epth of human understanding, his
lack of passion, his solitariness that had been likened to an air of
impending tragedy, held his listeners with a magic no one could have
explained. He might have come as a spirit of times that had passed, so
charged with the ages was his strange, powerful personality.

'From an open sky,' he continued, 'came the present war. The older
nations, knit by tradition and startled by its imminence, flew to arms at
a word from their leaders. France, who had been our friend, looked to
us; but what was our position? In fifty tongues our citizens cried out
that it was to escape war that they had come to America. Could we tell
the Jew that Russia, which had persecuted him to the point of madness,
was on the side of mercy? Could we convince the Teuton that his
Fatherland had become suddenly peopled with savages? Could we say to the
Irishman, bitterly antagonistic to England, that Britain was fighting for
the liberation of small nations? Could we ask the Greek, the Pole, the
Galician, to go back to the continent from which they had come, and give
their blood that the old order of things might go on?

'But, you ask, what of the real American, descended from the men who
fought in the War of Independence and the Civil War. Yes--what of him?
From earliest boyhood he has been taught that Britain is our traditional
enemy. To secure existence we had to fight her. To maintain existence
we fought her again in 1812. When we were locked in a death-struggle
with the rebellious South, she tried to hurt our cause--although history
will show that the real heart of Britain was solidly with the North. In
our short life as a people we find that, always, the enemy is Britain.
In one day could we change the teaching of a lifetime? The soul of
America was not dead, but it was buried beneath the conflicting elements
in which lay her ultimate strength, but her present weakness.

'What, then, was the situation? Events had outridden our national
development. Whether it could have been avoided or not I do not know.
Whether our education was at fault, or whether materialism had made us
blind--these things I cannot tell you. I only know that this war found
us potentially a nation, but actually a babel of tongues. Without
philosophy and humanitarianism this nation could not go to war--and in
those two things we were not ready.

'I do not belittle the many gallant men who have left these shores to
fight with