There have been many great changes in all the countries of the world since the time of Lafayette, and in most nations liberty has become more and more the watchword and the goal. The French Revolution was like a deep chasm between the era of feudalism and the era of the rights of man, and though the pendulum has sometimes seemed to swing backward for a short time it has almost constantly swung farther and farther forward in the direction of independence. The right of the common man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has gradually taken the place of the so-called divine right of kings to do as they pleased with their subjects.

In a sense the United States blazed the trail and led the way. The men of 1776 proclaimed the principles of liberty and drew up a constitution which has required few changes to the present day. They were remarkably wise men; and the people of America were almost as wise, for they appreciated the laws under which they lived and showed no disposition to thwart or overthrow the statesmen they themselves elected to guide the nation. The United States grew and grew, crossed the Mississippi, crossed the Rocky Mountains, reached the Pacific coast, and fronted on two oceans. As pioneers from the east had pushed out into the middle of the continent, cleared the wilderness, and filled it with prosperous cities and villages, so pioneers from the middle-west went on across the deserts and the mountains and made the far west flourish like the rose. The great northern territory of Alaska became part of the republic; to the south Porto Rico; far out in the Pacific Hawaii and the Philippines joined the United States; the Panama Canal was cut between the two oceans; and the republic that had begun as thirteen small states along the Atlantic seaboard became one of the most powerful nations in the world. Her natural resources were almost limitless and the energy of her people made the most of what nature had provided.

“America’s Answer”

The republic fought several wars. That with Mexico settled boundary disputes. The Civil War between the North and the South resulted in the abolition of slavery and made the country a united whole, no State having a right to secede from the rest. The war with Spain freed Cuba and other Spanish possessions in the western hemisphere. But none of these wars changed the system of government of the country. The United States was still the great republic during all the eventful happenings of the Nineteenth Century.

Meantime what had happened in France? Louis Philippe had shown himself in his true lights as a Bourbon, had been driven from his throne, and had been followed by various kinds of government. A new Napoleon, the nephew of the first one, had come into power, had made himself Emperor as Napoleon III., and had tried to restore the glories of the First Empire. For a time France seemed to prosper under his rule, but it came to a sudden end when the King of Prussia defeated the armies of France in 1871 and drove Napoleon III. into exile. France lost her provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and William I. of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the great hall of Versailles. There followed in Paris the days of the Commune, which almost equaled the Reign of Terror for lawlessness. Gradually order was evolved under a new constitution with a President at the head of the government, and ever since France has been a real republic. From much turmoil and bloodshed she had won the liberty that Lafayette had dreamed of.

Other countries in Europe had won independence too. England required no revolution; by peaceful means she grew more liberal; her sovereign became largely a figurehead, and the House of Commons, elected by the people, was the real seat of government. Italy, which in Lafayette’s time was mainly a collection of small kingdoms and duchies, ruled by Austrian archdukes or by the Pope, united under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel, the King of Savoy, drove out the Austrians, deprived the Papacy of its temporal power, and became a nation under a constitutional king. The west of Europe was really republican, like the United States; it was only in the east that the ideas of feudalism still held sway.

Russia had her Czar, an autocrat of the worst type, Turkey her Sultan, a relic of the Dark Ages, Austria her Hapsburg Emperor, a thorough Bourbon, who learned nothing and forgot nothing. And Germany had her Hohenzollern and Prussian Emperor, the descendant of a long line of autocratic rulers, the sovereign made by Bismarck, “the man of blood and iron,” the stanch believer in the old doctrine of the divine right of kings. Germany had become an empire by the power of the sword, and her Emperor never allowed his people to forget that fact.

Power goes to the head of a nation like strong wine. The true test of the greatness of a nation is its ability to use its power for the good of the world rather than for selfish ends. Prussia had always been selfish. She had fought a number of successful wars, against Denmark, against Austria, and against France, and each time she had taken territory from her adversary. Her statesmen regarded her power only as a means to gain greater material strength, and from the birth of the empire they trained the people to think only of that end.

It was inevitable that the forces of freedom and those of autocracy should come into conflict some day. Germany knew this, and her autocrats carefully prepared themselves for the coming strife with the lovers of freedom. They paid little or no attention to programs for peace offered by other nations, they refused to agree to limit their armaments, they openly showed their contempt for the conferences at the Hague. Like a fighter who feels his strength they were constantly wanting to force other people to acknowledge their power; time and again they could barely restrain themselves from leaping at some opponent; they only waited for the most auspicious moment to strike.

What they regarded as the right moment came in July, 1914. The assassination of the heir apparent to the Austrian throne by a Servian gave the rulers of Germany a pretext to make war on the world. Austria, always haughty, always greedy, always weak and blind, was simply the catspaw of the Hohenzollerns. Austria sent an overbearing message to Servia, and Russia, taking the rÔle of protector of the small Balkan states, made it clear that she sided with Servia. Germany pretended to take fright and warned Russia not to attempt to oppose Austria. England and France tried to keep peace in Europe by suggesting a conference to discuss the matter. But the Kaiser of Germany and his generals did not want peace; they wanted to show the world how strong they were, they wanted the world to bow down absolutely before them; they precipitated the crisis and, pretending that they acted in self-defense, declared war on Russia, France, and England.

In the first days of August, 1914, the enemy of liberty began its march. With a ruthlessness that has no counterpart except in the acts of those barbarian hordes that swept across Europe in the Dark Ages Germany marched into Belgium, a small and peaceful country, giving as the only excuse for her wanton invasion the fact that the easiest road to France lay across that land. She expected Belgium to submit. The giant, swollen with power, would do as it pleased with the pigmy. And when the British Ambassador remonstrated with the German Chancellor over this illegal treatment of a nation that all the powers of Europe had promised to protect the Chancellor answered that the treaty of Germany with Belgium was simply “a scrap of paper.” Germany knew no treaties that opposed her desires; Germany has cared for nothing but her own selfish goal. And the great German people consented to this infamous course, because they had been taught that their first duty was blind obedience to the will of the Fatherland, which meant the will of the House of Hohenzollern. Never in history has a people,—and in this case a people that was supposed to be civilized and thoughtful,—bowed its neck so meekly to the yoke of its overlords.

But as the hordes of power-drunk Germans,—whom civilization has rightly named the Huns, in memory of those earlier barbarian invaders of western Europe,—advanced through the peaceful fields of little Belgium they found, to their great surprise, that the Belgian people did not intend to submit to such an outrage without protest. Led by their heroic king, Albert, the Belgians threw themselves in the path of the Huns and checked them for a few days. They could not save their country, but they saved precious days for the French and English, and the Huns found that their march to Paris was not the easy, triumphal progress they had planned.

Yet the German army was a mighty and effective machine in that autumn of 1914, built by men who had devoted their lives to perfecting instruments of destruction. It rolled on and on, across Belgium, southward and westward into France, crushing the small Belgian army, forcing the outnumbered British into retreat, driving back the French by sheer weight of cannon and men. The Kaiser thought to repeat the act of his grandfather and make the French sign a treaty with him at Versailles, taking more territory and wealth from them as the next step toward making the House of Hohenzollern the greatest power in the world. As the Huns drove on their over-mastering pride and self-conceit grew and grew, inflating them like over-swollen frogs, until a chorus of what the rest of the world had formerly considered intelligent professors, scientists, and writers, actually dared to announce that the German will to victory was the supreme achievement of the ages. CÆsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, at the height of their power, never lost some sense of proportion, some human notion of justice; it was left to this Germany of 1914 to show how blind, how mad, how intolerant the mind of man can be.

Rapidly the Huns marched toward Paris; and then something happened. The French turned at bay, held, drove the invaders back. Over the ground they had crossed in triumph the Huns retreated, back and back until they had reached the line of the River Marne. And when the French General Joffre drove them back to the Marne he won one of the greatest victories for civilization in the annals of history.

Meantime Russia was attacking in the east and the Germans had to look to the protection of their own territory. Europe was now ablaze, England was training men, France was digging trenches, the flames of war, lighted by Germany’s reckless torch, were spreading across the world. Italy, true to the principles of her great leaders of the last century, Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel, hating that power of Austria whose history had been one long record of deceit and enslavement, joined hands with the countries that stood for liberty and justice. The Turk, true to his nature, united with the Hun. The war raged back and forth, its battle-fields the greater part of Europe.

The issue was clearly drawn between liberty and tyranny. The Germans were now the Bourbons, the Allied Powers were the true descendants of Lafayette and Washington. The land of Lafayette lay next to the Menace and her fair breast had been the first to bear the scars of war. The land of Washington, however, lay far across the Atlantic, and one of her guiding principles had been to avoid taking part in the affairs of Europe. Some of her sons, loving Lafayette’s country for what she meant to the world, volunteered in the French army, joined the French flying corps, worked in the hospital service; but the great republic across the sea proclaimed herself a neutral, although the hopes of her people lay on the side of France and England.

But Germany knew no law, either that of Christ or man. The Sermon on the Mount, the merciful provisions of the Hague Conventions, might never have been given to the world as far as she was concerned. See what some of her writers, men supposedly human, dared to say. “Might is right and ... is decided by war. Every youth who enters a beer-drinking and dueling club will receive the true direction of his life. War in itself is a good thing. God will see to it that war always recurs. The efforts directed toward the abolition of war must not only be termed foolish, but absolutely immoral. The peace of Europe is only a secondary matter for us. The sight of suffering does one good; the infliction of suffering does one more good. This war must be conducted as ruthlessly as possible.” And another German said, “They call us barbarians. What of it? The German claim must be: ... Education to hate.... Organization of hatred.... Education to the desire for hatred. Let us abolish unripe and false shame.... To us is given faith, hope, and hatred; but hatred is the greatest among them.”

This was indeed a strange religion for a nation that was supposed to have heard of the Sermon on the Mount; a religion that might have been made by Satan himself, with hate for its foundation instead of love. Yet this was the German religion; if any one dare to deny that the words of these writers truly represent Germany let him look at Germany’s acts, let him think of the treatment of Belgium, the bombing of unprotected cities and towns, the enslavement of women and children, the destruction of hospital ships and of Red Cross camps, the murder of Edith Cavell, the sinking of the Lusitania!

The submarine captain who fired the torpedo that sank the Lusitania was a true son of Germany. He sent non-combatants to their death in the sea as ruthlessly as might a demon of darkness. There was no humanity in him, nor in those who commanded the deed. But there is no act of evil that does not bear its own just consequences. The innocent men, women and children who went down with the Lusitania called forth the hate of the world on the Huns, and set America on fire with indignation. For every victim there Germany was to pay a thousandfold in time.

The United States had a great President, a man who knew the temper of his people far better than those who criticized him. He knew the history of the country, he knew that its people loved peace and hated war, that Europe was far from the vision of most of them, and that they still cherished Washington’s advice against the making of “entangling alliances.” He tried to be patient, even with Germany, though he knew her for what she was; he waited, urging her to obey the laws of civilization, hoping that he might act as a peacemaker between the warring nations, feeling that peace might lie in the power of America, provided she kept neutral. But his efforts meant nothing to Germany; she believed in insincerity and the piling of lies on lies.

In many ways the United States had been very successful. It had grown tremendously, it had carried out many of the ideals of its founders. But in some ways it had fallen from its true course. Special privileges had allowed some men to grow enormously rich at the expense of their neighbors, city governments were too often the playthings of grafting politicians, men were often apt to prefer the liberty of the individual to the welfare of the state. The real question of the country was not as to whether we had won success, but as to whether liberty was still worth striving for. A nation is very much like an individual, and an individual often loses his ideals as he wins material success. Had America grown to be like a rich and torpid man who cares more for his ease and comfort than for the dreams of his youth? Had America forgotten Lafayette’s vision of her, forgotten that liberty is the one priceless gift? Were the youths, few in number but great in spirit, who were offering their lives for freedom in the airplanes and trenches of Europe the only part of the nation that still saw the vision clear?

Woodrow Wilson never doubted his people in that time of stress and strain. He knew what their answer must be when the call came to them. They had forgotten their heritage no more than he. The Declaration of Independence was still their testament; the hundred millions were the true sons of the few millions of the days of Washington. And when the German Menace dared to forbid Americans to travel in safety on the seas the answer of America came instantly. Yes, there was something better than comfort and peace and wealth; there was freedom, there was the goal of helping humanity to throw off the beasts of prey! The world must be made safe for all men! The mailed fist must be shown that might does not make right!

Germany notified the United States that she intended to carry on unrestricted submarine warfare, to become the lawless pirate of the seas. President Wilson handed the German Ambassador his passports and waited to see if Germany intended to carry out her threat. As usual, the House of Hohenzollern would not listen to reason. Germany turned pirate, throwing away the last vestige of any respect for law. And when this was plain the President went to Congress on April 2, 1917, and advised the representatives of the nation to accept the challenge of war thrust upon us by the German Empire.

“Let us be very clear,” said the President, “and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our objects are.... Our object ... is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles. Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people....

“We are now about to accept gauge of battle with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretentions and its power.... The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.”

Let us be thankful that our President could voice the same spirit in 1917 that Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence and that Lincoln proclaimed on the field at Gettysburg. Our country bore malice toward none, we wanted to be friends to all, we had no selfish desires for power or dominion. But as Lafayette heard the call to battle for the freedom of men in America in 1776, so America now heard the same call from the fields of Europe. On April 6, 1917, the United States formally declared war against the autocracy of Germany.

What were we fighting against? Against the old idea of feudalism that the ruler need respect no rights of the ruled, against the old Bourbon theory that the sovereign need obey none of the laws that govern the rest of humankind, against the principles of Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns that the people exist solely for the benefit of the ruling dynasties. All this Prussia had converted into the principle that the Fatherland is supreme, and that the people must obey the Fatherland in everything; and the autocrats of Prussia had made the Fatherland a savage monster, ruthless, unjust and cruel, devouring all it could to satisfy its greed. If you look back through history you will see that the crimes of all the despots are the crimes of Germany to-day and that whenever men were fighting tyranny, rapacity and cruelty they were fighting the same battle that America and her allies fight to-day.

More than that. In fighting for freedom we are fighting for our preservation. The world cannot exist one half slave, the other half free. Let tyranny succeed in Europe and it can only be a short time before it will look hungrily at America. The Menace must be destroyed before it grows so powerful that none can withstand it. “The time has come,” wrote President Wilson shortly after the declaration of war, “to conquer or submit.” Submission would have been to surrender all the principles of the republic, the country to which lovers of liberty had looked for more than a century to prove the actual realization of their dreams.

It is the German machine-made government, the autocratic ruling military caste, the idea that might makes right, and that small nations have no rights that big nations need respect, it is all these old and hideous beliefs of the Dark Ages and the era of despots that the liberty-loving nations are fighting to-day. The individual German is, after all, a human being like ourselves, though warped and twisted in his ideas of what is right and wrong by his selfish and barbarous government. The individual German may become a civilized man again, provided he can come to see the monstrous tyranny of his government. And for this reason President Wilson said to Congress in his speech of April 2, 1917, “We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow-men as pawns and tools.”

It was a war in fact deliberately determined upon and brought about by that same dark enemy of liberty that thrust Lafayette into an Austrian dungeon a century ago, that oppressed the people of Italy and wantonly imprisoned some of the noblest patriots that ever lived, that tore Alsace-Lorraine from France, and that has rattled its sabre and clanked its spurs and declared that war and destruction are the noblest objects of man. But the people have let themselves be treated like galley-slaves, have allowed that dark enemy of liberty to chain them to the benches and make them row that ship of state which is nothing less than a pirate bark upon the seas of the world. The people have been blind. Our President has tried to help them to see the light of freedom.

Treachery, deceit, lies, these have been the watchwords of the rulers of the Huns. When our government was still at peace with Germany her statesmen tried to make a secret agreement with Mexico that in case we should declare war the latter country should attack us and take our southwestern states. Again and again they lied to our Ambassador at Berlin and tried to intimidate him. Nothing has been sacred to them. They talk of religion and God and in the same breath outrage every teaching of Christianity. They have no respect for the great works of art of the world; cathedrals, libraries are destroyed without a thought other than to impress the enemy peoples with the frightfulness of their warfare. The world must be taught to fear them is their creed. And they have no more sense of humor than a stone. Over the slaughter of thousands of poor slave-driven soldiers the Kaiser can still send decorations to his sons, complimenting them and extolling their valor and generalship while all the world knows them to be mere pawns and puppets tricked out in the gaudy dress of the Hohenzollerns. Neither Kaiser nor generals nor statesmen have the least sense of humor, and a sense of humor is more than a saving grace, it is the mark of a sanity of judgment. But how can any sane judgment be found in a nation that thinks to frighten the rest of the world into submission by bombing hospital camps and Red Cross workers? There is no health in the monster. All the poisons of the past ages have collected in his blood.

America has never forgotten Lafayette. As John Quincy Adams said to him, he was ours “by that unshaken sentiment of gratitude for ... services which is a precious portion of our inheritance; ours by that tie of love, stronger than death, which has linked” Lafayette’s “name for the endless ages of time with the name of Washington.” In 1916 the old ChÂteau of Chavaniac, Lafayette’s birthplace, one hundred and fifty miles to the south of Paris, was put up for sale by the owner, a grandson of George Washington Lafayette. Patriotic Americans bought it, desiring to make a French Mount Vernon of the historic castle and grounds. At first it was intended to convert the chÂteau into a museum, to be filled with relics of Lafayette and Washington and the American Revolution, but the great needs that were facing France led to a change of plan. The castle should become more than a museum; it should be a home and school for as many children of France as could be provided for. This would have been Lafayette’s own wish, and in doing this the American society known as the French Heroes Lafayette Memorial has paid the noblest tribute to the great patriot. And the people of France, the most appreciative people in the world, have welcomed the gift and the spirit that underlay it.

Anatole France, the great French writer, has summed up the sentiment of his nation in glowing words. “American thought,” he says, “has had a beautiful inspiration in choosing the cradle of Lafayette, in which to preserve memoirs of American independence and to establish an institution for the public good. In preserving in the ChÂteau de Chavaniac d’Auvergne the testimonies and relics of the war which united under the banner of liberty, Washington and Rochambeau, and in founding the Lafayette museum, ties which have bound the two great democracies to an eternal friendship have been commemorated. But this was not enough for the inexhaustible liberality of the Americans. It went further, and it was decided that upon this illustrious corner of France, the children of those who died in defense of liberty, should find a refuge and home, and that, deprived of their natural protection, some of these children should be adopted by the great American people, while others of delicate constitution should recover health and strength on this robust land. It is a large heart that these men reveal in preserving a grateful remembrance of past services, and in coming to the assistance of the orphaned of a past generation who fought for their cause a hundred and forty years ago. May I venture, as an aged Frenchman and a lover of liberty, to proffer to America the tribute of my heartfelt homage?”

And so the castle where Lafayette was born and the fields and woods he knew so well in his boyhood among the Auvergne Mountains are now to be the home of generations of French children whose fathers gave their lives that the world might be set free from tyrants and war cease to be. What could be more fitting! It is one of the beautiful things of history that Americans could do this for France. It is in such ways that the spirit of brotherly love may some day encircle the earth.

For all wise men know that it is not riches, nor material possessions nor great territories that make either men or nations noble. The United States might cover half the globe, her wealth be beyond what man has ever dreamed of, her population run into the hundreds of millions, and yet our country be only hated and feared by other peoples. That was the future the rulers of Germany had been planning for their nation; so they might possess material things they were willing, nay, they were glad that the rest of the world should hate them. They had no wisdom at all; they had forgotten all the lessons of history. Christ might never have taught, churches never been more than bricks and stone, patriots and poets never have striven to show men their ideals, so far as these rulers, and through them their people, were concerned. Lafayette knew the truth, but the spirit of Lafayette was what Germany and Austria most hated; they are trying to-day to imprison that spirit just as they did imprison the man himself when they had the chance.

Nations, like men, live to serve, not to conquer for the lust of power. Only when nations have learned that are they worthy of admiration. Had America drawn her cloak about her, said “I am safe between my two oceans,” made money out of the sufferings of other peoples, held fast to safety and ease, then America would have betrayed every ideal of her founders, every hope of the men who have loved and worshipped their “land of the free.” Only when America said there were greater things than ease and safety, that the liberty of all peoples was indissolubly bound up with her own freedom, did she show herself as the great republic in spirit as well as in name; only when she was willing to serve others did she rise to the true heights of her national soul.

One of our poets, James Russell Lowell, has written the beautiful line, “‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe, when for the truth he ought to die!” The truth of that was known to the farmers of 1775 who took their guns and at Lexington and Concord fired “the shot heard round the world.” And the same truth was known to the men of 1861 who went out to keep the republic their fathers had given them. For we have all received a great legacy from those who have gone before, and now we know what it is, and have again gone forth to fight for truth.

We know that this is the greatest of all crusades. We know that men must be set free. Tyrants, whether they be emperors and kings or governments that place greed above justice, must be cleared from the earth. This last and greatest of tyrants, this league of the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs, has by its very brutality and injustice opened men’s eyes and let loose a new spirit in the world. Russia was autocratic, her ruling house of Romanoff was in many ways true brother of the other tyrants, but the people of Russia felt the new spirit and have already driven their Czar from his throne. When we think of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, and all that France had to endure on the hard road to liberty we may well imagine that dark days lie before the Russian people, but in time France rose like a phoenix from the ashes of revolt, and when we see what France is to-day we may look confidently to the future of this other great people.

For the spirit liveth! The truest words that were ever spoken! And the spirit that fills France to-day, the spirit that fills England and Belgium and America and all the allies, yes, even that same spirit in Russia, will carry mankind a long way on the road to liberty. For no one can conquer that spirit; it is the immortal part of man.

Let us read again the glorious lines of Julia Ward Howe in “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” lines as true in this crusade as they were in the crusade against slavery for which they were written.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

“I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening’s dews and damps;
I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
His day is marching on.

“I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:
‘As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.’

“He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

“In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.”

America heard the call; America saw that there were no limits to the evils of the powers of darkness unless the powers of light should fight them; and on April 6, 1917, America declared her purpose to do so. As the small American republic once heard with rejoicing and confidence the word that Lafayette and Rochambeau were to bring aid westward across the Atlantic, so now the great French republic heard with the same emotions the declaration that American soldiers were to bring succor to them eastward across the same sea. The last great neutral nation, immense in power of men and wealth and energy, had cast in its lot with the forces that were fighting for freedom. The Allies, weary and worn with more than two years of fighting, looked to this fresh, great people to bring them victory.

A month after we joined the cause of liberty French generals and statesmen came to America. At their head was Marshal Joffre, the hero of the Marne. He visited Mount Vernon and laid a wreath on the tomb of Washington; he traveled through the country and everywhere he found statues of Lafayette and Joan of Arc and memories of great Frenchmen. To America Joffre stood for the ideals of France, courage, endurance, nobility of thought and action. Not since Lafayette’s visit in 1824 had the people of the United States welcomed any visitor with such love and admiration.

The tour of Marshal Joffre was the outward symbol of the new union. Instantly the United States, a peaceful nation with a very small standing army, an insignificant merchant marine, its farms devoted to supplying its own needs, its factories busy with the commerce of peace, changed to a nation at war. It faced a stupendous problem. From its untrained men it must create great armies, fitted to cope with and defeat the fighting machine that the enemy had spent years in building. It must have the ships to carry those millions of soldiers to Europe and it must supply them in Europe with the food, the clothing, the guns, the ammunition they would need. That in itself was a task beside which the greatest military achievements in history paled into insignificance. Napoleon crossed the Alps, but he could feed his army on the supplies of the countries on the other side of the mountains. We must supply everything, must transport America into Europe, and then keep America there by an unending bridge of boats.

More than that, we must do our part in building ships to provision our allies, ships that should replace those the pirates of the sea were sinking daily. And we must feed not only our own people, but the people of starving countries, and particularly the people of Belgium, whom we had helped since the war began. Here in the broad and fertile land that lay between the two oceans was to be the granary and factory and training-camp that were to make liberty victorious. The nation turned to its new task with the same indomitable energy that had conquered the wilderness in the days of the pioneers.

At the call of the love of country men instantly volunteered. Congress passed the Conscription Act, and young men who had dreamed of peaceful occupations went to be trained as soldiers. Ceaselessly, tirelessly the great work went on. Americans landed in France to reinforce the volunteers who were already there as engineers, as motor-drivers, as aviators. Railroads had to be built, and docks and factories; the most skilled men in every line of work hurried to be in the vanguard. Then General Pershing reached France as commander-in-chief of the vast American army that was to come. As we had received Joffre so France now welcomed Pershing. And he went to Lafayette’s tomb and laid a wreath upon it, declaring that America had come to the aid of France.

Great armies are not built in a day, nor are gigantic fleets of merchant ships. Mistakes must always be made, and there are always critics. But in spite of critics and mistakes the American government, and under it the people, went on with the work in hand. Men became skilled soldiers and ships were launched, and at the end of the first year after our entrance into the war our troops were in the trenches, fighting side by side with their allies, and a steady stream of more troops flowed day by day from west to east. America had already thrown the first part of her power into the conflict and given earnest of the greater power to come.

Americans have already given their lives for freedom. First there were the eager, intrepid young spirits who volunteered as flying-men, in the French Foreign Legion, in the regiments of England, in the driving of ambulances at the call of mercy. How gloriously their sacrifices will live in the pages of history and in the hearts of their countrymen! And then there have been men of the first American army, such men as the private soldiers Hay, Enright, and Gresham, above whose graves in France is the inscription “Here lie the first soldiers of the Illustrious Republic of the United States who fell on French soil for Justice and Liberty November 3, 1917.” Truly have they proved the truth of the Latin motto, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

What is the lesson of Lafayette, of Washington, of Lincoln, of all men who have put the ideal of justice and liberty above their material wants, of the men who have fought in France and in all parts of the world for the cause of freedom? The lesson is simply this, that service and self-sacrifice for others is the noblest goal of man, that life is given us not to keep but to spend, and that to follow the teachings of Christ is the only road to happiness for men or nations.

“Where there is no vision the people perish.” History is filled with instances of the truth of that; the greatest empires of the world became decadent, were defeated by enemies, and vanished from the earth when their rulers and people saw no vision beyond wealth and power. Nineveh and Babylon and Troy, Byzantium, Persia, the Macedonia of Alexander the Great, Carthage and Imperial Rome all fell because gold and possessions had blinded their eyes. Material power, and the wealth that often goes with it, has been as dangerous to nations as it has been to individual men. It is only too apt to lead to the greed for greater and greater power, to bend other peoples to its will, to magnify itself at the expense of everything else in the world. It is easy for power to make nations forget their dreams of nobler things, of freedom and justice, of the rights of men everywhere to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Strength is a splendid thing, but it must be used to help other and weaker people, not to aggrandize oneself.

That the great nations of the ancient world forgot, and that such empires as the Ottoman Turks and Austria-Hungary have never known. Has the Turk ever held any vision of helping other peoples? Have the rulers of Austria ever cared for the welfare of their subject races? The history of both empires shows that the men in power have thought only of themselves. And what vision those countries have ever known has been that of a few devoted patriots who struggled for liberty and were suppressed.

Now in the past century Germany has been blinded by her growing power. Her rulers lost their vision, they made might their God; then her people were tempted, as Satan tempted Christ with a prospect of the world’s dominion, and the people fell and were blinded, and so the spirit perished in them as it has perished in other and greater peoples. They talked of German “culture,” of the blessings of German civilization; and they wanted to thrust it by force on the rest of the world, not for the good of that world, but for the glory of Germany alone. Their God became the God of the savage tribe, a God who belonged to them and to them only.

There are times when all peoples are apt to forget the vision, times when ease and plenty wrap them about. Few men are like Lafayette, who from youth to old age hold fast to their ideals, no matter what comes. Then, in a time of stress, the question is put to them: What will you do? Take the easy road of blindness or follow the rough road of vision? Belgium had her choice; she chose to lose all her worldly possessions rather than lose her soul. France had her choice, and England and Italy: to each the vision of liberty was greater than safety of life. And as each has had to pay in countless suffering so the soul of each nation has risen to greater heights. Their people do not perish like the blind; they have seen the vision of a more Christlike world when the tyrants have been destroyed.

America had her choice. Under all the power and wealth that her hundred years and more had brought her she had kept her vision; she too knew that liberty is priceless, immeasurably above all things else in the world. And this is the America that we all love. For unless we would go the way of the great nations of the old world, the nations that have perished in their blindness, we must have ever in mind the sacred duty to set and keep all men free. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. And lasting peace comes only with liberty to men and nations.

We cannot read the story of Lafayette without feeling that in his generous youth he gave us the best he had, his love and devotion, his courage and perseverance, his dauntless spirit that would not be denied its purpose to fight for liberty. All this Lafayette gave us because he saw in us the hope of the world. And now our precious opportunity has come to repay that great debt. It is for us to give the land of Lafayette all that he brought to us, and we do it for the same reason, because we see in France and her allies the present hope of the world.

It is for youth to fight, for age to counsel and help youth in the combat. Glorious is the opportunity that lies before the youth of our country now; as glorious as was the opportunity that called to the boy of seventeen in the days of Louis XVI. We may not all accomplish as much as he did, but we can all thrill to the same generous impulses, see the same great vision, resolve that we will do all that lies within our power to win the crusade of freedom against tyrants. Every boy and man in America should learn the lesson of Lafayette’s life and then go into the struggle with the feeling that he is following in the footsteps of that great idealist, that great patriot whose country was not limited to his own nation but to all men who yearned for liberty. The greatest gift of patriots is not the material things they may build, but the devotion to ideals they show to other men. We may each be Lafayettes in our own way.

“And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not; for it was founded upon a rock.” So is liberty built; founded upon a rock; as unconquerable as the soul of man. Liberty must win after floods and storms; its beacon-light must in the time to come illumine the whole world. Its enemies are strong and well-prepared; they call to their aid all the powers and devices of darkness; but as truth is greater than falsehood so is liberty greater than all the oppressors of man can bring against it.

America answers France and her answer is clear and dauntless. It is as ringing as the Declaration of Independence, the rock upon which America built her house. The power of Prussia, the power of the Hun, the power of tyrants, must be utterly crushed before the world can be free. Germany sought this war in all wickedness and greed; to satisfy her ambition she has pulled down all the piers that support the house of civilization that men have been building for ages; she would destroy the world in her purpose to dominate it. And America intends that Germany shall have war until all the devils are driven out of her.

America can do it. America came to this conflict with clean hands and a clean soul; no selfishness was in her; she fights for no ends of her own save the highest end to make the world safe for democracy. And as she has truth and justice on her side she fights with a spirit unknown to the servile bondsmen of autocracy. She is young and immensely strong, she is still the land of freedom. And when she rises in full, relentless might, thrice armed in that she has a just cause, she will destroy the serpent and cast him from the earth. The greatest page in our history is being written; we shall write it so that the better world to come shall call us blessed.

“We are coming, Lafayette!” What a call to victory is that! We have already come. We have joined with the descendants of that youth of France who came to us in our hour of need. The spirit of Washington must glory in that fact. The great Father of our country loved the Frenchman as his son. To what nobler end could Washington’s children dedicate themselves than to help their brethren? And the spirit of Lafayette must rejoice to see his dreams fulfilled, his dreams of the great republic and of the dawn of the brotherhood of men!

Lover of liberty and justice, we salute you! The time has come for us to show that what you hoped of us we now are, and to show it to the end that liberty shall not perish from the earth, that all men be free, and that in truth man was endowed by his Creator with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.