ings would but retard her deliverance still
further. Did history ever witness a more poignant, a more desperate
tragedy? It is a fact that in the midst of this war we are constantly
finding ourselves confronted with events such as history hitherto has
never beheld. A people resembling an enormous beast of prey, in order
to punish a loyalty and heroism which, if it retained the slightest
notion of justice and injustice, the smallest sense of human dignity
and honour, it ought to worship on its knees: this vast predatory race
stealthily resolved to exterminate an inoffensive little nation whose
soul it felt was too great to be enslaved or reduced to the semblance
of its conqueror's. It was on the point of succeeding, amid the
silence, the impotence, or the terror of the world, when from beyond
the Atlantic a generous nation took that heroic little people under
its protection. It understood that what was involved was not merely an
act of justice and elementary pity, but also and more particularly a
higher duty towards the morality and the eternal conscience of
mankind. Thanks to this great nation's intervention, it will not be
said, in the days to come, that justice, loyalty, honesty and heroism
are no more than dangerous illusions and a fool's bargain, or that
evil must necessarily, at all times and places, conquer whenever it is
backed by force, or that the only reward which duty magnificently done
may hope to receive on this earth is every manner of grief and
disaster, ending in death by starvation. So immense and triumphant an
example of iniquity would strike the ideals of mankind a blow from
which they would not recover for centuries.

3

But already this help is becoming exhausted; it cannot be indefinitely
prolonged; and very soon it will be insufficient. It is, moreover, at
the mercy of the slightest diplomatic or political complication; and
its failure will be irreparable. It will mean utter famine, unexampled
extermination, which till the end of the world will cry to heaven for
vengeance. It is no longer a question of weeks or months, but one of
days. That is where we stand; and these are the last hours granted by
destiny to an inactive Europe wherein to expunge the shame of her
indifference.

These hours belong almost solely to you, for others have not your
power. Whatever may happen, however long you may postpone the issue,
one of these days you will be obliged to join in the fray. Everything
advises, eve