Emergency Fleet Corporation. I knew what Colorado had done. It is a State singularly susceptible to damage by alien enemies. Its irrigation system comprises thirty- two reservoirs, each impounding more water than the famous Johnstown dam, one of them covering 250,000 acres. The mountainous character of the State, moreover, necessitates an unusually large number of tunnels for the railroads, while the rich mines of the State, if undefended, would present a tempting bait to German dynamiters. Governor Gunter, whom I regard as one of the great War governors of the country, assembled a war council on the very night war was declared. The first man he thought of was L. G. Carpenter, a distin- guished irrigation engineer. With him he summoned to his office railroad presidents, telephone managers, mine directors, and other needful masters of emer- gency. Before the night was half spent all Colorado was on guard to avert potential danger! This was the beginning of the State Council of Defense, which has lived up to the signal night of its birth. It was temporarily financed to the extent of $12,000 by several of its members, who refused to receive a refund of their contributions after legisla- tive action had made this refund possible. One prac- 110 THE NATION AT WAR tical patriot put up between $25,000 and $50,000 to purchase emergency seed for the farmers, and then "lost his day-book." Responding promptly to the call to arms, Colorado turned over to the Federal Government on October 5, 1917, more than four thousand soldiers, every man completely uniformed in conformity with Government requirements. These men had been given preliminary training, including setting-up exercises, so that they were physically fit for the more rigourous drill to come. Only seven per cent were rejected by the Federal inspector. This neat job cost the State half a million dollars. The State owed the militia $325,000 when war was declared. The Governor called on five members of his Council and raised, within an hour, $350,000 for the immediate payment of this debt, which the legisla- ture subsequently assumed. A medical rally was called and the physicians of the State thoroughly organized. In September, 1917, I attended at Colo- rado Springs a state- wide rally of the Colorado Medi- cal Society, where Dr. A. C. Magruder, the president, delivered an address so full of "punch" for medical enlistment that one could but flinch by proxy for any of his unresponsive hearers. In the same manner the Governor lost no time in calling convocations of all county commissioners, all manufacturers, and last, but by no means least the State's leading news- paper men, some of whom spent from fifty to seventy- five dollars in order to answer his summons. Labor has received due consideration. William C. "OUT WEST" 111 Thornton, Chairman of the Labor Committee of the Council, is president of the Denver Trade and Labor Union. John Lawson himself is on this committee, which has had the cordial co-operation also of Mover, former associate of "Big Bill" Haywood. Through this committee the convicts of the State have all been used for war work, and the Governor believes in par- doning such as make good records. This labor com- mittee also engages the boys of the reform schools and Indian schools in emergency war work. Governor Gunter probably gives more personal at- tention to the work of his Council than any other Gov- ernor in the country. It meets every Tuesday after- noon in his office, and the occasions are rare when he is not in the chair, devoting half a day of each week to supervision of Council activities. The Governor, a Democrat, appointed Council members regardless of politics (as should always be done), and it happens that a majority are Republicans. For this he has been criticised when he should receive credit. Coming to the chair from the Supreme Court bench, he is a man of scholarly culture and delightful refinement of manner. His judicial temperament and training have not interfered with his practical ability to rise to the emergency of war. George B. Chandler was borrowed by the National Council from the Connecticut Council of Defence for our War Conference circuit of May, 1918, because of his ability as a speaker and also because of the ex- emplary character of the Connecticut Council, as al- 112 THE NATION AT WAR ready described. In his report to me of this western tour Mr. Chandler said, very wisely : "The success or failure of a State Council of De- fense almost invariably rests with the Governor. A courageous, masterful Governor means an efficient Council of Defense. A timid, irresolute Governor means a weak and disjointed Council of Defense. "The character of a State Council of Defense is de- termined at the apex and at the base. At the top of the Council must be adequate funds for the creation of the necessary machinery. There must be enough money to provide offices, a competent manager, clerical help, stenographers, travelling expenses, and telephone service, proportionate to the magnitude of the enter- prise. At the bottom there must be a vigorous, healthy community organisation. This community organi- sation may assume various forms; e. g., in Connecti- cut, the Old New England township; in Utah, the 'wards' and 'blocks' of the Mormon church organisa- tion; in other States either the school district, voting precinct, or some artificial unit carved out for war purposes. "It has been my observation that the county organi- sations, which constitute the middle strata of Councils of Defense, are the easiest to organise and usually in the most healthy condition. "Co-ordination of all the various war activities within or about the State Council of Defense and its subordinate parts is of primary importance. If the Council and its various arms are vigorous and efficient, this co-ordination comes about naturally and almost inevitably. Where they are a mere shell or blueprint, it is absurd to ask such well-financed and effectively organised institutions as the Red Cross, the Liberty Loan, and the Y. M. C. A. to co-ordinate with them "OUT WEST" 113 or even co-operate with them. In other words, 'To him that hath shall be given/ etc." Chandler agrees with me that Governor Gunter is "a man of scholarship, culture, courage, and ability." I dwell on this because Coloradans have not had the opportunity to judge their Governor, as we have, in comparison with the common run throughout the States. I shall never forgive him, however, for the scare he gave me on the night of that Denver mass meet- ing in May. With a brass-buttoned general or two he called for our party at the Brown Palace hotel with a big automobile just after we had finished our dinner. We had seen no signs of a mass meeting in the newspapers, and were afraid (after certain former experiences) that the publicity department had broken down. The Governor was very quiet, too; his man- ner was modest and subdued. Presently, moreover, when we reached the great turtle-shell of an audi- torium, the streets seemed entirely deserted except, indeed, for triple rows of empty automobiles that we scarcely had time to observe. Our big car charged straight at the side of the turtle-back, when, Presto f two burly policemen swung back a pair of huge doors, and, without pause, our great car rolled in to the front of the platform. Everybody was inside! There were twelve thousand people present, waving flags and singing community songs to the bellow of a Gul- liver organ. We stepped from the car to the plat- form. I was to speak first and to this multitude, 114 THE NATION AT WAR who had come there to worship Paul Perigordl My imagination had not made me ready for this; I was used only to ordinary War Conferences. At least, I thought, the Governor will give me a chance of adjust- ment while he introduces me; but, no! a dozen words, and he threw me to the lions! I am an old hand at public speaking, and toughened to stage fright; but I was as scared as a California jack-rabbit when a new town dumps itself into the desert from the trolley-cars. Being scared, I did what the jack-rabbit does, speeded-up. The shorthand re- porters held an indignation meeting around my re- mains after the meeting, while the French and the Catholics in the audience were kissing Paul Peri- gord's sword the sword of this Soul of France, whom we cannot honour too much. From Denver our party dropped southward, across the great Colorado plateau, to New Mexico. During this journey the brace of "tenderfeet" from the East began in their dull simple way to ogle and exclaim at the scenery. At this juncture I said : "Gentlemen, permit me to utter one word; then I shall have no more to say Just wait till you see Cali- fornia!" Since no Calif orniac (and I proudly claim to be one) has ever been known to boast, I then placed my hand upon my mouth, and we got off the train at Albuquerque. For some reason or other, Washington had not re- ceived full reports from New Mexico. During ten minutes' conversation with an active member of the "OUT WEST" 115 Council I picked up the following interesting informa- tion: Secretary McAdoo, passing through this famous stage-house, Albuquerque, on the best of all the great rail-highways from coast to coast, gave New Mexico officials with his own hands the first of the honour- flags to be distributed for the Third Liberty Bond undertaking. Their quota had been $739,000, and they raised $955,000. Ten counties comprising the tenth federal district exceeded their quota 215 per cent. In one county of 25,000 inhabitants five thou*- sand people took bonds. The Santa Fe shop em- ployees at Albuquerque all took bonds making a clean 100 per cent record. And I would introduce my Spy to the de-hyphenated lady residing in the town of Carlsbad, who put every dollar of her convertible property (six thousand dollars in all) into Liberty Bonds. The comparatively "poor" State of New Mexico is further markworthy for the large appropriation made by its legislature to the war work of the Council of Defense: $750,000 as against $40,000 for her huge neighbor to the East, and $100,000 for her rich col- league to the westward, California. This is doubtless due to a natural resentment over the following letter, preserved for us in that remarkable volume, "Out of Their Own Mouths," which consists of classic gems of Prussian "ideals" extending all the way down from Frederick the Great to Zimmermann the Little. Our national sense of humour should not blind us to the fact that this infamous despatch was meant in 116 THE NATION AT WAR all seriousness. It was sent on January 19, 1917, by Herr Zimmermann, German Imperial Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to the German Minister in Mexico. "On the ist of February," whispered Herr Zim- mermann, never dreaming that Uncle Sam could over- hear, "we intend to begin unrestricted submarine war- fare. In spite of this, it is our intention to endeavour to keep the United States of America neutral. "If this attempt is not successful, we propose an alliance with Mexico on the following basis: That we shall make war together and together make peace. We shall give general financial support, and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer the lost terri- tory in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. The de- tails are left to you for settlement.* "You are instructed to inform the President of Mexico of the above, in the greatest confidence, as soon as it is certain that there will be an outbreak of war with the United States, and to suggest that the President of Mexico, on his own initiative, should communicate with Japan suggesting adherence at once to this plan. At the same time he should offer to mediate between Germany and Japan. "Please call to the attention of the President of Mexico that the employment of ruthless submarine warfare now promises to compel England to make peace m a few months." *This sentence, italicized by the present writer, is one of the choicest bits of unintended humour in modern history. "OUT WEST" 117 This was in January, 1917. People who accuse President Wilson of a lack of humour should re- member how he used the Zimmermann letter. He kept it quiet until Bethmann-Hollweg had the unex- ampled audacity to harangue our own people, in our own newspapers, and also in the Hearst newspapers, against our own President. It was a lengthy and artful harangue, calculated to be very mischievous; written in a tone of deeply injured innocence, and pro- fessing profound friendship for the United States. The President never said a word, he simply published the Zimmermann letter whereupon the Herren Zim- mermann and Hollweg, if one may use a homely American phrase to describe a homelier German farce, promptly "went away back and sat down" hard. It was the publication of this Zimmermann letter that led my own boy to immediate decision. I remem- ber the little breakfast room in Pasadena, its blessed windows looking out through twin rows of Sentinel Palms toward the blue range of the Sierra Madre mountains; how I came in and found him, this lanky boy of nineteen, on the window-seat with the Los Angeles Times in his hand. "Father, is this true?" he asked me; and when my eyes had run down the page I said : "Of course it isn't true ; it's an obvious forgery, and a very clumsy forgery at that. The Germans would be the last people in the world to send such a foolish despatch." When he came back from college in the evening he said that his German professor had also told them in 118 THE NATION AT WAR the class-room that of course it wasn't true ; but that if it were true, then he was done with the Prussians, bone of their bone though he be: they were Schwein- hunde! And shortly they had to confess it! "Uncle Sam had the goods on them !" Then the boy came again, with two questions: "Father, is there any chance of the Mexicans cross- ing the border and coming up here and attacking our homes?" "Not a chance in the world," said I, unabashed by my bad guess of the "forgery." "Well, is there any chance of the Japanese coming over and attacking our coasts?" Now, I had lived in Japan five years, before the boy was born, and I thought I knew the Japanese pretty nearly as well as Mr. Hearst does not know them, which is saying a very great deal. (The Los Angeles Examiner was flooding Southern California in those days with slimy falsehoods of Japanese knavery.) I saw how the boy's mind was working: he didn't intend going "over there" of which he hadn't said a word to us yet if there were to be real need "over here," defending his home folk; but I told him not to worry about Japan. And so he made his great decision, and went a-chasing Zimmermann submarines, this lad with a c in his name. 1 *As I write, the following despatch concerning his ship ap- pears in The Washington Star: "LONDON, Aug. 7. It is announced that the United States torpedo boat destroyer now holds the record in the United "OUT WEST" 119 So our family remembers the Zimmermann note, just as New Mexico remembers it $750,000 worth. New Mexico is also doing a little Mexican propaganda of its own, now, by printing a large edition of the Council's "War News" in Spanish; and it is also shut- ting out the Hearst newspapers. New Mexico is spending a little of its large appro- priation in buying seeds for its ranchmen; in cultivat- ing really notable war-gardens; and in agrarian war- fare against predatory animals, which destroy five mil- lion dollars' worth of food-stuffs in New Mexico an- nually. The Council also has put up a war hospital in Albuquerque, to take care of sick soldiers passing through on the Santa Fe trains. Bernalillo county, of which Albuquerque is the seat, had independently contributed, when we were there, $42,000 to a War Chest. I closed my report from Albuquerque with the words : "I go to Paradise tonight." One of my col- leagues, as I found on returning to Washington, put it this way: "Scherer at this point felt the lure of Southern California strong upon him, and left us after the afternoon meeting. When I saw Pasadena, I understood why." A distinguished resident of Northern California told me, shortly after I went to reside in Southern California, that its chief characteristics are "one- lungers" and climate. The climate does draw the States Navy for submarine chasing. Since arriving in European waters in April a year ago the has steamed over 74,000 miles." 120 THE NATION AT WAR "one-lungers" out there ; then it makes them well, and they grow citrus fruits. They come to cough, and remain to spray the San Jose scale off the golden globes that are so easily convertible (in normal years) into good legal tender. This makes a fair combina- tion. Lazy people, "back East," never break down from overwork, so they stay where they belong. In the exuberant climate of Southern California, which even our envious enemies allow to us, the survivors of the fittest become entirely fit again, and so with our "one-lungers" and climate and a few other modest commodities we build up an eclectic community of Calif orniacs. But we never boast. 1 Accordingly I shall not boast of the California State Council of De- fense. 2 It is simple justice to remark, however, that the great Sacramento mass meeting was equal to any of the series, and that its pronounced success was largely due to community singing, without which no patriotic meeting is complete. From Sacramento our party went to Reno, an in- nocent looking mountain town bisected by the rushing Truckee River. We found Nevada organised one hundred per cent. A "barn-storming" campaign car- ried out under the leadership of a young and aggres- sive Governor had carried War facts home to every* cranny of the State. Perhaps Nevada thinks in too *To be perfectly honest about it, I regret to confess that this sentence is true only because for boasting we substitute "boosting" : a somewhat vulgar combination of boasting and booming, combining the evils of both. But the climate is help- ing us to conquer that zymotic disease, too! ' See, however, p. 175 ff. "OUT WEST" 121 light a vein of what we heard called "extra-legal treat- ment" for suspects of disloyalty. President Wilson, when we were there, had not yet issued his eloquent appeal against lynch law, which was greatly needed if one may judge from the following rough paraphrase of a report to Governor Doyle by one of his sheriffs : "I regret to report to Your Excellency that on such and such a date, such and such a person was forcibly taken from my possession by parties unknown. He was placed on trial by an improvised tribunal and found guilty of lukewarmness toward the cause of the United States and our Allies. Thereupon, Your Excellency, I regret to report that said unknown per- sons proceeded to strip such party to the waist and applied to his body a coating of black substance which, I am told, was tar. Thereafter, they applied, to the surface thus covered, a coating which, I am told, was feathers; whereupon they forcibly applied to his per- son the toes of their boots and instructed him to leave the country, telling him that if he ever comes back they will lynch him and if he does, by , Gov- ernor, we will." CHAPTER IX "OUT WEST": UTAH, IDAHO, OREGON, WASHINGTON, MONTANA TWO inland cities wield a special grip on the imagi- nation of the traveller fortunate enough to win their acquaintance : Salt Lake City and Spokane. You can always tell such a traveller by the fact that he says Spo-kan'. This city lies high and dry in the thin light air of "the inland empire," its clean streets sparkling in that rare sunlight known only to the West, a roaring silvery river dashing through them and turning the city's power-wheels as it goes. Spo- kane's shops are better stocked than those of Wash- ington or Baltimore, the women dress with a style and taste that Fifth Avenue seems to have lost, and you find displayed on the shelves of the book- stores the latest philosophies, as well as the novels of George Meredith and Henry James, to say noth- ing of "Ruggles of Red Gap," that whimsical satire by Harry Leon Wilson of "life as she is lived" by social pretenders in this western country instead of "those who know." Then there is the hotel, the Davenport. If there is a better hotel in these United States, "I ask to know," in the phrase of our good friend, Hashimura 122 "OUT WEST" 123 Togo, where to find it. The management does not know me from Adam, and has never given or promised me a free meal. I am only a sadly harassed traveller grateful for this oasis in a wilderness of common- place hotels, and furnishing a free testimonial "for the benefit of suffering humanity." It is equal to the "Palace" in San Francisco or the "Utah" at Salt Lake City, "and I can say no fairer than that." American hotels have improved greatly in the past twenty years, but they still have something to learn, and that is that guests nowadays like to drink water. The Davenport and a few others like it have awaked to this new hygienic discovery, so that you find a faucet of cold drinking-water over your basin between those that run "hot" and "cold." But in the average hotel you have to persuade a bell-boy, with a tip, to go out and persuade some other bell-boy, who also expects to be tipped, to fetch you a belly-shaped pitcher choked with lumps of ice that reek with the smell of some strong disinfectant, all of which is promptly re- moved by the chambermaid on the occasion of her first incursion. Either this, or sixty cents plus a tip to an apron-clad waiter from the "bar," with a bottle of lukewarm Poland water, for which invisible intruders into the room promptly acquire a wild thirst. A "vast conspiracy," powerful and wide-spread as that which Mr. Hearst avers to be on the trail of his persecuted newspapers which ought to be prosecuted instead! trails the quest of the traveller for water, and drives him at last to cola-coca or Vebo or some other substitute for the waters of Nepenthe, while the 124 THE NATION AT WAR States keep going dry. It is high time for scientific prohibitionists to read Horace Bushnell's justly cele- brated treatise on "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection," and undertake a nation-wide movement to inculcate a quenchable affection for water before the erstwhile inebriate becomes an inveterate Vebobriate. The "Gideons" have put a Bible into every bed-room; why not some "follow-up system" of Gideon's pitchers, filled with cups of cold water? The State of Utah is distinctly exotic. Socially, as well as topographically, it has a pronouncedly foreign flavour that is yet so unlike anything in one's foreign experiences as to make it Utah the unique. There is its Great Salt Lake, everybody knows about that; but who, as Julian Street triumphantly interrogates, knows that the Uintah Mountain Range, in Utah, is the only range in the entire country that runs East and West? "And what do you know of the Wahsatch and Oquirrh Ranges ? "Not wishing to keep the class in geography after school, I shall not tell you about these mountains, but will satisfy myself with the statement that, in an amphitheatre formed between the two last mentioned ranges, at the head of a broad, irrigated valley, is sit- uated Salt Lake City." 1 When the Secretary of the Utah State Council of Defense motored with me to the very tip-top of this valley, and we stood where Brigham stood as he viewed the landscape o'er after he led his people from the desert through the mountain gap to this promised 1 "Abroad at Home," Street, p. 440. "OUT WEST" 125 land, I could not wonder that he paused at the head of his people and flocks and herds, and, with a busi- ness-like intuition that never forsook him, stretched out his hand benignly over the smiling valley and ut- tered the simple, empire-building words : "This is the place." 2 There is a somewhat stodgy statue of Brigham Young on a high pedestal in an imposing square at the corner of Hotel Utah, the statue being unfor- tunately so placed as to incur the satire of the godless "Gentiles," who constitute sixty per cent of the Salt Lake City population, and who gleefully request the passing stranger to note that Brigham is placed, "as in life," with his back to the church and his hand reaching out toward the bank. People will say unkind things about statues, how- ever. Here in Washington City, whenever the Mt. Pleasant cars summon the strength to climb the gentle slope that leads from Connecticut Avenue into Colum- bia Road, where California Street branches away on either side, you cannot forget, as the equestrian Mc- 'July 24, 1847. The party consisted of 143 men, three women, and two children. On their long journey across the plains the company was well organised. "Every morning at five o'clock the bugle was sounded to awaken the camp. All assembled for prayers, then took breakfast, and the second bugle was sounded when the company began to march. They travelled about twenty miles each day, and at seven o'clock evening prayers were said, after which the 'brethren and sisters' gathered around the fire and sang songs, accompanied by the band which Brigham Young had organized." "Chief Episodes in the History of Utah," by L. E. Young, a nephew of Brigham, now a professor in the University of Utah. 126 THE NATION AT WAR Clellan prances high on his pedestal, the remark of the wag who said: "True to the life, indeed! One line of advance and three of retreat, as usual !" Uncle Joe Cannon has set a canny example in selecting the site of his tombstone himself, so that the wag cannot molest or the witty man make his shade afraid. The valley is infinitely more beautiful now than when Brigham Young said, "This is the place," largely in consequence of his vision and industrial general- ship; for, think what you will of his religion, as an empire-builder he takes rank with Cecil Rhodes. When he stretched out his hand, it was to strike the rock, and give the valley the one thing needful, water, so as to make the wilderness blossom as the rose. This he did by means of vast irrigation projects grand- iosely conceived but executed with superb practicality. When Salt Lake City was only a dream in his brain, he not only laid out the streets, avenues, and boule- vards of a great metropolis, but planted them with multitudinous box-elders and poplars, which he irri- gated to secure their umbrageous growth, and to-day the flesh and arteries of the Mormon Zion have en- dued his dream-skeleton with richly abundant life. I do not hesitate to say that the University of Utah, crowning high ground which overlooks the city and far-spreading valleys and snow-capped far-away mountains, commands the finest view of any university in the world that I have seen, and I have seen the most of them; or to add that the Agricultural College "OUT WEST" 127 at Logan (a genuine agricultural college) stands a fine chance for second place. The early history of Utah is characterised by certain beautiful incidents. One sees the statue of the gulls in the temple grounds, or notes the figure on the State emblems, and wonders why. Thereby hangs a tale savouring of miracle, like the quail or the manna of the Bible. In the spring of 1848 the pioneers planted five thou- sand acres of wheat. The original party had quickly been augmented by the "First Immigration," compris- ing 1,553 souls, with "580 wagons, 2,213 oxen, 124 horses, 887 cows, 358 sheep, 35 hogs, and 716 chickens"; and by the end of the year 1847 f ur thousand people had settled in Salt Lake Valley. Be- sides, other pioneers were on the road, so that the need of this wheat crop was pressing. Imagine the dismay of the Mormons when, during the last week in May, when there was every prospect of abundant fruition, hordes of crickets swooped down on the wheat-fields, hopping forward like some black army of destruction, and leaving the fields be- hind them as bare as the palm of your hand! Every device was used to check them, all in vain; even in spite of the fires that were set to destroy them, the crickets advanced and increased. The people were desperate; women and children wept with fright, and the hearts of the strong men failed them for terror. They fasted and prayed ; then, lo ! "From the shores and islands of the Great Salt Lake came the gulls, myriads of these snow-white birds, 128 THE NATION AT WAR with wild cries winging their way. A new fear arose in the minds of the people as they saw the birds alight in their fields, a fear that another foe had come to complete the destruction of their growing grain. Their joy may be imagined when they saw the gulls pounce upon the black crickets and gorge themselves, returning again and again to the repast. The people gazed in amazement upon the birds and their beneficent work. No wonder it seemed to them a sheer miracle from heaven, a direct and convincing answer to their prayers. For six days the destruction went on, and on the evening of the sixth day, which was Sunday, these winged deliverers quietly flew back to their island homes in the bosom of the Great Salt Lake." 1 My field-agent's year took me three times to Utah twice for the Council and once for the Shipping Board. During the first visit (in September, 1917), I en- countered an interesting illustration of religion as a handmaid of patriotism. A Mormon member of the State Council of Defense told me that when he was a little boy his mother drilled into his mind the necessity of always storing tithes of the wheat. Brigham Young, she said, had told the women of his time that a wheat famine lay in the future and that they should store up grain against the lean years to come. Each season, therefore, an increment has been added to the store-house to be found on each farm, due renovation nullifying havoc wrought by the weevils ; until to-day, according to my informant, there are hundreds of thousands of bushels 'The same. "OUT WEST" 129 of wheat stored in Utah and the Mormons confi- dently believe that this War is the exigency which the prophet Brigham foresaw, and are perfectly willing to use their wheat to win the War. On the occasion of this first trip to Utah I reported that without doubt Salt Lake City was the most patriotic place I had visited. On the Saturday night of my stay there I strolled into the finest moving- picture theatre on the continent; a great palace of a place, seating an audience of thirty-five hundred. Mind you, this was in September, 1917; the country had not yet waked up; in most cities and towns the people seemed timid with patriotic applause. But when I entered and while I remained the building rocked again and again with tonic applause as our troops and the flag were filmed. This was only a spectacular symbolism of the sub- stantial patriotism of Utah. The organisation of the Mormon church, which, as an organisation, is unr surpassed, has devoted its machinery to war work, and the "Gentiles" vie with the "Latter-day Saints" in avoiding the curse of Meroz. Of the first Liberty Loan, Utah was allotted $6,500,000 and subscribed $9,405,050, and has since lived up to this record in every respect Although its only coast-line is the shore of the Great Salt Lake, it responded with 2,500 shipbuilders when asked for 1,660, and when I was there in April, 1918, a proud procession of labouring men marched up the main street of Salt Lake City under the banner, "Utah's Shipbuilders Off for San Francisco." As one of my colleagues re- 130 THE NATION AT WAR ported, "There exists in Utah an organisation which, in my opinion, has no superior, and possibly few equals, in this country. It is to all intents and pur- poses the organisation of the Mormon Church con- verted into a war machine. It reaches each individual searchingly and unerringly." As already intimated, the "Gentiles" of Utah do not permit themselves to be outdone by their Mormon neighbours. Governor Bamberger, a Jew, has ap- pointed a State Council devoid of politics, in which representatives of all religions and interests work for the winning of the War. Governor Bamberger showed me in his magnificent new State House two paintings illustrative of the unique copper mines at Bingham, thirty miles away. These pictures look like the product of pure fancy, but depict actual fact. A great conical hill fairly sat- urated and choked with copper ore is seamed trans- versely from apex to base with road-like gashes swarming with labourers who are literally razing this mountain to the ground in quest of its treasure. Twenty-five thousand tons of copper ore are taken out every day of the week, including Sunday. The State is also rich in coal deposits of a very unusual character. They crop out at the mouth of canyons on a level with the terrain and are mined by digging horizontally into the canyons instead of by the usual method of vertical shafts. Accessibility is thus their strong point. We found a Hebrew Governor in Idaho, as well as in Utah, and were told that the same reason prevailed "OUT WEST" 131 m each case. The large Mormon population of Idaho, as in Utah, cast their votes for a Jew in preference to a Gentile Governor, and so Moses Alexander governs Idaho. On my first visit to Idaho (in September, 1917) the women were doing most of the war work. One of them, a Mormon ranchwoman far out in the coun- try, near Rexburg, had just sent in a noteworthy letter to the women's headquarters at Boise. "Our work," she wrote, in apologising for a slight delay in correspondence, "has kept me rustling. We gave our boys lovely leather bound testaments yester- day from the Council of Defense and from the appre- ciative thanks and expressions of their faces I feel sure they are appreciated. Our Council had three cars in the parade. Our first car with officers was a large car and had a banner of our President's picture carried in front. Then banners with the committee's full name. The next car carried Hoover's picture and a banner on one side, 'Save & Serve with Hoover/ on the other side 'Sign Your Pledge Cards At Once.' On the other car 'Save the Food for Our Boys.' Needless to say the cars were beautiful in Red, White & Blue. Our floral decorations in the tabernacle were fittingly arranged in Red, White & Blue order and a bouquet given each boy. The Red Cross was well represented. We had seats on the platform for our Council of Defense and as each member wore a W. C. C. N. D. badge on arm we were a pretty strong body of 63. It was a great pleasure to me to represent such a strong body of women and a still greater pleasure 132 THE NATION AT WAR to be able or rather to have the privilege of making the presentation speech. For I feel no dearer mes- sage can be given our American boys than the New Testament. 107 autos in the parade. After our boys were photographed on the steps of the tabernacle I had the extreme honour of supporting the American flag at the opposite end of Uncle Sam, which it happened was my husband whose name is Sam and is called Uncle Sam from one end of the country in State of Idaho to the other end of Utah. Several good speak- ers spoke during the programme and some very ex- cellent music was furnished besides two rousing songs by the band and audience. Taking all in all we had a very successful day of it. The Commercial Club and those in charge showed us every courtesy and gave us many privileges which surely made me feel our work was becoming known and appreciated. I really believe our success lays in my motto, which I secretly adopted at first but which leaked out and the members had done in Red, White & Blue and which graced one of our cars. It is, 'Nothing Too Big to Accomplish for our Nation/ I never hesitate to go after any- thing I want for our Council as I always feel it is for our Nation." The nimble-witted women of Idaho saved a huge cherry crop last summer. Going to the commandant of a great cantonment, they asked for an afternoon's loan of his soldiers; and the commandant, on learn- ing the cause of the request, quickly granted it. Lead- ing the soldiers out to the cherry trees, which the labour shortage had left heavy with an unusually pro- "OUT WEST" 133 lific harvest, the ladies bade the soldiers to climb up the trees and be fruitful. Then the women took the cherries home and canned and dried them, and be- stowed the fruits of this co-operative labour on the cantonment, with the result that the monotony of camp diet was relieved, and thousands of gallons of cherries were saved that would otherwise have rotted on the trees. My task on first visiting Idaho (in September, 1917) was to effect a reorganisation of the Council. As this experience proved to be typical and exemplary, I give below the Boise Statesman's account of the meeting called by Governor Alexander for a confer- ence. It had to be summoned on short notice, since I could spend but two days in Boise, and the Governor therefore assembled only such members of his "official family" as were available. Supreme Court Justices Budge, Rice, and Morgan, were in attendance, as were Dr. Enoch A. Bryan (afterwards made chairman of the Council), John W. Eagleson, Insurance Com- missioner Hyatt, I. A. Smoot, Dr. E. T. Biwer, A. L. Freehafter, Harvey Allred, Ford C. Cliff, Adjutant General Moody, Attorney General Walters, Secretary of State Dougherty, State Auditor Van Deusen and State Leader of County Agents Hochbaum. "Dr. Scherer's recommendations to the State of Idaho were as follows: " 'Representing as I do the Council of National Defense, I am able merely to make suggestions, based upon our function as a sort of a clearing-house for the activities of State Councils all over the Union. 134 THE NATION AT WAR " The first item that strikes my attention is the comparatively small number of your Council, which I think might well be enlarged. California, for exam- ple, has 33 members, and a Council of this size is by no means uncommon. ' 'Governor Alexander has already shown his wis- dom in making non-partisan selections, and this prin- ciple in the suggested enlargement of the Council is quite fundamental. The Nation is at war, and politi- cal considerations must entirely be sunk in the ideal of a common, unified service. ' 'Should the Council be extended, it should con- tinue to be broadly representative of all sections and interests of the State ; comprising the ablest men pro- curable, who will give their time and thought to mo- bilising the resources of this great State in so far as these have national value with reference to the prose- cution of the War. ' 'Should the Council be enlarged, as suggested, I would further recommend an executive committee of five, the chairman of the Council being ex-officio chair- man of the executive committee. s 'These men should live in the neighbourhood of Boise, so that all of them can attend weekly meetings to go over with the chairman important matters that will be sure to require constant and careful attention. " 'I think it desirable that a majority of the Council itself should be within easy reach of Boise, so as to secure quorums when special meetings of the full Council are called. ' 'Either the executive committee or a special com- mittee (of say three) on rules should report to an early meeting of the re-organised Council a brief and simple plan of government or set of by-laws. This plan should be as little cumbersome as possible, but should name the quorum for council meetings, which "OUT WEST" 135 should be a small number ; should define the functions of the executive committee and its relation to the Council very clearly; and should state the frequency of the Council meetings, together with any other mat- ters requiring formulation in rules. " 'In visiting Missouri, I was ^particularly struck with the value of what might be "called a peripatetic plan of Council meetings. The Missouri council goes about through the State, meeting now at Sedalia, again at Joplin, and still again at Springfield or Jefferson City; always with an open meeting at night (char- acterised frequently by a simple public dinner) at which two or three stirring speeches are made by mem- bers of the Council or invited guests. In this way not only do members of the Council become familiar at first hand with conditions throughout the entire State, but each community where this body assembles finds itself greatly stimulated to a more intelligent patriotism by virtue of the impress left by the Council on the people who attend the public meetings. ' 'My own judgment is that money could hardly be better spent than in paying the necessary expenses incidental to those peripatetic assemblies. ' 'It is of crucial importance that a good chairman be named to succeed Harry L. Day, resigned. Ex- perience of other States leads me to believe, other things being anywise nearly equal, that the chairman should live in or near the capital. He should have abundant energy, he should have the capacity to familiarise himself thoroughly with the work of the more advanced State Councils, he should be a good speaker, as well as what is known as a "good mixer," and should be able to go into all parts of the State with the object of awakening the people to the tre- mendous importance of this War and what they can do toward winning it. 136 THE NATION AT WAR " 'The scope of the Council will develop with great rapidity as its work normally proceeds. We will gladly furnish abstracts of plans based on the experi- ence of the most vigourous State Councils, such as those of Connecticut, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Washington. " 'Glancing only at those resources of Idaho which have peculiar reference to our national problems as affected by the War, I am struck at once by your prominence in agriculture, mining, and stockraising. " Talouse is a synonym throughout the world for pre-eminence in wheat production, while the apples, prunes, and cherries of Idaho have world-wide fame. " 'The Council should have a strong committee on agriculture to co-operate with the food administrator in speeding-up food production and in stimulating a widespread food conservation. I have been already greatly interested to learn what the women have done in conserving, through drying, a large quantity of cherries that would otherwise have rotted on the trees. " 'Since wheat is to be a factor in the winning of the War, and since the education of our own people in eating perishable food will mean the release of in- valuable equivalents in export foodstuffs, it may easily be seen that excellent as work already done in Idaho has been, a great and important field of labour awaits the activities of a committee on agriculture or, in- stead, of two committees, one on food production and the other on food conservation. " 'Stockraising has a direct bearing on national War problems, both because of food values involved and also because of Idaho's production of wool, which is an essential element in clothing and is therefore sec- ond as a war material only to wheat itself. " 'Overlooking the mine products of Idaho that have no direct utility, I am impressed by the pre-eminence "OUT WEST" 137 of Idaho as a lead, zinc, and silver producing State. " The report of your State inspector of mines for 1916 shows an output of 366,594,000 pounds of lead, constituting, I believe, about 30 per cent of the lead product of the entire world, together with nearly 100,000,000 pounds of zinc and more than 12,000,000 fine ounces of silver to say nothing of more than 8,000,000 pounds of copper and 120,000 pounds of tungsten, all having immense war utility. " 'You will probably wish to appoint 14 or 15 com- mittees in all, as set forth in the abstracts to which I have alluded. I am not mentioning in this report activities common to most of the State Councils, but merely those more or less distinctive of Idaho, so as to suggest the special potentialities of a Council that can render great service, not only through co-operation with national authorities, but, by co-operating with your own State departments, protecting and enhancing the interests of Idaho itself.' " When our Washington war party visited the Idaho War Conference in May, 1918, we found that the State had transformed itself into a bee-hive of the most effective war workers, with a Council of Defense second to none in the country. But of course they had to do it themselves. I cite this case as a telling example of what any of the weaker State Councils can do by way of reorganisation if only they make up their minds to it. Two incidents, one collective and the other indi- vidual, carved themselves into memory during this Idaho Conference. The local "Knights of Columbus" gave Lieutenant Perigord a lunch in the grill-room of the Hotel 138 THE NATION AT WAR Owyhee. Happening to glance about the central round table at which I was seated by his side, I could but note with astonishment the entirely accidental ar- rangement of seats. There was Perigord, a Frenchman, and brought up as a Catholic, the guest of honour. Sitting peaceably at his side was myself, brought up a Lutheran, of Ger- man ancestry. Next to me was a Catholic priest, and next to him a Scotch Presbyterian minister. Then came the Secretary of the Idaho Council of Defense, a loyal Mormon. Presiding over the feast was the Hebrew Governor, Moses Alexander, while sitting between him and Perigord was the Catholic Bishop of the diocese. But we were all assembled for war work, and we exemplified what is happening everywhere. It is a time to sink labels, and forget factions, as we toil in a great common cause. Idaho is broken in two parts by high mountain barriers running East and West. The only way to reach the large Southern section from the small min- ing region of the North is either to go around through Montana on the East or to "sidle" down on the West through the States of Washington and Oregon along the banks of the sinuous Snake River. Yet every county in the State was well represented at Boise, although not a few of the five hundred delegates had to travel a thousand miles to make the trip. Among these delegates from Northern Idaho I met a man whose face was a tragic mask of grief. I had to sit opposite to him one morning, and it was all I "OUT WEST" 139 could do to keep the tears back, just looking at the man, with his tragic mask of restrained grief. He was as rough a looking man as you will meet in a month's journey, even in the West. His boy, entering the war before America did, fell at Vimy Ridge, and now the father carries around with him all the time a letter, into which is written down the num- ber that marks the grave of his boy, "somewhere in France." He has never shed a tear; that is what makes his face look so tragic, perhaps. He says : "When the War is over, I'm going 'over there.' When I find his grave, I reckon I'll lie down on it and unpack my heart, but I'm not going to cry until then." I remember how eager and alert he was to catch every little suggestion that was uttered during that Conference. He said : "It is my sole business until this War is won, and won right, to do everything that I can to keep my boy from having made his sacrifice in vain." I join up with this man in my memory a little woman that I met in Montana, at Helena, during the War Conference there. While the incident was fresh in my mind I wrote of it in a letter to my daughter, as follows: "I went walking just now in this altitudinous town. Presently on a rickety retaining-wall beside the side- walk I saw perched a very grimy little girl not so grimy, however, but that a rare beauty shone through : blue eyes, golden ringlets, rosy cheeks, teeth like the little white grains at the tip of a roasting-ear. 'Mary' 140 THE NATION AT WAR I guessed her name the first time. Then toddled up 'Denny/ whose really-truly name is Virginia; half as old as four-year-old Mary. Then marched down from the back yard (it was all back yard) Wilbur, aged ten or so. I had such a good time that I pressed a dime deep into each grimy palm, suggesting with a question mark candy. But Mary said something that I ultimately made out to be 'doll-buggy.' And I came away. "But 'doll-buggy' haunted me. She said it with such automatic glibness that I felt she must have been saying it often a very long time. And I remember how much such things mean to children. So I went back and found Wilbur and asked for his mother. She came out of the cracked little red house ; from her work, looking simple and plain and sweet and sound. Mary soon came too. But I heard Denny crying, and asked, Why? " 'Because I took their money away,' said naughty Mother. "And I asked, 'Why,' again 'Opposed to candy?' " 'No, but to buy thrift stamps with!' "Now, the point is, she dearly wanted them to have the candy. I finally prevailed on her to take the dol- lar for the doll-buggy by ordering her, as 'one of Uncle Sam's men,' to do so, and then the tears came to her eyes as she said Mary had been begging for a doll- buggy for a year but they couldn't get one for her. And they got back their dime apiece when I promised to see that thrift stamps should not go begging. "Pennies are as precious to that family as bonds are "OUT WEST" 141 to many people; yet every penny they can save is going to the War, and they're teaching Wilbur and Mary and Denny the same lesson. That's morale. And Kaiserism will be spurlos versenkt, sunk without leaving a trace." Now that the spirit which dominates that Montana woman and animates that Idaho miner is taking pos- session of the entire country, there is a sharp point to our soldiers' satirical refrain, "God help Kaiser Bill !" Oregon needs to reorganise itself, as Idaho has done. The people are as loyal there as people anyr where, but the State Council is a group of eight very delightful gentlemen whose chief object seems to be to "boost Portland" the Atlanta of the Pacific coast. I will close this lengthy narrative of the Western War Conferences with extracts from the report I made on the States of Washington and Montana on getting back to the office in June, 1918, as follows: The State Council of Washington is maintaining the high standard indicated in the lengthy report I pre- sented after my visit to Washington last September. This in spite of the fact that our afternoon meeting at Seattle, which was to have been held May 24, had to be abandoned. Paradoxically enough, this incident itself is a proof of the good organisation of Washing- ton. The Red Cross "drive" was on, full force, and the thousand workers directed by the State Council of Defense were giving such devoted attention to this drive that they could not be assembled for the after- noon conference. On the following day a good at- tendance was secured for the organisation meeting 142 THE NATION AT WAR of the Conference, which can be pronounced a success. Conditions were different in Spokane, where the Red Cross people terminated their "drive" a day ahead of time so as to make way for the Conference. Both the day session and the night meeting were a pro- nounced success in Spokane. The most interesting change in Washington since my visit last autumn is concerned with the I. W. W. The pernicious activities of this organisation have almost entirely disappeared. This I attribute chiefly to the remarkably wise methods adopted by the State Council, as indicated by my former report. "Con- trolled publicity" has had much to do with the im- provement. The State Council succeeded, after much difficulty, in getting all the newspapers to squeeze down their I. W. W. headlines and news items to a mini- mum, as it is a noted fact that this organisation bat- tens on publicity, its leaders exhibiting to their would- be dupes "scare" headlines and newspaper articles in proof of the power wielded by the organisation over the capitalistic classes. The University of Washington affords a fine ex- ample of the manner in which State Universities should serve the public during war time. Through the magnificent leadership of Dr. Suzzallo, who is president of the University as well as chairman of the State Council of Defense, the people of Wash- ington have been led to understand that such subjects as economics have a value that is utilitarian as well as academic. To such a degree is this true that now when a misunderstanding or dispute arises between "OUT WEST" 143 different interests in the State, the University author- ities are invariably called upon to collect the facts as a basis for judgment; it being known that all the facts will be scientifically collected and impartially pre- sented. Adjudication is then made by proper tribunal without danger of a subsequent complaint being lodged of judgment based on insufficient or incomplete evi- dence. The University requires all of its students to do war work. An interesting example of this is found in the treatment of sphagnum moss, to which all of the women students are required to give two hours weekly- The sea bogs abounding on the shores of Washington and Oregon furnish vast quantities of sphagnum moss, which is an excellent substitute for cotton in the irriga- tion of heavy wounds. Instead of absorbing water between the filaments, as is the case with cotton, sphagnum moss sucks it up by a ciliary process and holds it in tiny cups that cover the little fronds that circle around the stem. I was surprised to find that here in Washington City Red Cross workers are already handling sphag- num moss. Its value may be gathered from the fact that raw cotton is now bringing about 3Oc a pound, whereas sphagnum moss may be had for the gathering. Not only so, but by the time cotton has been made into material for dressing, its original cost is doubled; whereas sphagnum moss requires only to be picked free of mineral adhesions and then thoroughly dried, which are the processes practiced by the "co-eds" in the University at Seattle. The moss actually posses- 144 THE NATION AT WAR ses superiority over cotton as a dressing in that it is lighter, bulkier, and not so likely to cake. It has very high absorption powers and does not have to be changed as often as cotton dressings. Jumping to another valuable activity of the Wash- ington State Council, let me mention the organisation of the Loyalty League of Loggers and Lumbermen in the forests. When Captain Disque was leaving for the lumber camps of Washington last fall, I gave him a letter to Dr. Suzzallo which has brought about co-operation between the federal authorities and the State Council of Defense. By means of this co-opera- tion the Loyalty League has almost completely eradi- cated the disloyalty which affected the lumber output of the far Northwest so disastrously for a season. Disque deserves great credit for the manner in which he has dealt with his men. In a camp formerly no- torious for recalcitrancy fifty-five out of fifty-seven lumber-jacks have voluntarily enrolled in this League and invested in Government savings. Members of the League make it very. uncomfortable for newcomers lacking in patriotism. Officials of the Washington State Council assured me that when they can get federal support for some important local movement their authority and influence are increased at least one hundred per cent. They attribute very great value to positive pronouncements recently issued by the State Councils Section. While I was there a happy illustration occurred. The State Council had been bothered by the "business as usual" campaign, which reaches its extreme in syndicated "OUT WEST" 14* articles prepared for newspapers by one H. W. J. Taylor of the Retail Credit Men's Association. The State Council of Washington had encountered great opposition in its campaign for economy until our Bulletin No. 94 was received. After this it was all easy sailing. Montana possesses a vital spirit of patriotism that I have not found excelled anywhere. Governor Stewart is one of the best War governors in the coun- try. Had it not been for his deliberate, just, but firm handling of the I. W. W. situation in Montana, grave disasters would almost certainly have occurred instead of the virtual disappearance of the trouble. As in Idaho, so in Montana there was a State-wide repre- sentation of county delegates at the War Conference, notwithstanding extreme difficulties in transportation in this the third largest state in the Union. The mass meeting at Helena was one of the five best of the entire trip the others being the meetings at Sacramento, Boise, and Reno, in the order named, Helena ranking with Sacramento at the very top. It was not "down on the programme" that we should speak at Butte, but Perigord and I did so never- theless addressing a great mass meeting of miners in the public square at six o'clock in the evening of May 29. In my judgment this unexpected meeting was the most important on the entire journey. Butte is more Irish than Ireland, and is a hot-bed of Sinn Fein activity. Perigord with perfect bravery attacked Sinn Fein activity. Irish miners admire clean grit and furthermore pay high reverence to the Catholic 146 THE NATION AT WAR priesthood. They were too overcome by emotion for immediate response, but later waited on Perigord at the hotel in a delegation and thanked him for having "roasted" them. After his very remarkable address I heard comments freely expressed in the crowd to the effect that there would be fewer labour troubles in Butte hereafter. Butte is one of the most interesting places on top of the earth, and is absolutely unique. It is a huge hill crammed full of precious minerals. When min- ing was begun there it was expected that the rich yield would be only temporary. The miners had to live, however, so "shacks" were built on the hill for their accommodation. The deeper the mines have sunk and the more extensively they have ramified the richer has been the yield, which is to-day at the richest point in its history. The Butte mines yield an average of 300,000,000 pounds of copper annually, besides hous- ing the richest silver deposits in the world, so far as known, together with great quantities of gold. As the yield has continued, more miners' houses have been built upon the hill, until now a city of more than ninety thousand people covers this great ant-hill of activity, which is so honeycombed with mines that it is possible to traverse the entire hill from one end to the other underground. The smelting which was formerly done in Butte itself, but is now carried on at the town of Anaconda, about a dozen miles away, destroyed with its fumes all vegetation, including the trees on the mountains 'round about. This brown and denuded aspect of "OUT WEST" 147 death adds weirdly to the general impression as one stands on the height of the hill, which, in the very thick of this mushroom city, prickles with the derricks of the mines like some huge industrial pin-cushion. Far-off, seen through an ever-present haze, are huge snow-covered mountains, the very snow of which seems contaminated by the atmosphere of Butte, which is so ugly that it is positively fascinating. I had resolved to see Butte even before it became my duty to go there. Somewhat puzzled by this de- sire, I had asked a "rough diamond" in Idaho the chief characteristics of Butte. After scratching his head for a moment he said, "Well, Butte's all there in the day time, and there ain't no night in Butte." This I discovered to be true with all that it implies. The I. W. W. activities were so effective in this greatest of mining camps last year as to impede and almost suspend mining operations. This is most serious when it is remembered that every ounce of mineral wealth now taken out of the mines is con- signed to the United States Government. Montana has so managed its labour troubles, however, that the mines are now running full blast. The minimum wage is $5.50 a day, while the average wage of miners is said to be between $9.00 and $10.00. A miner that I talked with in the bowels of the earth assured me that men who were paid from $9.00 to $10.00 gave far greater satisfaction to the company than those who used to get lower pay ! The only labour disturb- ance "on" in Butte when we were there was a little insignificant strike of plasterers, plumbers, and inside 148 THE NATION AT WAR electricians all of these working men doing a thriv- ing business in building more houses for the miners. Plasterers who received $7.00 for an eight-hour day were striking for $8.00 and a seven-hour day. Plum- bers receiving $8.00 for an eight-hour day were de- manding $9.00 for the same period, while the elec- tricians for the same period were receiving $6.00 and demanding $7.00. But this is a mere ripple on the laughing surface of Butte life, and is probably settled by this time. The managers of the mines of Butte plume them- selves on the patriotism of the miners. Four com- panies (the Anaconda, the Butte-Superior, the East Butte, and the Davis-Daly mines) made a drive for the "War Chest," spending on the expense of the speakers, etc., an amount equivalent to seventeen cents a ton on 125,000 tons of ore this at least was the Anaconda figure; with the result that 98 per cent of the miners of these four companies subscribed to the War Chest. Certainly the meeting I addressed with Perigord gave the impression of a deep feeling of the real spirit of the War. Butte is immensely proud of the fact that John D. Ryan has come here to manage the aircraft production of the Government. This unique American city is at its best at night, when one stands on the observation end of a Pullman train and climbs the enormous grade leading out of purgatory into normal American territory. The huge ant-hill is then all aglow with the most brilliant lights and shimmers in the increasing distance like the vast Koh-i-nor that it is. "OUT WEST" Speaking of lights reminds me of the huge search- light built on the top of a vast ash-heap that crowns the summit of the much vaster hill that is Butte. Per- haps this is the final touch with which to leave the story. One sees it in the day-time, sinister, expressive of the industrial volcano from which eruption may be expected at any moment; for the purpose of this search-light, which is used frequently, is to sweep every nook and corner of Butte with its rays through- out the long working hours of the night in quest of skulking dynamiters bent on destruction. In fact, I must add to this the weird effect I got from a peculiar- ly saccharine smell that suddenly came on us very strongly in the bowels of the Leonard mine. It was so cunous that I prevailed upon the reluctant super- intendent (who accompanied us) to tell the cause. It was fire, which has been burning underground for many months; and the singularly sweet smell is due to its consumption of precious ores. The big picks of our miners were driving very close to it, at immi- nent peril, in the desire to cheat the fire of its prey; and we heaved a sigh of relief when we stood once more on what Mrs. Partington would call terra cotta. If some German spy had criss-crossed the country with me, he would have found the planters of Louis- iana concerned about their sugar crop, not for what they can make out of it, but for what they can do with it in feeding our boys and our Allies. At the opposite corner of the country he would find the lum- ber men of Washington and Oregon concerned about 150 THE NATION AT WAR not what they can get out of their lumber, but how they can get the spruce out of the forests to help Uncle Sam build his airships. All through the country he would find the people determined to support Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes in their endeavour to "get" the men who have hindered our aircraft build- ing programme, if such there be. Further, in Massa- chusetts and Connecticut he would find the great men of those States giving practically all of their time to the War organisation of the country ; building up, for example, a great war employment service that will en- able New England to handle its labour supply effective- ly by distributing labour, with labour's free consent, from the points of surplus supply to the points of the greatest need. Crossing the country through the great Northwest and dropping down with me into the ex- pansive grain fields of the Central West, he would find the farmers concerned in speeding-up food production, just as loyal business men and labourers are speeding- up ship production along the Pacific Coast in huge plants that have sprung up, as it were, over night. Then, were he truthful, he would write a letter like this to his Kaiser : "May it please your Majesty, these Yankees are a strange folk. They are the most peaceful people in the world, and the most foolishly patient; but they possess the traditional anger of the patient man, when fully roused. For two and a half years they looked on at the great conflagration in Europe with their hands in their pockets, and never even bought a water bucket for protection. But now, the flame of prac- "OUT WEST" 151 tical patriotism is sweeping the country like a prairie fire, and God help you, Kaiser Bill, when this backfire meets the flame of your war ! Their waiting will un- doubtedly mean waste to them waste in treasure and in precious human life; but their resources are inex- haustible, and they are at last 'mad clean through/ and resolved to give short shrift to any movement, no matter who leads it, for an inconclusive peace. If you take my advice, Your Majesty, you and your family will clear out before you get cleaned out; leav- ing as a last bequest to your people, in a final effort to repair irreparable wrong, an urgent plea that they establish a fair and just government whose first act shall be to disarm, simultaneously with withdrawal from invaded lands and repayment for devastation and destruction. I have been on a swing around the circle, Your Majesty as these picturesque Yankees describe it. There can be no doubt that Uncle Sam has got his jaw set, as they say. The same blood that fought England twice, and won, still courses through his mighty heart and veins. Remember his own Civil War, how fiercely and gallantly his children fought on both sides of the house now united; take it from me, Your Majesty, that the long lines of the blue and the grey are completely melted in a far longer line clad in khaki; and that even if you break the French and British lines in France and Flanders, you must face an unflinching and unconquerable America!" CHAPTER X ZIGZAG JOURNEYS MISSOURI was one of the first States "to be shown" the value of organised patriotism by means of its State Council of Defense, which has become a model to its neighbours. Late in August, 1917, I attended one of the peripatetic meetings of this Coun- cil, held at Springfield, in the Ozark Mountains. We had a touch of welcome winter weather, I remember, and sat around a roaring wood fire. One of the first contributions of Missouri to war work was the stimulation of food production. As a consequence of her first year's effort she increased food production ten per cent, and put 750,000 acres into corn that had never been put to any crop before. This question of corn is important. I know of an old lady out West who has even been complaining of God on account of it. "Here I am," she says, "eighty-three years old, and He's been purty good to me so fur, but now He's gone and took away my white bread. I don't see why I ain't just as good as them Allies. Why should we have to put up with corn bread and send all our wheat and flour over there? Ain't we just as good as they are?" Now, for my part, there is no bread quite equal to 152 ZIGZAG JOURNEYS 153 a good old Mississippi "co'n pone," especially if it has a few "cracklin's" sprinkled through it. The pro- gressive State Council of Illinois "demonstrates" the proper use of corn-meal in Chicago by means of a num- ber of colored "mammies" in the corner stores the demonstrations being made complete by distributing sample corn-meal products, together with the recipes for preparing them. For those whose tastes are not properly educated, however, it needs to be made clear that the Government is not calling on us to practise sacrifice so much as to exercise discrimination. Here in this opulent land we could hardly sacrifice in food- stuffs if we tried, and none of us are trying very hard. But it is our bounden duty to discriminate. The reason we are asked to eat more corn bread so as to ship more wheat is that we can ship wheat and flour economically, while it would be a waste to at- tempt to ship corn. Meal spoils when exposed to salt-water; flour doesn't. Wheat packs compactly into the hold of a ship; corn doesn't. Even if we shipped the corn, they wouldn't know what to do with it "over there." All through the New Testament you find the word corn, but the English translators did not know what they were talking about! Whenever they said corn they meant wheat. When an English- man to-day talks about corn, he calls it maize or Indian corn. If we tried to educate them in the use of corn, we should have to send machinery for grinding it; and we haven't any business to be sending any ma- chinery to Europe these days, except machinery to kill Germans with. 154 THE NATION AT WAR So it is all along the line. We send bacon to our boys because it stands shipment, and we want them to save their bacon and to come home with the bacon. So with beef. But you can be patriotic and eat all the poultry that you please. Of course, you must first "catch your turkey" ; which reminds me of Uncle Rastus, of whom Booker Washington told this story : Uncle Rastus was mighty fond of turkey for Christ- mas. He never could get a whole turkey of his own for Christmas, and it was one of the aspirations of his life to have a whole turkey. But he never could get one, although, being religious, he prayed very hard for one. Finally he had an "illumination," as he called it. "I'll tell you how it was, Marse Washin'ton. I been prayin' every yeah fo' a turkey. It's true, Marse Washin'ton, dat de Missus sen' down de carcuss from de big house and de giblets, but it's been one of de movin' aspirations of my life to have a whole turkey, and I ain't never got no turkey, altho' every Christmas I pray, 'Oh, Lo'd, send dis niggah a turkey ; Oh, Lo'd, send dis niggah a turkey.' And 'I ain't never got no turkey. But dis yeah I jes' put one mo' little word in there, and de night befo' Christmas eve I pray, 'Oh, Lo'd send dis niggah to a turkey,' an' I got a turkey dat same night !" Our amiable Secretary of War tells us that we are going to win, because it is irreligious to doubt it, and that is true; but we American people must continue to add works to our faith, until we put every last ounce of our energy into intelligent organized effort. ZIGZAG JOURNEYS 155 To use one of our own vivid colloquialisms, we must go to it. Oliver Cromwell was a great religious soldier. His motto was, "Trust in God, and keep your powder dry." Assuredly we shall trust in our God not the German tribal deity known as Gott, but that Ancient of Days who nurtured our Republic in its infancy, and Who has promised His blessing to that Nation whose God is the Lord. At the same time let us go "to the help of the Lord against the mighty" in this crucial hour of struggle between right and wrong, with the last atom of practical resourcefulness that we can command. It was in Indiana that George Ade contributed an- other choice African story to my collection. This was the first War Conference I attended (in December, 1917), and one of the most effective. A distinctive feature was the editors' lunch-party on the second day of the Conference, attended by nearly every editor in the State, regardless of politics, with which this Indiana atmosphere seems permanently permeated. Will Hays, then chairman of the State Council, said in his speech that the Republican party might go hang, so far as he was concerned, in comparison with ef- fective war work ; and Meredith Nicholson, an ardent Democrat, paid Hays a warm tribute for the fearlessly impartial manner in which he administered the Coun- cil. 1 1 Mr. Nicholson's remarks were as follows: "It is a privilege as it is a pleasure to have an opportunity to testify to the intelligence and vigour with which Governor Goodrich has ad- dressed himself to the business of putting Indiana on a war 156 THE NATION AT WAR George Ade gave me my Negro story while extri- cating himself from the quandary in which George Creel had placed him. Through failure of the Penn- sylvania Railroad to deliver Mr. Creel as chief speaker, Ade, the toastmaster, with a pained expres- sion and a diffident manner, narrated Aunt Dinah's account of a wedding. "Well, Dinah, were the bridesmaids pretty?" asked her mischievous mistress on the return of Aunt Dinah to her tubs. "Law sakes, Missus, dey sho' wuz. One of 'em had on a green polonaise, and de othah, she woh bobi- net." footing. If the Council of Defense of this loyal commonwealth isn't the best, the most energetic and enlightened in the Union, I should like to hear of another that approaches it for the character and range of its work. Every citizen of this state is indebted to Mr. Will H. Hays, the chairman of the State Council, for the zeal and effectiveness with which he has or- ganised our war work, and for the great patriotic awakening of our people to which he has contributed in so great meas- ure. As a Democrat I am glad to express my appreciation of what the Republican state administration has done, and what the Republican chairman of the State Council is doing to mobilise Indiana's resources. I'm disposed to be pretty critical of my neighbours' Americanism in these times, but if there's a sounder American between the two oceans than Bill Hays I confess that I don't know where to lay my hand on him. He's a Republican, but first of all he's an American citizen. He has neglected nothing that could add to the strength of Indiana's arm or to the realisation by all her people that this is our war, a war for the defense of those principles of freedom and democracy that are rooted deep in the Hoosier earth that our fathers won for us and fought and saved under the leadership f Abraham Lincoln." ZIGZAG JOURNEYS 157 "And how about the bride?" "Law, Missus, you sho' sh'ud ha' seen dat bride. She had on a dress o' white orangeade, wid lemon blossoms droopin' from her haih. It was de scrum- shionest weddin' dese old eyes ebah hab seed!" "And the groom, Aunt Dinah; how did the bride- groom look?" "Law, Missus!" the old woman screamed, as her fat sides shook with laughter, "you know dat fool nig- gah he nebah did show up at all?" I purloined the original autograph copy of Ade's brief address to his editors, and write it down here because it has a wide application : "Gentlemen: My conception of a brave man is one who will tell his editor how to run his paper. I know that when we ran off the weekly edition on a Washington hand-press and had to address every single wrap, the editor was close to the carpet most of the time and needed the money, but he didn't take orders from any outsiders. "Later on, in a booming metropolis of 20,000, with a real cylinder press and boys' carrying-routes, when I was telegraph editor, proof-reader, dramatic editor, and chief editorial writer, I came to know that a real editor is one who knows how to hit the waste-basket. "Then I went to a larger town and became a simple unit in a gigantic Sears-Roebuck journalistic organ- isation, the editor being concealed from public view, but there was one intangible asset in which all of us shared. It was the knowledge that our paper could not be bought and could not be coerced. "You have been invited here to-day, editors of In- diana, by men who know something about the news- 158 THE NATION AT WAR paper game from the inside. Let my first assurance to you be that we are not going to tell you what to hang on your copyhooks. We are fellow volunteers in the same service. You and we are trying to get to the people the information that will reveal to them the significance of this war the inspiration that will keep them determined to win the war. "Your desk is cluttered with hot stuff from publicity bureaus. Every good publicity agent thinks his own message is the most important of the lot. Such simple tasks as conserving foods, saving soft corn, selling Liberty Bonds, collecting millions for the Red Cross and Y. M. C. A., punishing the traitors, organising the Home Guard, enlisting Boys for the Working Re- serve, are passed along to the editor these days in the serene belief that his patriotism knows no bounds and his space is unlimited. "The editors of Indiana have responded like good soldiers but even a good soldier can't carry a kit that weighs a ton. The editor finds it impossible to sup- press local news. Children will be born, and young people will get married and old settlers will pass away, even during war times. "The problem with many a publisher just now is How shall I do my full duty as a messenger of patriot- ism and at the same time get out a regular newspaper ? "The Indiana State Council of Defense has made many appeals to you for help and you have helped generously, unselfishly. We shall be compelled to ask more favours of you, not for ourselves but for the long campaign to which all of us are now committed. We have asked you to come here to-day not that we may tell you what to print in your papers, but that you may tell us how we can be of intelligent help to you. " We must co-operate. We may find it advisable to agree here upon some definite propaganda. You ZIGZAG JOURNEYS 159 know the temper of your readers. It may be that the bulletins and special articles we have sent you do not always appeal to your editorial judgment. All right ! Let us decide what kind of news and what kind of editorial appeals will deserve publication and get to your people and bring the results for which we are striving an intelligent understanding of our aims in the war, an unfailing readiness to answer every call to duty and, above all, a rock-ribbed and unshake- able determination to outgame the other fellow and see this war through to a creditable finish." Illinois held its first War Conference, as it hap- pened, in the midst of the bitterest freeze of the coldest of winters, but the delegates somehow managed to ar- rive, while I created a mild sensation by appearing on the platform just at the moment when a disgruntled chairman was announcing that I was snowed up some- where between Kansas City and Chicago. "Snowed up" we certainly had been ; and that night, attempting to get out of Chicago, a crowd of us stood around in the filthiest "union station" on the continent, waiting from nine until three in the morning for the train for Louisville, Kentucky. This appointment I missed altogether, but another visit to Louisville dem- onstrated what excellent work was being done in the Blue Grass region. 1 From Louisville I went to West Virginia, the State whose Council of Defense has been endowed with larger statutory powers than any other in the land; and found energy backing intelligence. The same brief report may be made of flying visits to s Perhaps the most notable thing in Kentucky is the Moon- light Schools for drafted illiterates. 160 THE NATION AT WAR Tennessee, 1 Michigan, 2 Pennsylvania, and Delaware. 3 The Oklahoma War Conference I attended with keen curiosity, since for some reason or other a wide- spread impression had gone abroad that Oklahoma was lacking in loyalty. My experience verified that of Secretary Lane. Said he: "I had been told that I would find the very seat and centre of hostility to the Government in Okla- homa. I went there. I found that a few misled tenant-farmers had objected to the draft. When I asked the reason, they said that New York had brought on the war and New York should make the fight. But that was not nearly so much the spirit of Oklahoma as the draft riots were the spirit of New York in 1863. "After a meeting in Tulsa a man came to me, dressed in a blue jumper and overalls, and said : " 'I am doing my bit. I have six children, four boys and two girls. The four boys are in the army and the two girls are Red Cross nurses, and I am sav- ing to buy a Liberty Bond/ 1 Tennessee had such an excellent office organisation, under Major Rutledge Smith, that the National Council impressed his services as a "zone director" for certain Southern States, just as Mr. J. H. Winterbotham, Jr., of Chicago, looks after States of the Central West. "Michigan's most noteworthy recent achievement was the holding of 8,500 simultaneous patriotic meetings in the schools (July 8, 1918) while school officers were being elected. 'Delaware was late in getting started, but the War Confer- ence held at Wilmington in July, 1918, guaranteed a successful career. ZIGZAG JOURNEYS 161 "That does not look like slacking, nor do Oklaho- ma's total subscriptions to the Liberty Loan bonds." Kansas did notable work in the stimulation of food production, under the generalship of Dr. H. J. Wat- ters. One gets an unpleasant impression, however, that politics is mixed up with the Kansas Council. Iowa, a little slow in getting started, perhaps is just now "striking her gait." That aged and indomitable "war horse," Lafe Young, of Des Moines, chairman of the Iowa Council, gave me these slogans for slack- ers that have never failed to elicit approval from au- diences all over the country : "Every traitor and every near-traitor in the United States is inquiring, 'What are we going to get out of this War?' "Well, among other things, we are going to get a better grade of patriotism than we have been hav- ing. "We are going to put an end to building up foreign colonies in the United States as breeding places of treason. "We are going to love every foreigner who really becomes an American, and all others we are going to ship back home. "We are going to have consultations with the I. W. W.'s to ascertain whether or not they have a real grievance or any just cause for their treasonable mouthings and threats. If they have any just cause, we are going to remove it; then we are going to shut their mouths for good and all. "Out of this War we are going to get a new United 162 THE NATION AT WAR States. We are going to hate nobody, but we are going to be prepared to fight whenever necessary. "There are a good many other things we are going to get out of this War. When the soldier boys come home, we are going to have several millions of patriots who, having fought for the flag, will make good citi- zens and thorough patriots." Some of the very best Councils, such as those of Wisconsin and Minnesota, 1 it was not my good for- tune to visit. But I must not close this chapter with- out mentioning certain exemplary undertakings in some of these States, with the hope that other States may profit by them. Nothing that Wisconsin has done is of more value to the Nation at large than its treatment of the foreign language press. The State Council publishes a series of weekly articles, averaging less than a thousand words each, on such subjects as American Ideals, and Germany's Responsibility for the War. Printed in German as well as in English, these are offered in "plate" form to the fifty German-language papers in the State, and have been regularly published by all of them. Recently, for example, the Germania Herold, the leading German newspaper in Wisconsin, published editorially an "Open Confession," concluding, on the strength of the famous Lichnowsky memorandum, that Germany had deliberately caused the War. The State * Minnesota, with its large foreign population, is wisely dis- tributing large numbers of Kale's "The Man Without a Coun- try," and Blythe's "Der Tag for Us." ZIGZAG JOURNEYS 163 Council promptly had this article republished in all the other German newspapers, and also circulated it in leaflet form by the thousand. The result of such patriotic propaganda is revealed in the fact that in German-populated counties in Wis- consin that had subscribed only twenty or thirty per cent of their Second Liberty Loan quotas, the sub- scriptions to the Third Loan all exceeded one hundred per cent, and in some cases more than two hundred! Of no less importance is the instruction of aliens in English. Illinois, for example, has undertaken to teach English to every foreign-speaking woman in the State. Many classes have already been started in connection with large factories, the manufacturers co- operating on account of their recognition of the in- crease in efficiency that must result. Housing is another phase of "welfare work" receiv- ing stimulus from the efforts of the Councils. Here in Washington, for example, the District Council of Defense maintains a Room Registration Bureau that during last June listed 1,616 rooms and placed 1,955 people ; while away out in Arizona the large employers of labour have been brought to effect a substantial im- provement in living conditions, and this in general is true of the country at large. One of Pennsylvania's novel and noteworthy achievements is the appropriation by the Council of $50,000 to train boys to work on the farms. Experi- ment last year having proved that boys can earn a wage of two dollars a day to the satisfaction of the farmers, this year the boys are to be assembled in 164 THE NATION AT WAR forty Liberty Camps, or "Farm Plattsburgs," and sup- plied with tents, food, and cooking and sleeping out- fits. Texas is leading the country in public education in health, while Virginia leads in the stern measures en- forced against social vice. No State outdoes Ohio in the excellence of its free Employment Service, while Arkansas challenges comparison for its devotion to War Relief. New York, New Jersey, and Florida are subject to reorganisation that ought to bring as good results as that of Idaho, for example, while Maryland challenges South Carolina in the wise organisation of its Negroes. Wyoming co-operates with the Bureau of Forestry in an interesting movement to arrange for the use of nationally owned forests as grazing land, with a large resultant increase in stock accommoda- tions already. South Dakota engages in an early fuel- buying campaign with the slogan, "Buy coal now or twist hay next winter !" while North Dakota attacks "slacker land" by ordering all the idle acres to be broken up and cropped, this conscription of "slacker land" having resulted already in an increase of a hun- dred thousand acres of crop-lands, half being given to wheat ! Thus the Councils differ as radically in specific character "as the Maine fisherman from the Arizona cowboy," but all are animated by a common purpose, and give witness to the awakening of a new national consciousness. What they will mean to the future no man can tell. A New England leader said recently : 'Never in my life have I been thrown with so many ZIGZAG JOURNEYS 165 different sorts of interesting people as in this State war work. Most of them never had any use for political life before the War. They called local politics a dirty business and kept away from it. But now they are finding public service the most fascinating game they ever took part in. It is queer to see them play- ing it side by side capitalists and labour leaders, men and women of every creed, every party, every walk of life. "You can't tell me that the new blood these people are infusing into our public life will not have a perma- nent strengthening and purifying influence, or that they will ever sit by after the War is over and let things slide back into our old haphazard government by quacks and crooks and phrase-makers. It is a hopeful sign. If State Socialism comes and I begin to feel that it is coming it looks as if we should have the men to run it!" CHAPTER XI THE RESEARCH COUNCIL AND THE SHIPPING BOARD "LIAISON" is a word that has come into its own through the War. We borrowed it from the French originally to denote a questionable social relation, but closer contact with them has acquainted us with its deeper and highly respectable meaning, that of "bond," or "union," and we have now adopted their military use of it to denote various ties that link us together in war work. As already shown in Chapter V, it is used in Washington of men who link up one depart- ment of governmental activity with another ; these are called for convenience "liaison officers," after the usage obtaining on the battlefields. My spare time in Washington, between journeys, passed all the more pleasantly because it fell to my lot to be a connecting link between our Section of the Council of Defense and the National Research Council. The work of that newly organised body is of such great interest and import that I intend to set down here a brief account of it, which I draw almost entirely from publications made by its officers. Its aim is to group into one common "liaison" or union all of the scientific agencies of the Government and, indeed, of the Nation, so as to mobilise them 166 SCIENCE AND SHIPS 167 swiftly and effectively for national service; and to clasp hands across the seas with our Allies. Backed by the National Academy of Sciences, whose offspring it is, the Research Council looks farther than the War, and should result in an international comity of scien- tific endeavour that will mean much for the future of mankind. No more striking recognition of the work to be wrought by scientific research in the world of the fu- ture has ever been accorded than that set down by the British Labour Party in its "Reconstruction Pro- gramme." This party "calls for more warmth in pol- itics, for much less apathetic acquiescence in the mis- eries that exist, for none of the cynicism that saps the life of leisure. On the other hand, the Labour party has no belief in any of the problems of the world being solved by good will alone. Good will without knowl- edge is warmth without light. . . . The Labour party stands for increased study, for the scientific investiga- tion of each succeeding problem, for the deliberate or- ganisation of research, and for a much more rapid dis- semination among the whole people of all the science that exists." 1 The chairman and indeed the founder of the Na- tional Research Council, Dr. George Ellery Hale, was deeply impressed, on visiting Europe in the spring of 1917, with the marvellous acceleration occasioned by the present War in the science of medical relief. In 1 "Towards a New World" may be had in pamphlet form for 20 cts. from W. R. Browne, Wyoming, N. Y. Documents of the very highest importance comprise this booklet. 168 THE NATION AT WAR the hospital of Compiegne, accompanied by Dr. Alexis Carrel, he witnessed the operation of "a system of surgery in striking contrast with the crude and often deadly methods in vogue during our Civil War." "The success of Carrel's system," Dr. Hale con- tinues, "is not due to a single element, but to the com- bined advantages of a highly developed technique. The operation itself is first performed with unusual care. A system of rubber tubes, with openings at close intervals, is next arranged over the wound, which is then irrigated to the greatest possible depth at regular intervals with Dakin's antiseptic fluid, supplied from a reservoir. We were shown every element in the plan, the patients cheerfully submitting their wounds to inspection. While I could not follow my com- panion (Doctor William H. Welch) in his apprecia- tion of the details, I could at least admire the extraor- dinary results and rejoice with him in this magnifi- cent contribution of science to the relief of the hor- rors of battle. "Think of the contrast with the surgery of the Civil War ! I have heard our veteran colleague, Dr. Keen, describe with the emotion which all who were forced to use those earlier methods must now experience, the deadly errors into which they were led by ignorance, at length dispelled by the greatest of Frenchmen Pasteur. It was no uncommon thing in those days not so long ago, yet mediaeval in their obscurity for a surgeon to withdraw his knife from a wound, sharpen it upon his boot, and plunge it once more, loaded with violent bacteria, into the very lifeblood SCIENCE AND SHIPS 169 of his patient ! What wonder that deaths were a com- mon sequence of even trivial wounds! And yet the human sympathy of the surgeon and his intense de- sire to save were no less obvious than at the present day. "What has accomplished this marvellous revolution? The patient researches of Pasteur and their adaptation to the art of surgery by such men as Lister and Carrel. No better proof of the value of scientific research to the world, no clearer evidence of its intensely practical importance in the midst of this world war, could pos- sibly be asked." 1 The organisation of the National Research Council is based upon the principle of broad and effective co- operation between the numerous scientific agencies of the United States and those of the allied countries. The Council is in reality a federation of research laboratories, working together toward a common end. At present its chief purpose is to assist in winning the War, both by the perfection of military devices and by the solution of industrial problems which the War has occasioned. But in the future, it will devote its attention to the promotion of research in all branches of pure and applied science. The organisation of researches bearing on the na- tional defense frequently involves the co-operative ef- fort of many investigators residing in different States. Sometimes the joint action of an entire university in question, is essential to success. Several researches 1 "How Men of Science Will Help in Our War," Hale, Scrib- ner's Magazine, Vol. LXL, No. 6, p. 721. 170 THE NATION AT WAR are in hand in which entire laboratories are taking part. More commonly, however, individual investiga- tors known to be especially qualified are enlisted by the National Research Council from widely scattered institutions. By thus mobilising all of the scientific resources of the country, the Research Council is assisting to an invaluable degree in the perfection of devices having direct and immediate bearing on the winning of the War. Obviously, details are not to be published at present, but this much at least may be said: that in such distinctive instruments of modern warfare as the submarine and the aeroplane, the co-operative prin- ciples on which the Council is based have already con- tributed practical results in the shape of detective de- vices leading to the destruction of the former, and of safety devices for protection of the latter, and for the consequent protection of thousands of the choicest of American lives. In his New York address before the Engineering Foundation (in May, 1918), Dr. Hale gave the fol- lowing account of the most recent development of the Council, involving as it does a broad international scheme of incalculable promise for the scientific prog- ress of the world. By joint action the Secretaries of War and Navy, with the approval of the Council of National Defense, have authorised and approved the organisation, through the National Research Council, of a Research Information Committee in Washington, with branch SCIENCE AND SHIPS 171 Committees in Paris and London, which are intended to work in close co-operation with the offices of the Military and Naval Intelligence, and whose function shall be the securing, classifying, and disseminating of scientific, technical and industrial research informa- tion, especially relating to war problems, and the in- terchange of such information between the Allies in Europe and the United States. In Washington the Committee consists of, first, a civilian member representing the National Research Council, Dr. S. W. Stratton, Chairman; second, the Chief, Military Intelligence Section; third, the Di- rector of Naval Intelligence; and fourth, a Technical Assistant, Dr. Graham Edgar. Similar Committees are being organised in Paris and London. The initial organisation of the Committee in Paris is: (a) The Scientific Attache, representing the Re- search Information Committee, Dr. W. F. Durand, Attache. (b) The Military Attache or an officer deputed to act for him. (c) The Naval Attache or an officer deputed to act for him. (d) A Technical Assistant, Dr. K. T. Compton. (e) A Military Assistant, Mr. Tod Ford. The initial organisation of the Committee in Lon- don is: (a) The Scientific Attache representing the Re- search Information Committee, Dr. H. A. Bumstead, Attache. (b) The Military Attache or an officer deputed to act for him. (c) The Naval Attache or an officer deputed to act for him. (d) A Technical Assistant, Mr. S. W. Farnsworth. 172 THE NATION AT WAR The chief functions of the foreign Committees thus organised are intended to be as follows: (a) The development of contact with all important research laboratories or agencies, governmental or private; the compilation of problems and subjects under investigation; and the collection and compila- tion of the results obtained. (b) The classification, organisation and prepara- tion of such information for transmission to the Re- search Information Committee in Washington. (c) The maintenance of continuous contact with the work of the offices of Military and Naval Attaches, in order that all duplication of work or crossing of effort may be avoided, with the consequent waste of time and energy and the confusion resulting from crossed or duplicated effort. (d) To serve as an immediate auxiliary to the of- fices of the Military and Naval Attaches in the collec- tion, analysis, and compilation of scientific, technical, and industrial research information. (e) To serve as an agency at the immediate service of the Commander-in-Chief of the Military and Na- val forces in Europe for the collection and analysis of scientific and technical research information and as an auxiliary to such direct military and naval agencies as may be in use for the purpose. (f) To serve as centres of distribution to the American Expeditionary Forces in France and to the American Naval Forces in European 4 Waters of scientific and technical research information orig- inating in the United States and transmitted through the Research Information Committee in Washing- ton. (g) To serve as centres of distribution to our Allies in Europe of scientific, technical and industrial re- search information originating in the United States SCIENCE AND SHIPS 173 and transmitted through the Research Information Committee in Washington. (h) The maintenance of the necessary contact be- tween the officer in Paris and London in order that provision may be made for the direct and prompt in- terchange of important scientific and technical infor- mation. (i) To aid research workers or collectors of scien- tific, technical and industrial information from the United States, when properly accredited from the Research Information Committee in Washington, in best achieving their several and particular pur- poses. The chief functions of the Washington Office of the Committee are as follows: (a) To provide means of ready co-operation with the Paris and London offices of the Committee by: Receiving, collating and disseminating information forwarded from these offices; Rendering available such evidence and documents as may be collected by the National Research Council relative to research in the United States, so as to for- mulate replies to inquiries sent from abroad; Communicating to foreign offices needs for addi- tional information relating to problems originating in the United States. (b) Classification, cataloguing and filing of papers and reports received from various sources at the re- quest of the National Research Council, and record of researches in progress concerning which detailed in- formation may be obtained elsewhere. (c) Issue of lists of available information and preparation of digests of such information for distri- bution to properly accredited persons. (d) Maintenance of contact with various research agencies in the United States. 174 THE NATION AT WAR An appropriation of $38,400 has been made by the Council of National Defense to cover the expenses of the Research Information Committee for the current year. Vice-Admiral Sims, in Command of the U. S. Naval Forces Operating in European Waters, has been particularly cordial in his welcome of the foreign representatives of the Research Council. Fully ap- preciating the possibilities of scientific co-operation, he has issued a circular letter to all naval officers and in- vestigators in Europe, directing them to facilitate the work of the Scientific Attache in every possible way, to keep him fully informed of investigations in prog- ress or needed, and to make every proper effort to see that all investigators, whether officers or civilians, shall consult the Scientific Attache in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of work and to utilise scien- tific and technical information obtained from any source. He has also created a Scientific Division of his staff, and placed Dr. Bumstead at its head. Major- General Biddle, in command at American Army Headquarters in England, has issued similar orders to ordnance, engineer, gas, signal, aviation, medical and other offices in England. The British Govern- ment, on its part, has opened every source of informa- tion to Dr. Bumstead, and provided for the closest co- operation in research. In France, Dr. Durand is also in close touch with our own Army and Navy, and with the French Gov- ernment and men of science. He has also been ap- pointed the representative of the United States on the Inter-Allied Board of Inventions. The Ministry of Munitions in Rome has recently requested, through the Italian Ambassador in Wash- ington, that a representative of the National Research Council be sent to Rome as Scientific Attache and SCIENCE AND SHIPS 175 head of an Italian branch of the Research Informa- tion Committee. The natural development of the work of the Re- search Information Committee will lead to the con- centration in the office of the National Research Coun- cil, where the Washington headquarters of the Com- mittee is established, of all available information re- garding research problems under investigation both in the United States and abroad. At the same time a service is being developed for the purpose of bring- ing properly accredited inquirers into touch with exist- ing sources of scientific, technical, and engineering information in the United States. One of the most valuable of these is the Information Service of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which is furnishing much important material to the National Research Council. A central office from which in- quirers may be directed to Government bureaus and to such sources of information as that just mentioned has long been needed, and it is possible that the serv- ice of the Research Information Committee, once well organised, will be in increasing demand. The best example of practical (and highly valuable) co-operation between the National Research Council and an individual State Council of Defense is afford- ed in the case of California. Dr. John C. Merriam, chairman of the Committee on Scientific Research under the California Council of Defense, reported last October to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco certain items of important achievement that should spur similar committees on other State Councils to "go and do likewise." 176 THE NATION AT WAR Work on economic problems in chemistry, said Dr. Merriam, includes an investigation of extraction of potash from mother liquor obtained in the manufac- ture of salt, a study of the utilisation of wood waste, a study of derivatives of petroleum, and an effort to devise new processes for manufacture of cyanide at a reduced cost. The committee on geology and mineral resources has been exceedingly active. Consideration was given first to those carefully selected problems for which solution is most urgently needed. It was through the recommendation of the committee on geology that the Commission on Petroleum Investigation was ap- pointed, as almost the first action arising out of the work of the Committee on Scientific Research. It was also through the committee on geology and min- eral resources that impetus was given to investigation of existing iron resources, since taken over by the committee on economics. As next in importance to petroleum and iron, the geological committee is now engaged in a study of the state's important resources in manganese, so nec- essary in certain alloys used in steel production. The committee is also working on metallurgical processes, which will make more useful the manganese ores now available. The work on manganese is being con- ducted by three of the men most fully equipped for this investigation, and is done in co-operation with the Federal government and the California State Mining Bureau. This resource of our state is large, and de- serves full exploitation at this time. Through the recommendation of the committee on geology and mineral resources, the Governor, as chair- man of the Council of Defense, appointed a committee to investigate the petroleum resources of California with a view to presenting such information as might SCIENCE AND SHIPS 17T be needed in forming a judgment concerning meas- ures required to place this state in a position to meet emergency conditions. With most praiseworthy energy the committee brought together a carefully prepared statement of existing conditions in the field of petroleum produc- tion in California. It has also presented definite rec- ommendations regarding procedure making it possible to meet the existing emergency, and, at the same time, care for future conservation of our oil supply. The committee prepared its report in well organised form, printed it and distributed copies to all interests con- cerned with the problem, within a remarkably short time following its appointment. This work has re- ceived wide approval and represents one of the most important investigations undertaken as a part of the emergency programme in this country. The committee on zoological investigations has under way a survey of the possible sea-food forms on the California coast. This is giving data on the num- ber of kinds of fish and molluscs available, the rela- tive quantities of each, and the extent to which they have heretofore been used. Through the biological station at La Jolla the committee has under way a careful study of conditions governing the distribu- tion of the tuna and other food fishes of the southern coast. Up to this time we have not known certainly the true nature of the tuna supply as to quantity, as to its normal location, or as to the conditions which govern its movement. A third inquiry which is under way covers investigation of use of fish for fertiliser, hog feed, and chicken feed. It is carried on with the idea that it may be possible, by more careful co-ordina- tion of the work in fish industries, to get a larger and cheaper supply of food for poultry raisers. A fourth problem covers investigation of conditions un- 178 THE NATION AT WAR der which certain sea-foods may be poisonous to men, with a view to making their freer use possible under proper conditions. The work of the committee on psychological inves- tigations has centered on the study of aviation, with the purpose of securing such information as will make it possible to determine from preliminary tests the ultimate fitness or unfitness of men for aeronautic work. Much has been generally reported concerning studies on this subject, but the field is as yet imper- fectly known. Permission was obtained from gov- ernment authorities at Washington and San Diego to carry on a series of experiments at the government aviation school at San Diego. A temporary labora- tory was established at San Diego and experiments were carried on by Professor G. M. Stratton and Mr. Spencer W. Symons. The data so gathered are now being interpreted. Men in the school of aeronautics at the University of California have also been exam- ined and preparations are being made to examine many others from time to time in the psychological laboratory of the University. Professor Warner Brown and fourteen or more advanced students of the University will assist in this work. Out of the large number of emergency problems re- quiring investigation, the committee on medical re- search has given special attention to three. These are: (i) Work on botulism, a particular form of food poisoning originating especially in use of cer- tain kinds of canned vegetables; (2) the study of tri- nitro-toluine poisoning from munition factories; (3) a possible new cure for tuberculosis. The work on botulism, or food poisoning, carried on by Doctor E. C. Dickson of the Stanford Medical School, has been progressing favourably. Doctor Dickson has been able to show that the cold-pack SCIENCE AND SHIPS 179 method of canning vegetables recommended by the Federal Department of Agriculture does not prevent development of bacillus botulinus which causes this poisoning. Several other series of experiments re- lated to the development of this important subject are under way and results will be available in the near future. The study of a possible new cure for tuberculosis is carried on under the direction of Doctor F. P. Gay of the University of California. Experiments on the curative results obtained by use of a substance known as taurine in infected guinea pigs and rabbits are pro- ceeding satisfactorily. These experiments require from four to six months for their completion. As a preliminary application of the experiments to a study of tuberculosis in man, it has been possible to show the absence of poisonous effects of taurine injected into the blood of man, and Doctor Gay has begun pre- liminary treatment of human cases with taurine. This work is facilitated by the discovery of a new process for extraction of taurine from abalones. A consider- able supply of taurine is now being prepared for a study of tuberculosis in human beings. Tuberculosis has become a terrible menace in France, and anything that can be done to reduce its ravages in this emer- gency, or following it, should be advanced. These pages seem to the writer to illustrate with convincing power the fact that the World War is jolting America out of a comatose state of national inefficiency into a unity of organised effort which in itself more than compensates for the cost of the War in blood and treasure. Here in Washington many people have told us how to win the War. Joffre calls for more men, 180 THE NATION AT WAR Hoover says the chief need is meat and wheat, Medill McCormick comes back from the front and says that the War is to be won by huge guns and plenty of them, while our Boy writes home from the engine- room of his "star" submarine chaser that the navy people think "over there" that the War will have to be won by American airplanes, "blinding" the enemy. Who is right ? Probably all. Certainly it is men that must win the War, and our brave troops must always be remembered as incomparably more valuable than machinery or munitions or provisions; but they must all be fed, and supplied with the necessary imple- ments and instruments. Obviously, then, a funda- mental need is for ships. The men lack Peter's gift of walking on the water, the cannon cannot trundle across, the meat and wheat must be transported, even the aircraft cannot fly across the sea. You cannot ship men without ships, and then they must be pro- visioned and munitioned by a continuous shuttling of these ships across the ocean, for it requires at least two million tons of shipping to take care of half-a- million soldiers "over there." To bring such rudimentary facts home to the people, and especially to university students, became one of my special tasks in December, 1917, when I entered the employment at another "dollar a year" of the Industrial Service Department of the Emergency Fleet Corporation. Co-operating with Dr. Frank P. McKib- ben, of Lehigh University, and under the direction of Mr. Meyer Bloomfield, I had the pleasure of assisting SCIENCE AND SHIPS 181 in securing large numbers of students for the ship- yards in a period of serious emergency. Everybody knows of the differences that developed between General Goethals and Mr. William Denman soon after we entered the War, regarding the relative merits of steel and wooden ships. General Goethals, who had been promised an undivided responsibility, ultimately resigned in consequence of a hopeless "dead- lock" resulting from divided responsibility, and the President, after deftly accepting Mr. Denman's resig- nation also, selected Mr. Edward N. Hurley to "boss the job" of bridging the ocean to France. Mr. Hur- ley had the good sense shortly to call to his aid the executive genius of Charles M. Schwab, and now we are really building ships. But nearly eight precious months were sadly wasted, and had it not been for the assistance of England our troops could never have reached France in the nick of time to save the cause of liberty. In his speech early in August, 1918, re- viewing the War, David Lloyd George revealed the fact that of the 305,000 American troops crossing the ocean during the preceding month, 185,000 had been carried in British bottoms. Our Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt, said in Lon- don at about the same time : "The United States owes much to the untiring work of the British Navy, for it is a fact that about sixty per cent of the troop- ships carrying Americans to Europe are British ships, and have been escorted by British men-of-war." 1 Under the new system of centralised authority given * North American Reviews War Weekly, Vol. i, No. 32, p. 3. 182 THE NATION AT WAR to Mr. Hurley, our shipbuilding picture is rapidly brightening. Its later and brighter side is shown by Washington's shipyard report for July, 1918, the latest available information as this book goes to the press : WASHINGTON, Aug. 6. American shipyards launched a greater tonnage during July than during any previous twelve-month period. One hundred and twenty-three ships, totalling 631,944 tons, left the ways. Of the total, sixty-seven vessels were steel, aggre- gating 433,244 tons; fifty-three ships were wood, to- talling 187,700 tons, three composite vessels of wood and steel making up the balance. The July total, which was swelled by the remark- able launching of July 4, was more than double the output of the yards in June. Officials of the Shipping Board believe the July total will be exceeded this month. During July forty-one vessels, totalling 235,025 tons, were completed and delivered to the Shipping Board. Of this number thirty-six were steel vessels of 217,025 tons and five were wooden vessels of 18,000 deadweight tons. If two ships delivered from Japanese yards were counted, the grand total would be forty-three ships of 250,880 deadweight tons. From August, 1917, when the present Shipping Board began operations, up to August i of this year, there have been delivered thirty-seven steel contract vessels having a deadweight tonnage of 245,700 and 210 requisitioned vessels totalling 1,326,156 tons, a grand total of 247 ships aggregating 1,571,856 tons. 1 *N. Y. Tribune, August 7, 1918. CHAPTER XII PERSONALITIES HAVING spent the last ten years in California and the preceding decade in South Carolina, I naturally know more about the public men of these States than of others; and it so happens that they are just now "to the front" to such an extent that the country has a quickened interest in them. The real majority leader of the House, in my judg- ment, is Representative Asbury F. Lever, of South Carolina and an admirable leader he is. Kitchin, of my own native State, is one of those frock-coat affairs that ought long ago to have been relegated to the po- litical junk-heap. Lever, miniature giant that he is a second Alexander H. Stephens? deserves the highest gifts at the hands of his State for his heroic devotion to the South's essential cause, agriculture; and above all for his unswerving, unquestioned loyalty. It meant something for Lever to be loyal. Was he not from the famous Dutch Fork, and did not the disease of Bleaseism, once dominant there, threaten his political overthrow if he dared to speak out for the War? Yet go to the Dutch Fork he did, this weazened wizard, and bearded them and heckled them about the War turning the tables on his hecklers. 183 184 THE NATION AT WAR His dark face illumined with those blazing Hack searchlights of eyes that redeem him from homeliness, he called out to the dupes of "Coley Blease," after he had made them hear his war story : "Here, you! Hans Kraut, what would you have done had you been Wilson? Tell me! And you, Fritz Schmidt, what would you have done in my place? Wouldn't you have supported the President?" There is nothing South Carolinians so much admire as clean grit ; and, like Missourians, they also demand to be shown. Lever had both the case and the cour- age; so he won them, and won them overwhelmingly. It is pleasant to know that there is no man in the House on whom the President relies more steadfastly than on Lever, for he will be true to his trust. It is to be hoped, now that Tillman is dead, that Lever may before long have a place in the Senate, to which Blease the infamous aspires. Pitchfork Ben! What an insult to the character this Rough Diamond wrought upon his granite State that Cole L. Blease should have stirred the baser depths of those rural "masses" whom Tillman first made conscious of their power, and so won a way for his despicable and infinitely dangerous demagoguery through paths which an honest man had blazed. For Tillman was honest, as able. He revolutionised his State in the interest of the common people; writing first a new constitution, and converting South Caro- lina, quite literally, from an oligarchy into a democ- racy. He had his faults; all strong men have them; the greatest of all faults is weakness. He sometimes PERSONALITIES 185 abused his huge power, but the main direction of his strength was ever true, as true as the needle to its star ; and that is the test of a man. Pitchfork Ben! God rest his ruddy soul! Born in 1847 on a ten-thousand acre homestead that had been his family's possession for more than a century and a quarter, this heir of aristocracy over- turned its political rule in South Carolina. A life- long student of history and law, he began his political career in 1885 by a speech at a farmers' convention. The State was startled by his originality and power. Not until four years later, however, did his influence become strong enough to build a legislative platform of reform. From that time forward the State di- vided into Tillmanites and "antis." The "cornfield lawyer," as he liked to call himself, was elected Gov- ernor after a "raw, self-advertising campaign" in which he drove from place to place in a farm wagon "decorated with sheaves of grain, cotton-stalks, corn- tassels, and pea-vines. Often the horses were taken out of the wagon and it was drawn by a hundred or more farmers." After a second term as Governor he was sent to the Senate, to remain there twenty-four years. His most important work in his State, after revolu- tionising it, was the establishment of the Clemson Agricultural and Mechanical College, on the site of Calhoun's old home, at Fort Mill, and the Winthrop Normal and Industrial College for Girls, at Rock Hill. His most important work in the Senate was done in recent years as chairman of the Naval Affairs 186 THE NATION AT WAR Committee ; for "Pitchfork Ben" was no pacifist. He never uttered nobler words than those of 1916, when, answering a charge that the South was giving sec- tional direction to national affairs, he said: "The country belongs to us all and we all belong to it. The men of the North, South, East and West carved it out of the wilderness and made it great. . . . Let us share it with each other, then, and con- serve it, giving to it the best that is in us of brain and brawn and heart." Hiram Johnson revolutionised California almost to the same degree that Tillman revolutionised Carolina. Both States were ruled by oligarchies; one social, the other commercial. The aristocrats "ran" South Caro- lina before Tillman, and the Southern Pacific Railway ran California before Johnson opened his smashing 1910 campaign with a single plank "to kick the Southern Pacific out of politics." Having kicked it out, he kept it out; and, by such constitutional amendments as those involving the initi- ative, referendum, and recall, made it as nearly im- possible as any legislation can for it or any other "big interest" ever to control the State again. Other things he did, one of them certainly unwise. Just as Till- man's great mistake was the Dispensary system for the sale of liquor, Johnson's lay in his failure to pre- vent (in 1913) the enactment of a discriminatory Anti-Alien law. 1 But in spite of this, Johnson was the greatest American Governor of recent years. I express now the same judgment pronounced of him in J See "The Japanese Crisis," Scherer, pp. 97, 115. PERSONALITIES 187 October, 1916, when introducing him in his contest for the Senate to a Los Angeles mass meeting. "Citizens of California," I said, "the very terms in which I address you all at this moment were made possible under the leadership of the great Governor whom it is my privilege to introduce. Instead of laying emphasis on distinctions instead of saying Ladies and Gentlemen we are able in this State under his leadership to address men and women together as citizens; and if the Johnson administration had ac- complished nothing else for human rights this alone would entitle it to fame. "But human rights has been the keynote of numer- ous notable achievements. The Workmen's Compen- sation Act, satisfactory to employer and employee alike, has secured for labour a larger share of life, liberty, and happiness than it hitherto enjoyed, with actual profit and protection to capital. A Railway Commission has worked the miracle of securing fairer service for the people, with the corporations them- selves applauding its fairness and efficiency ! A Hous- ing Commission, proceeding on the salutary principle that prevention is better than cure, wards off the slum and invites the immigrant to a citizenship that shall involve a clean and wholesome home. A system of good roads unites the Sierras with the seas and breaks the barrier of the Tehachepi with a network of State highways built without a breath of scandal or a rumour of waste in such fashion as to win the admiration of the world. Many other such things have been done; and yet the people's purse has been so carefully safe- 188 THE NATION AT WAR guarded that instead of the deficit of $265,000 which Johnson found, to-day we have to our credit $4,500,- ooo of state funds. Best of all: our liberties have been restored to us, and not only restored but secured. "This is the man whom California is willing to lend to the Nation. The Nation needs him. He says in his platform : " 'I shall endeavour to extend to the Nation by fed- eral action what we have given to our State, suffrage for women.' "He says, further: " 'I am for national preparedness a preparedness sufficient to protect our citizens and to preserve our Nation from invasion or aggression. I am not only for this sort of preparedness, but equally I am for the preparedness necessary for both peace and war that preparedness which begins with social health, with so- cial justice, with social conditions which produce men who can be good soldiers because they have had a fair chance to be good and contented citizens.' "Hiram Johnson is not seeking an honour, he is seeking new opportunities of service. As our Sena- tor he will still belong to the State but he will also serve the Nation as the friend of human rights. But to-night we can still claim him affectionately as our Governor. We can greet him, Citizens all, as the greatest of American Governors, Hiram Johnson." CHAPTER XIII PAUL PERIGORD, THE SOLDIER-PRIEST DR. ALBION W. SMALL delivered the com- mencement address at his old alma mater, Colby Col- lege, in the June of 1917. We had just entered the War, after hesitating for two years on the brink. Dr. Small, knowing Prussia as few Americans know it, and consequently convinced of the profound issues in- volved in this War, had not yet wholly escaped from the fear which for two years had oppressed him lest we fail the world in its crisis. "Few native Ameri- cans/' said he, "have more or weightier reasons for gratitude to Germany than I have been accumulating for nearly forty years. None can be more willing in every possible way to acknowledge the debt which can never be discharged. And yet ! And yet ! This will be an intolerable world until the Germans have once and forever recanted, with all it involves, that most hellish heresy that has ever menaced civilisation: There is no God but power, and Prussia is its prophet !" Anxious that America should answer with all her heart and all her soul and all her strength the great moral summons to which at length she had unstopped her ears, Dr. Small introduced his main theme by a 189 190 THE NATION AT WAR beautiful reference to Paul Helie Perigord, as fol- lows: At the first meeting with my class of graduate stu- dents, on the opening day of the summer quarter, 1910, one face held my attention from all the rest. At the time, the only word which I could find for my impression of that face was spectral. It was the type of face which is associated in my imagination with Savonarola and St. Francis of Assisi. At the end of the hour the young man whose face was so unusual introduced himself. In a few words he out- lined his personal history. Educated and consecrated in France as a Roman Catholic priest, he had come to this country with the intention of making it his home. He had received an appointment as professor in an important seminary for the training of priests. With the approval of his archbishop he had decided to devote his summer vacations to further academic work in a subject remote from that of his professor- ship. Therewith an acquaintance began which I cherish as among the most notable of the many close asso- ciations with students during my thirty-six years of college and university teaching. For three successive summer quarters this young man returned to the Uni- versity of Chicago, and at the end of the third quar- ter he received his degree of Master of Arts. Mean- while I had found in him one of the choicest spirits it has ever been my privilege to know. He revealed himself to me in ways which I had never supposed possible to a priest with a layman, and especially with a Protestant. In this acquaintance I learned, what even Bobby Burns may not have suspected, that "A priest's a man for a' that." If nothing had deflected the course of my friend's career, his native and ac- PAUL PERIGORD, THE SOLDIER-PRIEST 191 quired mental and spiritual qualities would doubtless have assured him high rank among American Catho- lics. Early in the autumn of 1914 I was startled, but not surprised, to learn that immediately after the German violation of Belgium my friend had renounced his ecclesiastical prospects, had crossed the Atlantic with all speed, and had enlisted as a soldier of France. At long intervals he sent me samples of the laconic postal- card messages permitted to soldiers: He was well and hoped to be sent to the front soon; he had been wounded, but was well again and hoping to rejoin his company in the trenches; he had been wounded again and probably disqualified for further fighting; he had regained strength enough to be serving as interpreter at staff headquarters; and in January of this year (1917) came a long letter, the leading theme of which was this: "Until lately I have felt that I had no desire ever to see my adopted country again. But I have reconsidered. After the war the problem will remain, Can America save her soul? I now in- tend to return, if I live, after I can render no more service here (in France), and spend the rest of my life trying to help work out that salvation." And then Dr. Small adds: "This soldier of Jesus Christ, detailed for service at the French front of the Army of the Prince of Peace, was right. For Americans, everything else in the present world-crisis is incidental to the problem: Will America evade or accept the moral issue which Germany has forced upon the world, and thus lose or save her soul?"* 1 "Americans and the World Crisis," A. W. Small, in 'Ameri- can Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, pp. 146-147. 192 THE NATION AT WAR Thanks be to God, America has accepted the moral issue involved in the Great War. She has saved her soul. For a year, in every part of this immense coun- try, I have seen the spiritual thermometer of our peo- ple steadily rising, until now it is at blood heat. And hardly any man has contributed more to this result than the young Savonarola of France who intended, had we not gone into the War, to become a missioner to us, when it should close, in behalf of our national soul. The French High Commission brought him to America, after his last terrible wounding, in 1917; and gave his services free of charge to the Committee on Public Information. Co-operating with the Speakers' Bureau of this Committee, the Council of Defense sent Perigord to the War Conferences organised throughout the country, of which I have already told. Of the countless valuable experiences that came to me out of my field-agent's year, the experience of ac- quaintance with him, and finally of intimate friend- ship, is what I value most highly. He is thirty-five years old now, and he came to this country when twenty. Not content with his graduate work at Chicago and other American universities, he was studying at Harvard when news came that France was invaded. A native of Orleans, this ardent lover of France literally left his books scattered open on his study table, and caught the first ship sailing for Eu- rope after war was declared. Finding, on arrival in France, no chaplaincies vacant, he at once enlisted in the infantry, thinking that the men in the trenches PAUL PERIGORD, THE SOLDIER-PRIEST 193 might be those that would chiefly need succour. "Father Perigord" indeed he became to the boys of his regiment, this priest who enlisted as a private. Boys they were in very truth : ranging from eighteen to twenty-four. He has spoken in all of our States, and no one that heard him can forget his story of these French boys at Verdun. "You remember the German Crown Prince," he quaintly asks; "that great Prince, who so far had taken only portraits and furniture from French dwell- ings and castles, but decided that he would now take a city ? He thought it would be nice to take it on our French national day, July 14; very thoughtful of him! But we decided to do all we could to make it hard for him. For three days and three nights before his at- tack there was the most terrible shelling; then wave after wave of gas, to kill those who had not been caught by the shelling. You know what a brigade is : two regiments of three thousand soldiers each. Well, early on the morning of July 13 these six thousand boys, from eighteen to twenty-four years old, knelt down to receive my blessing ; and it was a solemn mo- ment, for I knew that many of them would never re- turn, and I did not know whether I myself should return or not. "About nine o'clock on the morning of July 13 the first unit of the German attack charged up the hill of Verdun; but we charged down on them and drove them back. At noon a new unit charged ; and the boys drove them back also. At three o'clock a fresh unit charged ; and the boys were so tired that an entire Ger- THE NATION AT WAR man company entered the ditches of the fort. Then our General sent for me, and he said, 'What shall we do? The reserves cannot come until five o'clock, and the Germans are in the ditches of the fort!' I said: 'You come see the boys, General; they are all ready to die for France, and France can ask no more of her sons. Let us charge once more.' "So we charged down the hill, and we took the German company prisoners, those whom we did not kill ; and at five o'clock the reserves came, and the city of Verdun was forever saved. "So the Crown Prince, who had his mail sent to Verdun, had to have it sent back again, with the no- tice, 'Has not yet arrived!' But of the six thousand boys who received my blessing that morning only fif- teen hundred were left; and the first thing they did was to ask for a thanksgiving service, kneeling down there, because their lives had been spared. And yet people sometimes say that France is a faithless na- tion!" It was at Vimy Ridge that Lieutenant Perigord re- ceived his commission, on the field, under the most dramatic conditions. He tells of it with the most perfect modesty, and by request of our Secretary of War. Mr. Baker told him that there is only one trouble with our soldiers, and that is, they all want to be officers; none of them wish to be privates. The distinguished Irishman, T. P. O'Connor, happened to be present, and he remarked : "Why, Mr. Secretary, that is just like the Irish; PAUL PERIGORD, THE SOLDIER-PRIEST 195 we have never been able to get up a band in Ireland, because all the musicians want to be leaders." It was at Vimy Ridge that the Germans used gas for the first time, and their victims happened to be the Canadians. The Canadians had no masks, and so some of them ran away. But when the British and Australians teased them, the Canadians answered: "Oh, that is all very well ; but the Germans know our mettle, and they know that when they want to whip us they have to give us gas first !" In those early days the French officers still wore their gay uniforms, instead of the "horizon blue" that now melts into the landscape. They made daz- zling targets, and as the Germans gave orders to shoot the officers first, many of them were shot down. Of the sixty-two officers promoted with the Lieutenant only two are now on active duty; the others have all been killed or otherwise put out of action. At Vimy Ridge, when the German Imperial Guard broke through the French lines, the company in which Perigord was a private, being billeted in a town near by, happened to become the leading company in re- sisting the German charge. His Captain, shot through the right lung, handed him his sword, and told him to take command of the company a sword which the Captain himself, the last remaining officer of the company, had received from his dying officer at the Marne. So Perigord summoned the boys to another charge, and "because these boys were so brave and daring," they attacked the Germans successfully and brought back with them all that was left of that Im- 196 THE NATION AT WAR perial Guard unit. Then when the General next came riding along he said : "Where are the officers, and whence this sword?" "So I told him how I had received the sword, and then he said to me, very graciously: " 'Well, my friend, you keep the sword, and you keep the company.' "So that is how I got my commission; and your Secretary of War has asked me to say wherever I go that he has a commission for any Sammie that does the same." Lieutenant Perigord, by the way, confirms the in- teresting story of the French origin of this word Sam- mie. The French first called our soldiers "Teddies" ; but when our troops began to disembark in large num- bers the French people called out eagerly: "Les amis! les amis!" The American boys, none too sure of their French, mistook the crowd's pronunciation of "friends" for a new nickname, "Sammy"; it amused them, and is rapidly embedding itself in the new international war language with "Tommy" and "poilu" and "boche." I am not sure but that the most beautiful story Perigord tells (and he keeps it for rare occasions) is of Joan of Arc and her voices. The American troops, as he says, have been assigned to the sector of Lor- raine, because the French people like to give the United States the best of everything. "When we sent you one of our Generals to visit you we did not send Pe- tain or Castelnau; we sent you Field Marshal Joffre." And so in the same way they have given us the PAUL PERIGORD, THE SOLDIER-PRIEST 197 sector of Lorraine, with the Valley of Domremy in it, because they thought we should like to be charged with the guardianship of the home of Joan of Arc. Then Perigord adds, with a twinkle: "Besides, we think that when the American boys give Lorraine back to us, it will be a good deal larger than when we gave it to them!" Well, two Sammies were idly discussing, one day, in skeptical fashion, the story of Joan and her voices. "Do you think she really heard them?" one of them asked of the other. "No"; he was sure it was only a sweet old story, the other replied. But just then a French officer came riding along, and one of the Americans called out to him : "How about Joan of Arc and her voices? Do you think she really heard them?" "But, yes!" smiled back the French officer for it happened that just as the question was asked the clear notes of an American bugle were heard as the Amer- ican troops came marching down the Vale of Dom- remy: "Listen! there are her voices now!" And so these people of exquisite sentiment, as of unsurpassable valour, call America their new Joan of Arc. Perhaps equally beautiful is that letter which Peri- gord frequently reads to his audiences, written by Odette Gastinel, a thirteen-year-old school girl in France, to the children of New York. It has to do with the tiny river of Yser, on the sides of which French and Germans lined up in battle array early in 198 THE NATION AT WAR the War, facing one another; and here is his trans- lation : "It was only a little river, almost a brook. It was called the Yser. One could talk from one side to the other without raising one's voice, and the birds could fly over it with one sweep of their wings. And on the two banks there were millions of men, the one group turned to the other, eye to eye. But the distance which separated them was greater than the stars in the sky; it was the distance which separates right from injustice. "The ocean is so great that the sea-gulls do not care to cross it. During seven days and seven nights the great steamships of America, going at full speed, drive through the deep waters, before the lighthouses of France come into view. But from one side to the other the hearts are touching." Perigord believes that the last weeks of July, 1918, shall mean more to the American people than any other period in our history since the Civil War. Then it was that our stalwart soldiers, clean of limb, clear of eye, surpassed our fondest hopes and dreams of them; showing the mettle of their grandsires; driving against the German lines with a verve and a dash, an audacity and intelligent resourcefulness, and above all with an unflinching courage, that atoned (at least against weary and battle-worn troops) for lack of experience and training. This astonishing spectacle gave Europe, including even the Germans, a new view of us, enormously enlarging our prestige. It infused fresh blood into France. But beyond this PAUL PERIGORD, THE SOLDIER-PRIEST 199 it gave us ourselves a new self-respect, and will bring us a new lease of life. Our boys are sometimes too impetuous. Instead of timing themselves to the slow gait necessary so as not to reach their own barrage ahead of time, they are likely to go "on the jump," and thus encounter the danger of military suicide. One day, after fre- quent remonstrances to the American officer whom he was guiding with American troops on the march to their first barrage, a French officer lost his temper, and called out: i "Can't you hold back your men ?" Whereupon the exasperated American officer re- torted : "Hold them back, hell ! These troops are from Kan- sas!" The Lieutenant can be most amusing. Who that heard it can forget his daring story of "the delousing hospital" ? "We take care of your boys now, but at the be- ginning of the War there were hardships. I suppose that for the first three years of the War I did not sleep in a bed more than forty times. And for twenty-one days I had to go without washing even my hands. I told that to a little boy in Kansas and he said : 'My ! weren't you lucky?' But we were not lucky; for if you should go twenty-one days without washing you would soon have about yourselves a good deal more company than you'd ever care for. And so we had to establish delousing hospitals. The first boys who came back from them told wonderful stories: they 200 THE NATION AT WAR had had clean beds to sleep in, and good food, and rest; a whole week's vacation. So all the boys wanted to go to the delousing hospital. But in order to go you have to qualify; there was an examination! So the boys that hadn't any, would ask the others: 'Have you got some? Won't you give me a couple?' But the boys that had them became wise, and bye-and- bye they said: 'Oh, I'm not giving them away; I'm selling them !' And so it is we've had to stop sending the boys to a delousing hospital!" Amusing, too, is his story of General Pershing and the mamselle taxi-driver, which he tells to show, good- humouredly, how late we were getting in "but, thanks to God, not too late!" They have women chauffeurs now in Paris, because there are not men enough to work and fight, too. So General Pershing was standing one day, watch in hand, waiting for mamselle of the taxi; to whom, when at length she whirled up, he said : "Mademoiselle, you are three minutes late!" Whereupon the little lady, smiling sweetly, said to him: "But, General! you were three years late!" Perigord almost invariably begins his address by telling of what the French people call "the best speech of the War"; when Pershing, at Lafayette's tomb, made no oration, but merely bowed his head and said simply : "Lafayette! we are here!" God knows we came none too soon. France has mobilised seven million men; if we mobilised in pro- PAUL PERIGORD, THE SOLDIER-PRIEST 201 portion we should call nearly eighteen million troops to the colours. Of these seven million Frenchmen 1,400,000 are slain! Should these dead pass across the stage, four abreast, and marching at regular mili- tary gait, it would take them twelve days and twelve nights to pass by. And yet, so strong is the spirit of the women of France, that one striking incident may be cited as typical of many. Perigord happened to be serving as colour-bearer while his regiment marched through a village. An old woman ran out from the crowd, knelt on the ground, and buried her face in the folds of the flag, kissing its fringe. "What is it, mother?" gently asked the Colonel of the regiment as Perigord came to a pause with the flag. Then she handed the Colonel a letter, which she had just received, telling of the death of her fourth and last child on the battlefield ; and she was a widow. Explaining her strange act in checking the colour- bearer, she uttered the supremely beautiful words: "I have given all to France ; her flag is my only love ; but how proud I am of my flag!" The French love the American flag, now, second only to their own. Perigord tells of the little girl in Philadelphia, where our very first flag was made, making an American flag herself and sending it over to France. Paris claimed it ; and affixed it to the dome of the City Hall, above the flags of the other Allies, above the French flag itself and then Paris said to the rest of the world : "The great battle for democ- racy is about to be won!" 202 THE NATION AT WAR While always paying an eloquent tribute to Presi- dent Wilson as the world-spokesman of democracy, this Soldier-Priest, loyal to all the facts of our recent history, tells his audiences without flinching what they thought "over there" about the phrase, "Too proud to fight." Nor does he forget a tribute to Roosevelt as the sturdy apostle of preparedness and as "the ideal American father." The tensest part of his speech is always toward its conclusion, when you can almost hear, as it were, the excited pulsebeats of his audience, and detect their nervous pallour, as Perigord fearlessly tells us that had we not entered the War we never again could have sung of America as "the home of the brave," nor yet as "the land of the free." "Oceans to-day are not barriers, they are bridges. And if the British navy were not standing to-day in the Atlantic Ocean and the French soldiers dying you cannot imagine the devastation that would come to your shores! "I know how dreamers have told you in good faith, but dangerous dreamers nevertheless that you should have waited till your shores were invaded, when ten million men would spring to their feet. But ten million men, my friends, are a crowd, a mob, to be mown down like grass before the scythe of war. "Besides, have you not been invaded, many times? not materially, but spiritually, which is far worse. Belgium was materially invaded, but Belgium has never been spiritually invaded. Is it not true that these invasions over here went so far that the German PAUL PERIGORD, THE SOLDIER-PRIEST 203 ambassador in Washington dared pluck three stars from your flag, and hand them over to a would-be enemy on your Southern border, offering to finance the war, and intriguing with your powerful neighbour on the East to attack you on those Eastern shores while planning another attack on you from the West? This is not imagination, this is history ; and far worse you shall know after this War is over. "But, be proud, Americans ! for you have redeemed yourselves, and can hand down to your children that flag, the purest of all the flags of the world, unsullied of the stain that forevermore must have dishonoured it had you not heeded the summons to duty. "And, believe me, the War shall not be ended until it is ended right. What you see now in Europe is but the first act of a play and this is the voice of every single man in the trenches! the first act of a play that will not be over until the armies of the Allies have crossed the Rhine!" At Hartford, where we had our last meeting to- gether, this flaming evangel of France closed his ap- peal with these "words from the dead," written by a soldier in the trenches : In Flanders fields the poppies grow Between the crosses, row by row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly, Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the dead. Short days ago We loved, felt dawn, saw sunsets glow, Loved and were loved. To-day we lie In Flanders fields. 204 THE NATION AT WAR Take up our quarrel with the foe! To you, from falling hands, we throw The torch. Be yours to hold it high ! If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields. He made his speech that evening in Hartford under great stress of emotion; for just before we left the Club for the immense mass meetings (three thousand people in the theatre and two thousand outside), he showed me a letter that was awaiting him on our re- turn from our tour through New England, advising him that the eight lads he loved most dearly, the eight lads he had trained with fatherly love and sol- dierly devotion to be officers, had every one been slain in the recent German advance. There was another letter, too, summoning him to return to his regiment, the fourteenth infantry, within two weeks. Although his last wounds had been so terrible that for a month he was completely blind and for three months totally paralysed, he had felt, here of late, that he was well enough to go back to the trenches, and had himself requested reassignment. So he is answering the voices of his dead. CHAPTER XIV AMERICA TO-MORROW, TALLEYRAND once said that there is a force in the world greater than all kings, all cabinets, all par- liaments combined, and that force is public opinion. Talleyrand's epigram presupposes the organisation of public opinion. That is precisely what a democracy is government by organised public opinion ; "govern- ment of the people, by the people, for the people," * instead of government by a caste, a camarilla, or a Kaiser. There was never a time in our history when it was so needful to remind ourselves of this fact, or when it has been more important for the Nation to nerve its resolution with a consciousness of what public opinion can do. The President's most convincing tribute to its power is not found in such eloquent phrases as "pitiless publicity," with context, 2 but in the remark- able changes in his own point of view toward the War. And, by the same token, that insidious but widespread influence toward an inconclusive peace that constitutes 1 Lincoln in uttering those great simple words did not em- phasise the three prepositions, he emphasised with ever-increas- ing emphasis the word "people." "See, for example, "The New Freedom," p. 115, ff. 205 206 THE NATION AT WAR our gravest menace at this moment will vanish if an intelligent and determined public opinion be formed in this country to demand that no peace shall be made with Germany until the objects for which we and the Allies are fighting have been unquestionably and per- manently obtained. By all means peace must then be fair and just to all; America, when the time comes, must emulate her great Father by being "first in peace" but, until that time is clearly come, public opinion must sternly keep her "first in war." The formation of public opinion depends of course on freedom of loyal speech, on the right of constructive criticism. As Mr. Elihu Root pointed out in his great address on "The Duties of the Citizen," debate on the subject whether our entrance into the War be right or wrong must cease the moment we enter. "A nation which declares war and goes on discussing whether it ought to have declared war or not is impotent, para- lysed, imbecile." On the other hand, constructive criti- cism in behalf of winning the War is enjoined by a public duty quite as imperative as that which inhibits disloyalty. President Wilson can "imagine no greater disservice" than to deny to the people of a free Re- public like our own their indisputable prerogatives, and says : "While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in the crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of pa- triotic and intelligent criticism." Now, America is afflicted "in spots" with a malady of intellectual hook-worm, complicated with pernicious moral anaemia, that superinduces in its somewhat nu- AMERICA TO-MORROW 207 merous victims (our self-styled "Intelligentsia") a contagious preachment against the hatred and denun- ciation of evil. If a personal reference is pardonable, let me illustrate by the fact that I myself have been criticised by one or two doctrinaire journals as a "hater" of Hearstism. Of course I hate Mr. Hearst's works, and all his ways; if I did not I should be ashamed of myself. And it is a very insidious sort of deviltry indeed that teaches that to hate evil is wrong. I find nothing of this sort of teaching in the New Testament, whose pages are of much ruddier hue than Mr. George Creel's "Quatrains of Christ." The Son of Man blazed out in righteous wrath against all spiritual wickedness in high places; never was there such a master of denunciation and invective as He. He hated Pharisaism and fraud and slimy deceit with all the ardour of His holy soul; and, if St. John is any true interpreter of His spirit, He hated the Laodiceans, who were neither cold nor hot, and so He would have spued them out of His mouth! We need, surely, not an influx of white corpuscles into the veins of our body politic, but, more than almost anything else in the world, an infusion of red-blooded courage. We need, too, now as always, that acute "knowledge of good and evil" acquired in the Garden of Eden itself, and any subtle propa- ganda to blunt the edge of this knowledge is a sin- ister menace to our national life. It is something new in the history of the 'world, this pernicious anaemia of the spirit. Sentimentalists of both sexes fall an easy prey to its soft infection; and Uncle Sam is in- 208 THE NATION AT WAR deed a sick giant unless the tonic of an iron public will shall be the antidote to its poison. I call attention to this pious fraud that infects some of our political writings, for the reason that America to-morrow will require as never before to exercise a courageous discrimination regarding its public men and public measures. If such men as Vardaman and Hardwick and Blease are to sit in the Senate from the South, or if La Follette is returned from Wisconsin or Gronna from North Dakota or Reed from Mis- souri, then do not the voters in those States thereby prove their unfitness for the critical needs of the hour? Public discrimination must exercise itself to set bet- ter men in our seats of authority, and it must also accept the stern task of improving our legislative ma- chinery. Of the last regular session of Congress be- fore we entered the War one of our national reviews wrote so trenchantly that its words cut themselves into the memory by the very force of their whiplash hyperbole. "It was garrulous, wasteful, amorphous, frivolous and foolish," wrote Mr. Walter Lippmann of that Congress. 1 "It wasted money like a drunken sailor and time like a babbling idiot. It could not think, it would not imagine, it could not organise, it could not act. It squabbled over trifles, grunted and rooted, and left the country in chaos. It spoiled what- ever it touched, obstructed everything it was asked to assist, attended to everybody's business but its own. It conducted raiding parties against the treasury, 1 The New Republic, March 10, 1917. AMERICA TO-MORROW 209 against the Administration, it died with the curse of a nation upon it, a soiled and debauched thing." Anxious to correct such abuses, this critic con- tinues : "No mere reform which introduces cloture into the Senate rules will make Congress a decent instrument of democracy. The evil is far deeper, arising in the last analysis from the Constitution itself. We have tried to construct a Government in which leadership is divorced from responsibility, a Government in which those who make the laws have no organic rela- tion to those who execute them, a Government in which head, heart and limbs are separate bodies without in- ternal connection. And because no Government is workable on that principle, we have seen the growth behind the legal Government of a party system which lives as a parasite upon the Government, is fed by pork, held together by patronage; which has created out of the separation of powers a perilous confusion of powers. The thing has broken down at last, as all observers knew it would, and we are now in a sit- uation where only the most revolutionary changes in the congressional system can save representative gov- ernment in America." While the Congresses succeeding the one so vio- lently criticised have been vastly better, and have sup- ported the Administration's war measures without stint, Americans need soberly to consider these sug- gestions of Governmental reform. Of course everything that is written of "America to-morrow" presupposes that we win the present War; 210 THE NATION AT WAR for if the Central Powers win, democracy will perish from the earth. A democracy is not necessarily a re- public ; the democracy of England is more pliable and responsive than our own. The English-speaking peo- ple originated and developed the democracy of modern times, Runnymede and Marston Moor and Bunker Hill being consecutive milestones in its progress, Crom- well and Washington and Lincoln belonging to one unbroken historical succession. But the French I4th of July means as much to modern democracy as our own 4th of July; Mazzini and Garibaldi and Cavour are cousins germane to the great English-speaking line ; and Japan, with constitutional government, is be- coming progressively democratic in spirit, while poor Russia has swung for the moment into anarchy, a pseudo-democracy gone mad. You have a complete institutional antithesis in the lining up of this War. Prussia? So long ago as April u, 1847, Frederic William IV., in a speech from the Prussian Throne, snapped his fingers at "all written constitutions" as being "only scraps of paper." So recently as in 1914, in his Proclamation to the Army of the East, William II. declared: "The spirit of the Lord has descended upon ME because I am the Emperor of the Germans ! I am the instrument of the Almighty. / am His sword, His agent! Woe and death to all those who shall oppose MY will ! Woe and death to those who do not believe in MY mission! Woe and death to the cow- ards! Let them perish, all the enemies of the Ger- man people! God demands their destruction, God who, by MY mouth, bids you to do His will !" AMERICA TO-MORROW And the German people cried, Amen! while the German army rushed to spread with fire and sword the Kultur-gospel of this new Mahomet, whose mailed fist seeks to strike democracy a mortal blow upon the heart. If Germany wins, freedom perishes, the individual is enslaved to the State. One of the most learned of German scholars, long a resident but never a citizen of this country, in comparing their and our theories of government, says: "For the German, the State is not for the individ- uals, but the individuals for the State. It is the same contrast which gives to every realm of German civili- sation its deepest meaning. The American view is that science and art and law, like the State, exist for the good of the individual persons; their value is to serve them (the people). The Germans believe that science and art and law and State are valuable in themselves, and that the highest glory of the indi- vidual is to serve those eternal values." It is significantly added that "the very scope of the German idea can afford no smaller sphere than the world itself" a world in which the individual be- comes a mere cog in a machine more remorseless and more insatiate than all the inhuman Tamerlanes of history. As for us "we must be free or die who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke and hold the faith that Milton held." If Germany wins, democracy vanishes, liberty per- 312 THE NATION AT WAR ishes from the earth, and not only so, but the Christian religion itself disappears. The Ten Commandments will then make way for the "Ten Iron Command- ments of the German Soldiers," formulated and pro- mulgated by General von der Goltz, and obeyed re- morselessly by German soldiers in the ravaged fields of France and the ravished homes of Belgium. "Grow hard, warriors!" say these new "iron commandments" ; "The soldier must be hard ! It is better to let a hun- dred women and children belonging to the enemy die of hunger than to let a single German soldier suffer its pangs." With modern Prussia the beatitudes have become a derision, the Sermon on the Mount a laugh- ing-stock, the 1 3th chapter of Corinthians is but sound- ing brass and tinkling cymbals, and the iron cross blasphemes the cross of Calvary. Out of their own mouths do we judge them. The spirit even of Ger- man clergymen is fairly expressed by what Pastor D. Baumgarten said in exultation over the Lusitania in- cident: "Any one who cannot bring himself to ap- prove from the bottom of his heart the sinking of the Lusitania . . . and give himself up to honest joy at this victorious exploit of German defensive power such an one we deem no true German." The events of recent months renew the optimism that we had all but lost in the dark latter days of last March. While on constant guard against over-opti- mism, while resolved that no seeming success shall lead us to abate one jot or tittle of endeavour until security shall be doubly sure, we are nevertheless warranted AMERICA TO-MORROW in turning again to the prospect of a world set free, a new world, the world of to-morrow, far different from the world that has been. Let us plan, then, to set our national house in good order for the home- coming of the boys two years hence or even ten years hence, when they return to a new America. Of one thing- we may feel very certain: they will bring with them an expansive and regenerative force that America stands sorely in need of. It is a thrilling thing that America at last may belong to the world. Accustomed as we have been to ridicule the insularity of England^ we have been blind to the fact of our own continental, colossal provincialism, compared with which "right little, tight little" England, one some- times thinks, is Cosmopolis itself. Our great teacher Shakespeare has taught us that "there is some soul of goodness in things evil, would men observingly dis- til it out." So even out of this terrible War, if it ends aright, there will come marching back to us the stal- wart builders of a new Republic enriched by inten- sive experience, ennobled by hardship and sacrifice, their sympathies deepened by a common suffering with other kindred peoples that are just as good as we are, to say the least ; bringing, let us trust, a new explosive force that will shatter our smug and complacent pro- vincialism to atoms, and so set us free to be neighbours to the world of our kin. It is true of nations as of men that whosoever would find his life shall lose it. Hitherto we have been abiding alone; henceforth we shall have life more abundantly through a common THE NATION AT WAR touch with our spiritual kin among mankind. Just as the returning Crusaders of Europe, illumined by the educative values of travel and inspired by sacrificial service in a holy cause, were precursors of the great Renaissance, so let us hope that our own returning Crusaders will find us ready for some mighty Revival in common with our kin across the sea. Already we clasp hands with our Mother land. The virtual alliance in which we find ourselves with Eng- land is a logical conclusion far too long delayed. Let me repeat that it is only the shallowest and narrowest view of history that regards our Revolutionary War as other than one in the long sequence of the revolts of English-speaking people against tyrants. The American colonists were predominantly and essentially Englishmen, removed merely by the accident of dis- tance from the soil enriched by the blood of their fathers as they fought with other liberty-loving Eng- lishmen to set up milestones along the path they helped to blaze in behalf of Anglo-Saxon democracy. So in that war that we call our own Revolution not even Patrick Henry himself was more eloquent in the Amer- ican interest than Burke and Pitt in the British Parlia- ment, as we made common cause with those fine pa- triots against the Hanoverian King George III., with his petty but intolerable tyrannies, supported by his mercenary Hessian soldiers. Just as we claim Hamp- den, England claims Washington, and Yorktown itself was but an overseas victory for British democracy. We are bone of her bone, our Mother England; our AMERICA TO-MORROW 215 traditions are wrought from her fibre, as our speech is a gift from her tongue. 1 1 Contemporary "German-Americans" may read to advantage this quaint letter written in 1695 by the German colonist Pas- torius to his children: "Dear Children, John, Samuel and Henry Pastorius : Though you are of high Dutch Parents, yet remember that your father was Naturalised, and ye born in an English colony. Conse- quently each of you Anglus Natus an Englishman by birth. Therefore it would be a shame for you if you should be ignorant of the English Tongue, the Tongue of your Countrymen; but that you may learn the better I have left a book for you both, and commend the same to your reiterated perusal. If you should not get much of the Latin, nevertheless read ye the English part oftentimes OVER AND OVER AND OVER. And I assure you that Semper aliquid hcerabit." Courteously furnished by Elsie Singmaster, who said in a letter to the author (July 24, 1918) : "The loyalty of the early immigrants is shown chiefly, it seems to me, by their active participation in the life of the colonies. Pastorius expresses it clearly in this letter; Conrad Weiser showed it not only in his extraordinary services to the colony, but in various recorded expressions, for instance: " 'Permit me to put you (the German settlers) in mind that as we for the most part retired into this country for peace and safety's sake and to get our living easier than in Ger- many, we not only have obtained our ends in all this, but we have also been well received and protected by the governors of this province, especially by the present governor, and it is not long since his majesty of Great Britain by an act of his parliament invested us (German) Protestants upon very easy terms with so many privileges and liberties whatsoever that a native born Englishman can enjoy.' " "In another letter he expresses his admiration for English law. "I see no evidence that even the resistance of the 'Pennsyl- vania Germans' to some colonial regulations was accompanied by any feeling of loyalty toward the Fatherland from which they had fled. That the Kaiser should ever have dreamed that 216 THE NATION AT WAR On the 4th of July, 1914, I happened to be coming home from England a month to the day before the Great War unexpectedly opened. As passengers will, the travellers on that ill-fated Arabic (later torpedoed by a lawless German submarine) arranged a 4th of July celebration. This one had peculiar significance, because our two countries were celebrating their cen- tennial of peace; it was just a hundred years since the signing of the Treaty of Ghent. So, as my own trivial contribution to that Anglo-American evening on ship- board, I wrote a few verses that now seem to me, in spite of their crudeness, weighted with momentous meaning. For my jingle of verses, framed as they are on a memory of the Landseer sculpture of lions in Trafalgar Square, were, although I did 'not dream of such a thing then, a prophecy ; and surely it is a glori- ous "soul of goodness" in the evil of this War that words so lightly figurative four years ago have, by this War, been made most literal : the descendants of these voluntary exiles should feel loyalty toward a country which did not really exist in 1700 was ab- surd. The fact that they continued to speak German had no significance for his cause. "I know of 'pro-Germans' among the Pennsylvania Ger- mans, but they are few and lack judgment in other ways. The Kaiser would be dumbfounded to hear himself denounced in his own tongue though perhaps he is beginning to suspect now the real state of affairs. A few weeks ago an acquaint- ance of my father said to him in Pennsylvania German, 'I am appalled when I think of my boys fighting the brutal Ger- mans. You and I know what the foreign Germans who have lived in this village are like.' " AMERICA TO-MORROW 217 The lion throned in his island home Looks wistfully out to sea With a touch of grace On his battle-scarred face And a mellower majesty As he broods on the cubs That have fared them forth To the uttermost ends of the earth- India, Africa, Canada, Australia, and Arctic firth But chiefly on him of the eldest birth With a hemisphere for his home Who fought his sire With passionate ire And set up a rule of his own. A hundred years in a lion's life Is a span, could he speak as man; The old lion deems it but yesterday Since the rule of the whelp began; And anger dies in a lion's heart With the moment that gives it birth; So the old sire yearns toward the lusty cub That conquered half of the earth. And the whelp, who a hundred years agone In heat with his father strove His heart has cooled ; and has warmed again, And the warmth is the warmth of love. So these lions who guard the Atlantic sea Have vowed o'er its bosom vast That blood is thicker than waters be, And sealed a truce that shall last Till men with mirth Shall acclaim one birth 218 THE NATION AT WAR "All peoples of one blood be" When the knowledge of God Shall cover the earth As the waters cover the sea. The great Englishman Joseph Chamberlain prophet- ically said of us in 1898: "There is a powerful and generous nation. They speak our language. They are bred of our race. Their laws, their literature, their standpoint upon every question, are the same as ours . . . the more cordial, the fuller and the more definite these arrangements are, with the consent of both peo- ples, the better it will be for both and for the world ; and I even go so far as to say that, terrible as war may be, even war itself would be cheaply purchased if, in a great and noble cause, the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack should wave together over an Anglo-Saxon Alliance." Of course we should not limit our alliance to Eng- land ; it should include all of the genuine democracies of the world. Most of all we should conclude forever an insepar- able alliance with our sister Republic, la belle France! It is a "soul of goodness" in the evil of this War that America, long blind, is at last awake to the spiritual beauty of her twin sister across the Atlantic. "Friv- olous," "frail," even "decadent," we have called her; to realise now, in the incandescent light of this War, that what we called frivolity is but the laughing, rip- pling surface of a nobility as deep as the ocean that what we called frailty was but her gay "camouflage" AMERICA TO-MORROW 219 for sinews of unbending steel and that, instead of decadence, France has since 1870 enjoyed a renais- sance, has risen and climbed and stood upon glorious resurrection heights from which now she beckons, and bids us to climb up and stand at her side. To com- memorate the centenary of our independence she sent her great bronze gift across the water and stood it up in New York harbour. We are now sending our boys by the million to aid her in the eternal establishment of her own independence, and to aid her further in her gigantic task of setting up on the watch-towers of Europe her own radiant and heroic monument of lib- erty enlightening the world. Just as this War has already established us in new international relations, in new relations toward people of other lands separated from us by oceans, so when the boys come marching home let us hope they will bring with them a new intelligence and a quickened spirit that will inspire us to fairer and more intelli- gent relations with people of other lands that seek whole-heartedly to become naturalised citizens of our own. "In the last decade, over 10,000,000 immigrants entered the United States with presumed intent to make this their home and the land of their devotion. Three millions returned to Europe after completing varied terms of labour, and of the seven millions re- maining, only two and a half millions have given formal evidence of any desire for citizenship. Two- thirds of the seven millions have never learned the English language [the language of Washington and Lincoln] with any degree of mastery, nor is the money 320 THE NATION AT WAR earned by this army of foreigners invested in the United States or even deposited in American banks. In some years the amount sent abroad by aliens has reached the huge total of $300,000,000. One-third quitting the land that was to have been their home, two-thirds holding aloof from citizenship and common interest, two-thirds unable or unwilling to learn the tongue of their adopted country, and the great ma- jority rushing their savings back to Europe! No record of failure was ever written so plainly." 1 The melting-pot has not been melting. Let us be sure that the trouble is not altogether in the material that has poured into the pot; the trouble is largely in our failure to feed with the prepared fuel of foresight that flaming warmth of brotherhood which alone can melt and transmute and purify many peoples into one, and make true our motto, "E pluribus unum." The War has brought us to a sharp national conscious- ness of the menace involved in huge masses of un- assimilated human material; it must quicken our na- tional conscience to action, so that by wisely consid- ered laws we may restrict immigration to assimilable quantities, and then protect and treat in a spirit of wise fostering brotherhood the so-called aliens ad- mitted. At present, commissaries rob them, we are told, contractors cheat them, and even the courts and the lawyers are permitted to confuse and defeat them when they have recourse to our institutions for justice. "Am I my brother's keeper?" that was the question "George Creel in "The Hopes of the Hyphenated," in the Century Magazine, 1915. AMERICA TO-MORROW of Cain. When our Crusaders come back from the front let us hope they will quicken in us a new spirit. With our broader international vision let us take up that fine old saying of the Latin poet Terence : "I am a human, and nothing that is human can be alien to me" and, paraphrasing it to apply to our own in- ternal internationalism, take as our motto the words: "I am an American; and no one seeking to be an American can be an alien to me." America to-morrow must be humanised. Clouds loom ominous along the horizon, and only the sunlight of brotherhood can give them silver linings. There is one cloud that does not need to be looked for; it is larger than the shadow of a man's hand, and that is the way it is shaped; it is the problem of labour. Labour has awakened to a new consciousness of its power in consequence of this War in a manner to challenge our highest constructive thought and our widest sympathies. "Hands," you may depend upon it, will never be mere hands again; there are brains and hearts behind them, with a sense of rights and of wrongs, with a newly aroused dignity, with vision, and with a rightful demand for brotherhood. Con- descension on the part of capital must give way to comradeship, patronage must be supplanted by partner- ship, class and mass must vanish in the meeting of man with man. America to-morrow must be humanised. Science must be humanised. "The scholar's taper in his room on high shall be a star to pierce the utmost dark, and guide poor men." Religion must be humanised. 222 THE NATION AT WAR Squarely opposed to the Antichrist dogma of Prus- sian ideals of the State, quoted on page 211, is the doctrine of Christ, deep and far-reaching : "The Sab- bath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." So the Church was made for man, not man for the Church, and to this truth the Church must awaken. American politics must be humanised, with politics all over the world. True religion must be applied to politics. As Arthur Henderson says, "In a wider sense than has hitherto been understood, the politics of the future will be human politics and the dominat- ing party will be the party of the common people, and of democracy. This is certain. The people will have it so, for the people are weary of wars. They have borne too long the inequalities and injustices inherent in an economic system based on competition instead of co-operation. . . . We want to replace the material force of arms by the moral force of right in the governance of the world." "Is it a dream? Nay, but the lack of it a dream, And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream." 1 Almighty God, Who rulest over all things in Heaven and on earth, and before Whom all the might of man is less than vanity: Mercifully regard the scenes of desolation and anguish that have come upon the world. Bring Thou an end to tiie reign of violence. Make x Walt Whitman. AMERICA TO-MORROW 223 wars to cease unto the end of the earth. ' Break Thou the bow; burn Thou the cliariot in the fire! Scatter the people that delight in war, and let all kings and rulers know that Thou art God, even Thou only. Give success to our arms on land and sea. Be with our soldiers and sailors at all times, in camp, and at sea, and as they face the enemy. Not only protect and defend them from all peril of body and soul, but make their arms effective to the maintenance of right, and the deliverance of the world from wrong and oppression. Arise, O Lord, as in the days of old. Be Thou a wall of fire about our hosts. Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered; as smoke is driven away, so drive them away; and grant us and all na- tions speedy, just and lasting peace. 1 *This prayer was said and afterwards written out at request by Dean Henry R Jacobs, LL.D., of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Mount Airy, Philadelphia. THE AUTHOR S RESIGNATION, ETC. From the New York Times of June 25, ipi8: DR. SCHERER QUITS DEFENSE COUNCIL BECAUSE or HEARST CHARGES THAT SECRETARY BAKER WARNED SPEAKERS AGAINST ATTACKING CERTAIN NEWSPAPERS SAYS MEMBERS ARE GAGGED DECLARES HEARST SEEKS TO HIDE BEHIND SKIRTS OF ADMINISTRATION WHEN ASSAILED OTHER SPEAKERS STOPPED DR. SCHERER ASSERTS THAT HE HAS RESIGNED TO RETAIN His RIGHTS TO FREE SPEECH Dr. James A. B. Scherer, President of Throop College of Technology, at Pasadena, Cal., and Chief Field Agent of the Council of National Defense, State Coun- cils Section, announced yesterday that he had resigned the latter post and made public his reasons in the fol- lowing open letter to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, who is Chairman of the Council of National Defense : HON. NEWTON D. BAKER, CHAIRMAN OF THE COUNCIL OF NATIONAL DEFENSE. Sir : I have this day handed Director W. S. Gifford my resignation as a member of the Council of National Defense, State Councils Section, and I herewith repeat it to you. Ordinarily, this resignation would have no public importance whatever; but the extraordinary cir- cumstances that caused it seem important enough to call for the fullest publicity. I am resigning because of your 225 226 policy in warning representatives of the Council, includ- ing myself, against freedom of speech in denouncing certain newspapers as inimical to the national defense. I began this denunciation before joining the Council. In "The Japanese Crisis," published in April, 1916, (a study of the California- Japanese question,) I wrote of the mischief wrought by Hearst's two California "Exam- iners" some Westerners pronounce them "Eczemanas !" in endangering American relations with Japan. 1 So far as I now recollect, my first public condemnation of Hearst policies after becoming field agent (at a dollar a year) of the State Councils Section of the National Council a year ago, occurred last January, when I happened to be at home, in Pasadena. On receiving an invitation to become a patron of The Los Angeles Examiner's scheme for rebuilding French cities destroyed by the Kaiser I published in The Los Angeles Times a letter contain- ing the words : "I cannot escape the impression that the scheme originated with a notorious newspaper exponent of self-exploitation with an exceedingly unsavoury past. I am unwilling to lend my name as a patch on the gar- ment of quasi-patriotic rehabilitation with which the Hearst papers are seeking to cover their record of shame while still pursuing a subtle and insidious propaganda for impeding our winning of the War." This, however, brought you no protest that I know of. 'A few days later, speaking for the National Council at the Illinois War Conference in Chicago, I used and 1 "California is little given to 'war scares,' being inclined to laugh at the fulminations of perfervid Merrimac heroes and to frown on the misrepresentations of Hearst newspapers as mali- cious and mischievous." p. 41. "Our Japanese problem will vanish into thin air if we substitute in dealing with it the spirit of Townsend Harris for the spirit of Hearst; the spirit of the gentleman and statesman for that of the journalist one of whose writers was actually audacious enough to boast in a published book that his paymaster brought on the American war with Spain (J. Creelman, "On the Great Highway": Boston, 1901, ch. ix., Familiar Glimpses of Yellow Journalism. For examples of grotesquely mendacious attempts to foment strife with Japan, see files of the Los Angeles Examiner, October, 1915)." pp. 63, 64, "The Japanese Crisis," Scherer. THE AUTHOR'S RESIGNATION, ETC. 227 indorsed the following words of one of my colleagues, in warning the people against the grave menace of an incon- clusive peace: "Some time Germany is going to make a plausible peace proposal. This will, of course, be a camouflaged war move. She may offer to yield Belgium and even to pay some indemnity; indeed, she will yield anything except the Pan-Germanic empire which she now holds, extend- ing from the North Sea to Bagdad. Her policy will be elastic in the West and adamant in the East. When this hour comes every pacifist, every England-hater, every secret or open pro-German, every half-baked Socialist, every weak-kneed sister in trousers or petticoats will clamor for the acceptance of the German proposal; or, at least, for a council of the nations at which Germany can get the powers about the table and juggle the cards. At the same time the twelve or fourteen great dailies owned and controlled by William Randolph Hearst will let out a strident blast for stopping bloodshed in other words, a peace 'made in Germany.' " 1 This warning I have repeated in various States when speaking at their recent War Conferences. I have also publicly condemned the Hearst papers (with others) for seeking to make it appear that this War is not so much our war as it is that of England and France. That my prophecy concerning the probable Htearst policies regarding a German peace is not unfounded ap- pears, for example, from The New York American' V statement of Sept. 15, 1917, as follows: "The best peace for all concerned is a peace without victory, a peace with- out conquest, a peace without indemnities." And Mr. Brisbane, who ought to know, wrote in The Washing- ton Times, Aug. 8, 1917 : "The most powerful and effec- tive peace worker in this country is William Randolph Hearst. The world wants peace. It is more important than victory." Little wonder, Mr. Secretary, that the Cologne Volkszeitung commends the Hearst papers as "auxiliaries for us (the Germans) of valued influ- 1 For a brief economic argument against an inconclusive peace, see Appendix B. 228 THE NATION AT WAR ence," as quoted in The New York Tribune of yesterday. ^ The other day (June 19) Mr. F. W. Kellogg of The San Francisco Call came to my office in Washington, saying that Mr. Jackson of The Oregon Journal whom he characterized as a warm friend of the Administra- tion had complained of my reference to the Hearst papers in a speech made at Portland in May; that he, Kellogg, had shown a copy of Jackson's letter to Hearst ; and that Hearst had requested him to ask me why I dislike him. I said that the reason in a nutshell is that I regard Mr. Hearst's newspaper policies as having been treasonable in so far as he has dared to make them so, and his influence as the most pernicious in American life. Kellogg conceded that a member of the Cabinet had got him to go to Hearst a year ago to persuade him to alter some of his policies, but claimed that since then he has been "good." In contravention of this I cited certain editorials that I happened to have just at hand. Kellogg Advanced the powerful argument, in behalf of Hearst's present goodness, that President Wilson has himself re- cently intervened for the restoration of Hearst's cable privileges, removed by the English ; but I find it difficult to believe that the President has used the almost irre- sistible powers of his high office to induce the British Government to show favor to a news service that they have adjudged inimical to our great cause, as have also the Canadians, to say nothing of the French, whose offi- cial announcement said of the Hearst organization, "the connivance of which with the enemy is certain" (quoted by New York Tribune, June 23, 1918). Kellogg's whole contention seemed to be that, since the Hearst papers support the Administration, they are therefore wholly loyal to our cause; he even said that Roosevelt should be condemned rather than Hearst, seeing that the latter supports the Administration (at present), while the for- mer frequently criticises it. He also claimed and "con- spiracy" is evidently a catchword with the Hearst inter- ests nowadays that there is a "vast conspiracy" through- out the country to injure the Hearst papers out of envy of their business success. I finally told him that the THE AUTHOR'S RESIGNATION, ETC. 229 only way to shut me up as a member of the Council would be to have me put out. The next day I was officially informed that Mr. Kel- logg had called at the War Office, and that when the Administration has decided on a policy everybody con- nected therewith must abide by it. What this policy is I already knew. For I am not the only offender. An- other representative of the Council at these recent War Conferences has been complained of in a telegram from a Hearst agent, for speaking (far less frequently and more mildly than I have done), in warning the people against the Hearst influence, and I had seen your memo- randum, Mr. Secretary, attached to this telegram, in- structing speakers that hereafter they must not indulge in discriminatory remarks as to the relative values of newspapers. This was officially sent to me, with the request to "note and return." The language is diplo- matic, but there can be no doubt as to its meaning. Mn Hearst, who, for the sake of scandal-mongering pennies, habitually assails individuals in his great group of "Ex- aminers* and other peep-Tom newspapers Mr. Hearst now seeks to creep under the skirts of the Administra- tion when an individual assails his newspapers for dis- loyalty, not to the "Administration," indeed, but to the Government itself as involved in the greatest War in our history; and, apparently, the skirt is uplifted to receive him. I resign, and so retain my freedom of speech and my right to keep the oath I took on entering the Council to give absolute allegiance to the Government, and to protect and defend it against all of its enemies, domestic and foreign. 1 Deeming Mr. Hearst, as I do, 1 The exact words are : "I do solemnly swear that I will sup- port and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" (see p. 58). I did not have a copy of the oath by me when writing the foregoing letter. The Constitution is of course the quintessential expression of the Government. Incidentally, it guarantees the right of freedom of loyal speech, and defines treason as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It would be unfortunate for us to permit the words "Government" and "Administration" to become synony- mous. 230 THE NATION AT WAR the Bolo Pacha of American journalism our most in- sidious and dangerous internal foe, 1 just as the Kaiser is our most dangerous foreign enemy I must, apparently, in order to keep my oath, resign from the Council! I trust you will consider carefully this point of view, Mr. Secretary, before suggesting to local councils of defense throughout the country that they must not discriminate 1 1 agree with the following analysis of Mr. Hearst's probable motives, but not with the conclusion : "Not being hampered by deep convictions or by high journalistic and ethical standards he exploits whatever policies promise the best results in profits and power. Often supporting good causes, he most persistently capitalises for his papers the manifold forces of discontent, hatred and prejudice. His essential policy is to cultivate the support of classes and groups whose passions can be incited and turned to account. "It is a fair presumption, we think, that when the war began Mr. Hearst surveyed the field in a perfectly cold-blooded way, and shaped his course upon this principle. He found all the New York newspapers, except his own, ranged against Ger- many, and saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the large German population in the metropolitan district by giving them their sole English language paper. He had always played for the anti-English Irish element, and the pro-German Irish group would be a valuable asset. He had a German-printed newspaper to promote. A multitude of Russian Jews, of the extreme radical type which produced Bolshevism, provided an- other promising field. Distrust of Japan in California could be exploited. "Thus there were many reasons apart from pro-German sen- timent to inspire the Hearst decision as a matter of business. And the gains would seem to a calculating mind to be sure. If Germany won against the Allies, as Hearst confidently be- lieved she would, he would be a figure of great influence and power in this country; if she lost, he would be in a position to advocate an alliance between Germany and the United States to resist the 'aggression' of Britain, the victor. . . . "Many Americans who have been incensed and shocked by the flagrant course of these journals have been mystified by the failure of the government to check the systematic rendering of aid and comfort to the enemy. . . . We are satisfied that Mr. Hearst is not at heart a traitor to the nation; that his purpose has not been to sell his country, but to sell newspapers." It is a strange conclusion. The Constitution defines treason as giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and "selling newspapers" is in this case the equivalent of a good deal more money than the famous "thirty pieces of silver." JTHE AUTHOR'S RESIGNATION, ETC. 231 regarding newspapers of which they are reported to be making bonfires. JAMES A. B. SCHERER. June 24, 1918. Dr. Scherer is still a member of the Industrial Service Department of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, United States Shipping Board. From the New York Tribune of June 26, 1918: BAKER ADMITS ORDER GAGGING HEARST CRITICS SECRETARY DE- CLARES THAT RESTRICTION APPLIED TO ALL PAPERS (Special Despatch to The Tribune) WASHINGTON, June 25. Secretary Baker to-day accepted the charge brought against him by Dr. James A. B. Scherer, who resigned from the Council of Na- tional Defense because, he said, the Secretary of War had forbidden members of that body to criticise the loyalty of the Hearst newspapers. Mr. Baker admitted that after Hearst agents had complained to him of Dr. Scherer's attacks, he had issued a general order instruct- ing Council members to refrain from attacking any news- papers. The Secretary of War also said that the Hearst com- plaint had been to the effect that Dr. Scherer had spent "a lot of time criticising in harsh terms the Hearst news- papers." Dr. Scherer's letter of resignation, in which he charges that the Hearst influence has penetrated the Council of National Defense, had not been received by the Secre- tary of War late to-day, Mr. Baker said. He dictated the following answer in explanation of his decision that criticism of any newspaper must not be made by mem- bers of official organisations: "Some one I believe a representative of one of the Hearst papers had told me that a representative of 232 THE NATION AT WAR the Council of National Defense was making addresses and spending a lot of his time criticising in harsh terms the Hfearst papers. I told Mr. Gifford that I thought nobody who is officially representing the government ought to be criticising any newspaper I don't care whether it is Hearst's paper or anybody's else and that I thought, while I hadn't the slightest desire to prevent any man expressing his individual opinion upon any newspaper, I did not think that any man as a representa- tive of the government ought to criticise any newspaper." Walter S. Gifford, director of the Council of National Defense, declared that Secretary Baker's order in the Scherer case was a general expression of policy of the Council, and as such it was sent to all members of the Council and not to Dr. Scherer alone. He said that Dr. Scherer's resignation had not yet been received by him, and until it is received he would withhold comment. Director Gifford, however, said that Dr. Scherer had been one of the Council's most energetic workers during the last year, and had "performed splendid and efficient work as chief field agent." The decision in the Scherer case, Mr. Gifford said, only applied to members of the Council of National De- fense, and would not extend to the members of State Councils. He said that the National Council, however, had to make general policies as a guide to members of the organisation, and that the order directed by Secretary Baker was the enunciation that must be rigidly ad- hered to. Mr. Gifford indicated that the resignation of Dr. Scherer would be accepted when it was received. He was not prepared to-night to say who in the Council of National Defense would be selected to carry on the work outlined by Dr. Scherer. THE AUTHOR'S RESIGNATION, ETC. 238 From the New York Tribune of July 20, 1918: THIS HEARST AND THAT ONE To THE EDITOR OF THE TRIBUNE. Sir: A friend has just shown me The Los Angeles Examiner of July 5, containing an editorial article en- titled "Dr. Scherer and Secretary of War Baker What a Contrast!" Undoubtedly, there is a contrast between Secretary Baker and myself, but the public is not in- terested in it. The public is greatly interested, however, in the contrast between the Hearst of May, 1918, and the Hearst of May, 1917. Since the i6th of May, 1918, when the President signed the sedition act, penalizing with heavy fines or imprison- ment, or both, those who seek "to promote the success of our enemies," "to obstruct the sale by the United States of bonds," or "by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war, or by word or act oppose the cause of the Uhited States therein" since May 16, 1918, Mr. Hearst has seemed to be good, and will perhaps seem so for a season, since he now advertises his "loyalty" with his own full-page affidavits. But let us contrast the Jekyll Hearst of May, 1918, with the Hyde Hearst of May, 1917. The Hamburger Nachrichten joyfully reprinted from Hearst's New York American of May 3, 1917, these editorial excerpts: "Well, the facts are these: . . . unless America can perform the twin miracles of rescuing England from the submarine and of putting enough troops in France to beat off the offensive which the Germans are now beginning to develop, . . . "We tell you plainly that in a military, naval and economic way the Germans have the Allies whipped, and that without our intervention there was not a doubt that Germany would have victoriously dictated peace be- fore this year was gone . . . 234. THE NATION AT WAR "And we have been plunged into war, without prepa- ration, with the most powerful single nation in the world, equipped to the last shoelace with every possible neces- sity of warfare, filling the seas with her submarine navy, covering half a continent with her veteran armies, and everywhere winning her way with blood and iron against her foes!" Yet the amiable Secretary of War says that nobody representing the government ought to be criticising any newspaper. The Cologne Volkszeitung reprinted from Hearst's New York American of May 17 and 21, 1917, these editorial comments: "Our part in this war, for months to come, is to pay the bill to finance and feed hungry and bankrupt England, hungry and bankrupt France, hungry and bank- rupt Italy. . . . "If the result of war is to be that we will be hope- lessly outclassed by England as a naval power and hope- lessly beaten by England at the start in competition for the world's trade, then it would seem to be prudent to keep enough of our own money to build our indus- tries. . . . "Our money, like our armies and our fleets, should be concentrated at its home bases and not dispersed abroad. "It is plain enough that the bond issue is not being eagerly taken, to say the least. The banks have gone in to the limit with commendable alacrity, but the people are not buying the bonds. The government will doubt- less eventually dispose of the $2,000,000,000 issue, but who can say as much of the next issue?" The Berlin Lokalanzeiger reprinted from Hearst's New York American of May 16, 1917, these gems of editorial "loyalty": "The reports of our own officers say that the Allies will lose the war unless we send enough war materials, men and ships to help them win. . . . THE AUTHOR'S RESIGNATION, ETC. 235 "As long as the U-boat danger is not put out of the way, any question of shipping men across and also ma- terial is in the air. Things being such, would it not be better to end the war honorably? Shall we send troops to destroy Germany which, perhaps, may be nec- essary for the defence of our own country?" While all newspapers look alike to our Secretary of War, the Germans exercise discrimination. The New York Tribune's translation of a tender tribute to Hearst in the Cologne Volkszeitung follows : "In the daily press the numerous Hearst papers of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Fran- cisco and other cities were auxiliaries for us of valued influence. . . . How far Hearst's International News Service got upon the nerves of the London atrocity manu- facturers is shown by the cable embargo which Lon- don finally placed upon the Hearst service, thereby cut- ting his European life-nerve. "More valuable, however, than the news were the editorials of the Hearst newspapers. They were un- excelled models of popular style and arresting composi- tion. . . . "Hearst last year, took the sting out of one of the worst pests of the American press when he had his editor in chief of The Evening Journal Arthur Bris- bane, with his salary of $75,000, the highest paid news- paper man of America and probably of the world to buy The Washington Times and conduct it in a line with his other papers." That The Times has been conducted "in a line with his other papers" is sufficiently clear from Hearst's $75,ooo-man's issue of July 16, 1917, issued within two blocks of the White House, whence he is intimately ad- dressed by Mr. Tumulty as "My dear Brisbane." "Anarchy rules in Russia," writes The Washington Times; "somebody must do something. The natural 236 THE NATION AT WAR somebody is Germany, right next door to Russia. . . . the civilisation of Western Europe may be very grate- ful to Germany if the war finds Germany with enough strength left to undertake the maintaining of order in Russia developing the resources there and making a few billions of rubles in the process." How could Mr. Burleson write of the Hearst levia- than's development in Chicago as "able and unselfish efforts" in behalf of "justice and freedom and true democratic government"? And how is it that a Hearst agent could dare come into my office in the Council of National Defense building and boast that the President himself had intervened to have Hearst's cable privi- leges restored ? which statement I do not yet permit my- self to believe. The Examiner sharpens the shaft aimed at me with the point that I prefer abandoning war work rather than freedom of speech. This would be interesting if true. Although I resigned from the Council, I am still giving all of my time to war work, in other branches of service, and shall do so for some time to come. In fact, I am still giving assistance to the Council of National Defense, albeit unofficially, so as to keep to my own conscience the oath I swore when entering the Council to support and defend the Government "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." The Brooklyn Eagle, on the morning when my open letter appeared (June 25), contained an editorial as follows : "A Charge That Should Be Answered: Dr. Scherer regards Mr. Hearst and his newspapers as dangerous to a country engaged in the prosecution of a great war," said The Eagle. "He expresses that opinion without qualification or reserve. He sustains his position with reference to Hearst policies as defined in the columns controlled by Mr. Hearst. He prefers to get out of the Council of National Defence to remaining an officer of it with a tongue tied by an order from the Secretary THE AUTHOR'S RESIGNATION, ETC. 237 of War. . . . The imputation that Mr. Baker has as- sumed the role of a Hearst defender is serious. Mr. Baker is an able controversialist, and his reply to Dr. Scherer will be awaited with interest." * The following day Mr. Baker replied, in a statement triumphantly quoted by The Los Angeles Examiner, as follows : "Some one, I believe a representative of one of the Hearst papers, had told me that a representative of the Council of National Defence was making addresses and spending a lot of his time criticising in harsh terms the Hearst newspapers. I told Mr. Gifford that I thought nobody who was officially representing the government ought to be criticising any newspaper, I don't care whether it is Hearst's paper or anybody else's, and that while I hadn't the slightest desire to prevent any man expressing his individual opinion upon any newspaper, I didn't think that any man as a representative of the government ought to be criticising any newspaper.". x The Brooklyn Eagle said further in this same editorial arti- cle: "Newspapers rightly object to any interference with their own freedom of statement on public questions. They do not, and should not, deny the right of individuals to an equal free- dom of statement when they themselves are affected by it. The issue raised by Dr. Scherer is really of more consequence than Hearst or his newspapers. It goes far beyond the question of Mr. Hearst's loyalty now, far beyond the question of what his purpose has been in attacking England, assailing Japan, or arguing against the despatch of American armies to fight the battles of civilization in Europe. Summed up, the issue is whether any representative of the Federal Government is justi- fied in gagging responsible subordinates who wish to speak their mind about newspapers which have freely spoken their mind without rebuke from the Government with whose policies they have disagreed. Dr. Scherer has charged gagging under cir- cumstances that call for an explanation by Secretary Baker. He has placed the War Department in the position of an apologist for or defender of a certain group of newspapers and their proprietor. No group of newspapers, no individual newspaper and no newspaper proprietor should expect or ask the Govern- ment of the United States to interpose its authority as a pro- tection against criticism, no matter what may be the official rela- tion between the Government and the critic." 238 Mr. Burleson made an exception of the Hearst papers in his rulings debarring other publications, infinitely less mischievous, from the mails. Had he not made this exception, individuals would not be compelled to match freedom of speech against the license of Mr. Hearst's press. But Mr. Baker says that his rules have no excep- tions; all newspapers look alike to him; and thus the unexceptionable rules of the War Secretary uphold the exceptions of the Burleson rulings. JAMES A. B. SCHERER. New York, July 19, 1918. APPENDIX B A BRIEF ECONOMIC ARGUMENT AGAINST AN INCONCLU- SIVE PEACE Used by permission By FRANK BOHN THIS is only superficially a war between two groups of nations. It is fundamentally a war between two social systems between two methods of industrial reorgani- zation. The coming task of the democratic peoples is to apply their basic political and intellectual principle to industrialism. The task which the autocratic peoples have set themselves is to apply a benevolent and most efficient monarchism to the stupendous and intricate mechanics of modern life. The stake of the game is the world of our times and of an indefinite future. Place before yourself a map of Eurasia. Draw a line from the Baltic to the Adriatic, west of Holland and Germany and south of Switzerland. You will see pro- jecting in the sea west of this line five little fingers Italy, Franco-Iberia, Britain, and the two Scandinavian peninsulas. East of that line are the mighty hands of middle Europe, the arms of Russia and the Bagdad line, and the massive body of Asia proper. Let Kaiserism organize indefinitely to the eastward and the fingers of Western Europe will be speedily drawn into the sys- tem. Let Kaiserism live in middle Europe and the in- evitable result will be a league with an imperialistic Japan for the permeation of Asia. Cut Kaiserism out of Eu- rope now and Japan will be well on the road toward 239 240 THE NATION AT WAR democracy within five years. The general tendency of our world society from London to Yokohama, and from Yokohama to New York, will be dependent for direction upon the result. For modern mechanical mili- tarism and democracy cannot live permanently together in the same world. During the coming twenty years the stupendous and almost untouched economic fields of Russia and the Near East, of Siberia, India, and China as well as of Africa and South America, are going to be permeated by indus- trialism. The sources of raw material are going to be opened up by the nations which have, first, the machines ; second, the technical experts ; third, the banking capital. The greater economic forces will draw these elements from those who have and scatter them among those who have not just as the sun draws water from the sea and pours it upon the land. The question is, shall this process proceed democratically in the interests of the peoples who live upon the soil which will be devel- oped and exploited, or will it take place autocratically in the interest of a selfish ruling class? Give Germany Russia to exploit and her monarchical, militaristic efficiency will do the job with infinitely greater speed and accuracy than the democratic nations can hope to do. For instance, a truly democratic Government in America will help to organize the Chinese only as the Chinese request credit, expert guidance, and economic and educational assistance. But the actual organiza- tion which a liberal America or Britain would accomplish in China in ten years the German militaristic regime would probably do in two or three years. Let Kaiserism live in Germany and an open door in China will be an open door through which the German drill master and military engineer will enter to kick the beginning of Chinese democracy out of the window. The most important single economic factor in Eurasia is to be the railway line from Constantinople to Canton, China, through Central Asia. Let Kaiserism build that line and India will be Germanized as soon as the Ger- man General Staff concludes that sufficient troops can AGAINST INCONCLUSIVE PEACE be moved to the Indian frontier. In the presence of these factors the Berlin-Bagdad avenue to empire be- comes an almost negligible bypath. Let German monarchical industrialism organize Eu- rasia and the eighty millions of Germans in Germany and Austria will become, en masse, a ruling class. This has been the place of Junkerdom for a full generation. They will be fed and protected, trained and led, as never before. Their dream of supremacy will have been 100 per cent, realized. If they have endured the slavery of the last half century and the sufferings of the last four years for their dream of power, what will they not do and permit to be done with them when the goods are in their hands and in their pockets? The German laborer will see his son trained to be a captain of in- dustry. The young German shopkeeper will stay in the army as a Captain in the foreign service. Every black