GIVING AID AND COMFORT
Giving Aid and Comfort Americans Who Repudiate and Abhor Toleration are Making it Hard to Dismember German Liberals From Their Militaristic Government BUT they are not the only Americans who are...
...Unless they can be persuaded to cease their recriminations and moderate their truculence, billions of superfluous dollars will have to be spent before , the war is brought to a successful conclusion and many thousands of young Americans will be unnecessarily killed...
...Cleveland Moffett, to set themselves up as the arbiters of loyally...
...Thus they are actually strengthening the resistance which the American army and navy will have to overcome...
...Giving Aid and Comfort Americans Who Repudiate and Abhor Toleration are Making it Hard to Dismember German Liberals From Their Militaristic Government BUT they are not the only Americans who are giving aid and comfort both to the enemies of their own country and to the enemies of democracy...
...The man who could most easily become red ia the face was erected into the model which others were expected to imitate...
...Not less unpatriotic and equally baleful in its effects is the behavior of those of our fellow-countrymen who instead of seeking to discipline the weapon of war to the service of democracy are doing their best to poison the souls of their countrymen with sheer Jacobin barbarism, until the President broke his long silence we were drifting into a situation which permitted vacant and bumptious minds like that of Mr...
...German liberal journals have been obliged to warn their readers against the way in which American newspapers have perverted the meaning of the President's reply, and the great difficulty which the Catholic Centrists have had of converting the President's offer into a help rather than into a hindrance to their work on behalf of reform in Germany has been its popular interpretation m America as a mere shriek of defiance...
...Henceforth any American citizen or newspaper who preaches an irreconcilable program, who indulges in angry recriminations against the whole German nation and who insists upon military victory as the only instrument of political and moral victory is injuring the successful prosecution of the war by its own government...
...The cables from Copenhagen and Amsterdam have illustrated repeatedly the obstacles which American jingoism is placing in the path of American democratic diplomacy...
...It rendered you liable to be haled before an unofficial Vigilance Committee of Public Safety and be morally lynched or guillotined in order that the republic might be purified...
...If you were disposed to be a little less hectic, a little more reasonable, a trifle discriminating, you were suspected of sedition...
...The Americans who repudiate and abhor all moderation and all toleration, and who confuse complete loyalty with complete jingoism, are not only perverting the spirit of.democracy at home for the ostensible purpose of safeguarding its interests in the world, but they are thwarting the success of the declared and accepted policy of their own nation...
...This kind of talk or writing is clearly maleficient...
...The President has officially adopted the contention that the war can be won for liberalism if and only if military force can be redeemed by a clarifying and reassuring diplomacy...
...The purpose of the President's reply to the Pope may well be frustrated unless something is done to revise these simple notions of how a patriot should think and feel and talk...
...The moat flagrant pacifist who wishes to stop the fighting before the end is achieved is not giving any more aid and comfort to the enemy than the jingo whose talk and whose program tend to cement the union between the German people and the German government...
...They have been making it extremely difficult for German liberals to convince their fellow-countrymen that the President really means what he says...
...All that the German general staff really needs in the way of war propaganda is a liberal supply of quotations from such spokesmen of democracy as the New York Times and Sun or the Morning Post of London...
...Winning the war, so it seemed, depended on losing our reason...
...True patriotism, even in the midst of war, has ceased to mean proscription, the extreme of emotional intemperance, a harsh Jacobinism of mind, and the systematic attempt either actually or morally to lynch everyone whom the "patriot" prefers to suspect or to dislike...
...It has come rather to mean, as it did in the case of Abraham Lincoln, scrupulous fairness of attitude towards enemies within and without the gates, ultimate stability of national purpose, and an indefatigable and openminded attempt to fulfill it in the least costly way by uniting the immediate resistance of war with a political policy of ultimate conciliation.—The New Republic...
...There is no exaggeration in the foregoing indictment...
...They are aiding the German government in its militarist ambitions by helping it sustain the morale and secure the thick-and-thin allegiance of the German people...
Vol. 9 • September 1917 • No. 9
