I Vinil'l IM^l'l'Vlil?l'ii ?,fi P.!Yf f'SIDP LIBRARY 3 1210 01959 8083 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE ADDRESSES DELIVERED IN AMERICA SIR GEORGE ADAM SMITH KT., D.D., LL.D., I.ITT. T). '» THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY 0¥ CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE N OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE SIR GEORGE ADAM SMITH OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE ADDRESSES DELIVERED IN AMERICA DURING THE GREAT WAR BY SIR GEORGE ADAM SMITH Kt., D.D., LL.D., Litt.D. ' Vice-Chanceixor and Principal of the University of Aberdeen AND Honorary Chaplain in the Territorial Force os the British Aruy NEW ^S^ YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 1) Copyright, ipig, By George H. Doran Company Printed in the United States of America TO OUR DEAR SONS WHO FELL FIGHTING FOE THE CAUSE GEORGE BUCHANAN SMITH SECOND LIEUTENANT GORDON HIGHLANDERS m THE BATTLE OF LOOS 25 SEPTEMBER IQIS AND ROBERT DUNLOP SMITH CAPTAIN ^;^ED PUNJABIS INDIAN ARMY AT BEAUMONT'S POST NGAURA RIVER EAST AFRICA 12 JUNE 1917 Thine they were, and they have kept Thy word INTRODUCTION In the first of the following addresses I have explained the origins of the mission on which they were delivered. That mission was begun in New York on the 2nd of April, 191 8, and with two brief intervals was continued daily till the middle of July, after which I had a few further engage- ments before my return from America in the end of August. The programme of the necessary tours was drawn up by the executive of the Na- tional Committee (of the United States) on the Churches and Moral Aims of the War — of which Mr. Holt is chairman, and ex-President Taft, the Hon. Alton B. Parker, and other representative Americans are members, and by their secretary, Mr. Henry A. Atkinson, to whom, with his assist- ant, Mr. L. Gordon, and Dr. Frederick Lynch of the "League to Enforce Peace" by winning the war, I have many reasons to be very grateful. Their admirable plans were carried out in co- operation with local committees, chambers of vii viii INTRODUCTION commerce, mercantile clubs, universities, and fed- erations of ministers of religion, in the thirty-nine or so large cities and other places visited. Some- times I spoke alone, but usually along with an- other speaker, an American. We addressed in all 127 meetings, for the most part of two kinds — either "Conferences" with business men or min- isters or with both, varying in size from 80 or 100 to 600 or 700, at which after the speeches ques- tions were put and answered; or, in the evening, "Mass Meetings," from 1000 up to 3500 and 4000, to hear addresses interspersed with patriotic music. To reach all these, scattered over the States as they were from New York to San Fran- cisco and San Diego and from Detroit to New Orleans, I had to cover over 22,000 miles by rail. The excellence of the arrangements made is proved by the fact that no engagement was missed and only one had to be postponed. Before delivery I had written out only three of the ten addresses given in this volume. The other seven, starting from a few notes, grew as we went along. They have been reproduced from these notes and from shorthand reports of some of them, with the help of my daughter who accom- panied me as my secretary. Some further re- INTRODUCTION ix marks seem necessary. In speaking in Amer- ica I used In part the materials of addresses given in my own country since the war broke out. Again, the subjects of the addresses being closely related, they contain not a few repetitions of the same thoughts expressed sometimes in the same terms. In this volume I have left these repetitions stand- ing just as they were spoken. Again, it must be kept in mind that my mission began with the close of America's first year at war, at a time when in result of the last German offensive in France the fortunes of the Allies — in spite of British successes in Asia and Africa — appeared at as low an ebb as they had reached at any point, and when — though the American Navy and Army Medical Corps had been at work with the British for several months — only the first considerable detachments of Amer- ican troops had arrived in Europe. On those dark days there followed nearly three months dur- ing which our anxiety was but gradually relieved, first by the fortunate union of the Allied Armies under a single supreme command, then by the check to the German advance in Picardy and Flanders, and — most potentially — by the increased speed of the despatch of American soldiers to France in far greater numbers than either our X INTRODUCTION enemies or ourselves had deemed possible. Since these fruitful months of anxious strain, events, both in the East and in the West, have moved very rapidly in favour of the Allies. That their suf- ferings and sacrifices shall not be in vain is now becoming as clear to our sight as it has always been sure to our faith. By the time these addresses are published much of their appeal will seem be- lated. Still, they may stand as a record, why we Allies went to war, what were the sources of our courage under our unparalleled sufferings and despite our sense of our unfitness — what was the faith which sustained us and the grounds on which we pled before God, to our own and each other's hearts, the justice of our Cause. To His Grace the Chancellor, and to my col- leagues, of this University my warmest thanks are here given, for their cordial acquiescence in my mission to America, and their generous discharge of such additional duties as fell to them through my absence. GEORGE ADAM SMITH. University of Aberdeen, Scotland. CONTENTS Introduction CHAPTER I The Moral Aims of the Allies . II Britain's Part in the War III The British Hope and Its Grounds IV The Witness of France V Peace — False and True VI The Universities and the War . VII Some Religious Effects of the War VIII Faith and Service IX The Cloud of Witnesses . X Courage and Its Three Sources Epilogue — America at War . PAGE vii 15 43 73 93 115 135 155 179 195 209 223 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES Americans, kinsmen of my people at the first, for over a century our nearest friends, but to-day our Allies — at last our Allies — in the most sacred cause to which nations were ever called ! To the ties of blood which have bound us all along in spite of our disruptions there is now added the closer brotherhood of a common conscience, a common duty to the world, and a common sacrifice. The grave sense of responsibility with which I have come upon this mission I have been encour- aged to bear by the generosity of those who moved me to undertake it. I am here upon the invita- tion, conveyed through your honoured Ambas- sador in London, of your National Committee on IS 16 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE the Churches and the Moral Aims of the War, working in conjunction with your Government's Department of Public Information ; but also under the "sanction and cordial approval" of the British Foreign Office, and with a commendatory letter from my own Church, the United Free Church of Scotland, to the Churches and Christians of the United States. Highly as I value these supports from Church and State in my own country, I take my stand before you most firmly and most grate- fully upon the call of your own National Com- mittee — upon the fact that I speak as an invited guest, entrusted and commissioned by a number of your representative citizens and officials. My commission is twofold: to relate as far as I can the efforts of Great Britain on the many fronts of the war during now nearly four years, and to expound from the British point of view the moral aims common to the Allies in their warfare — those aims which on our side of the Atlantic have been clearly defined by Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour, Viscount Grey and Mr. Lloyd George, but nowhere with greater lucIdHiy and impresslveness than by your own President. It is safe to say that without those moral aims neither your people nor my people would have THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 17 been at war to-day. Those alms alone are the secret of the practical unanimity with which each of the Allied Nations has rallied to the call of its Government, and of the security of the agreement which binds them all, diverse and scattered as are their civilisations and national interests, in so un- shaken a resolution to fight and to suffer shoulder to shoulder till their sacred cause is carried through to victory. No greed for the territory of others, no lust of dominion, no passion for glory has drawn or could have drawn so many peoples into war or could maintain them in so costly but so firm an alliance. In the most con- crete form in which you may define the purposes for which we fight, these are altruistic: the re- demption of certain small nations from the servi- tude and slaughter to which they have been sub- jected, and for that end the overthrow of the powers which treacherously invaded their lands, ruthlessly devastated these and have deported, tortured and otherwise abused the peoples them- selves in defiance of every law human and Divine. But behind those concrete objectives, too well known that we should pause to name them, are the wider aims of which they are but details, aims on the scale of humanity itself and not to be stated 18 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE in narrower terms than justice, freedom, and peace for the whole world. For it is nothing less than those supreme interests of mankind as a whole which have been assaulted by Germany, which are denied by her avowed philosophy that might is right, which are still menaced by her stated aims and whole policy, and which have been insulted and wounded at every stage of her war- fare by the most atrocious cruelties the world has ever seen. Hating war, we Allies are at war for no other purpose than to end for ever such forms of war as Germany has forced upon the world, and to restore those foundations of Christian civilisa- tion which have been shaken and rent by the per- fidy and cruelty of the people that boasted itself to be civilisation's supreme representative. To borrow the phrase of a British statesman during the struggle against the last tyrant who threatened the freedom and peace of the world: "We are out, not to collect trophies but to restore the world to peaceful habits." Of all the Allies, France with her gifts of in- tuition and her closer experience of Germany is perhaps the most impressive witness to the justice of our cause and the moral aims of our warfare. I reserve her testimony for another address. In THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 19 this, I wish to show how the conscience of my people has interpreted those aims, how that con- science has been articulated, as the war has gone on, by the words and the deeds of our foes, and how we have felt that it has been vindicated by your armed adhesion to our Alliance. The world knows why we British, all reluctant and unready as we were, were forced into this war. Germany broke her word, and we could not break ours. Twice over, by solemn treaties, Germany, Great Britain, and other European Powers had sworn to observe the neutrality of Belgium and to defend its integrity. By a later engagement at the Hague, which you of America shared, the civilised nations bound themselves to respect in war the inviolateness of the territories of neutral peoples. In August, 19 14, Germany invaded Belgium against the will of the Belgian people, thus breaking her oath and by the mouth of her own Chancellor owning her crime but pleading "necessity" as her excuse. Her further defence, that France had invaded Belgium first, was an afterthought and has been proved to be a 20 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE lie. For her own reputation before posterity she had better have been contented with Bethmann- Hollweg's unabashed confession that when she forced Belgium she was a criminal and an outlaw. It was this crime, this breach of faith by Ger- many, which united the British people behind their Government as nothing else could have done. Germany's suddenness, the suddenness with which all crimes break from their guilty preparations, left us but a few days in which to make up our minds with regard to our duty. I should rather say that this was a matter only of hours. I well remember that hot August night and day in which we restlessly waited for the decision of our lead- ers, and the sigh, or rather the roar, of relief that went up from all the borders of the United King- dom when it was learned that our Government had not flinched from its duty, that we meant to keep our word to Belgium and Europe, and that — knowing as we did that Germany had been pre- paring for such a war for forty years and more, and that we were unprepared, at least by land, adequately to meet the colossal struggle which she was forcing on the world — we would nevertheless fight her for justice and in vindication of the good faith between nations on which alone the freedom THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 21 and the peace of the world depend. Within twenty-four hours that immediate, clear conscience of our people at home was echoed from every one of the free Commonwealths and the dependencies which form the British Empire round the world. There has been nothing like It in British history, nor I think in the history of any other nation. We were insufficiently equipped for a great war, we had been accepting- the foreign criticism which called us lazy, luxurious and decadent, there was great social unrest among our people and we had just been on the verge of civil war. Yet in a few hours our nation at home became united as never before, and we were immediately joined by our fellow-citizens across the seas — some of them on the opposite side of the world from the dangers that menaced our own coasts, and some of them, the South-African Dutch, our enemies less than fifteen years before — and by the native states in Egypt and India of which we were the controlling power. Such a result could not have been effected by anything else than a just, a transparently and urgently just, cause. Thus from the beginning we have had proof of the moral aims of our warfare. Such was our original conscience, and my first 22 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE message from my people to you Americans Is this. So far from that conscience having been weakened by all which has happened since, it is to-day if possible even stronger and certainly far more ar- ticulate than it was at the beginning. War is a great disillusioner; there is none greater. War searches the hearts and tries the motives of na- tions as well as of individuals as nothing else can. War casts down every lofty imagination, it dis- covers every pretence, it bleeds pride pale, stifles in its awful waste all glamour and romance, and strips the wings off Victory herself, which in so terrible a struggle as this seems to stagger rather than to fly towards her goal. But I am here to tell you that in spite of four years of such war, in spite of all the disappointments and disasters it has brought us, in spite of all the suffering and sacrifice, our faith in the justice of our cause, our sense of our duty to fight for it, our determina- tion to see it through to victory stand unshaken and unshakable. All along we have only had one doubt and that Is about ourselves. The more the sacredness of the cause committed to us has grown upon our minds, the more we have been tempted to doubt our own worthiness to be Its instrument, and the strength of that doubt is an- THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 23 other proof of the quality of the Interests which have drawn it forth. It is the shadow of the great light which has never forsaken us, of the truth and purity of the ideals for which we fight. The materials of our convictions have been supplied by our enemies, and no more by their crimes than by their blunders, for those blunders have largely been the obvious, irrepressible errors of the criminal mind. Let me deal with these two subjects in turn. To the crimes of Germany in starting and car- rying on this war I shall call none but German witnesses. We need not dredge the English dic- tionary for epithets adequate to express those crimes when in the German language itself and from German mouths and pens, speaking or writ- ing from a close intimacy with the designs and methods of their Government, we have so full and so unsparing an indictment. I have already spoken of the German Chancel- lor's own confession. Let me remind you of an- other which before the war was five months old, was shouted on your own doorstep by a German journalist. In the "New York Times" of 6th December, 19 14, Max Harden exhorted the Ger- man Americans to "cease the pitiful attempts to M OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE excuse Germany's action. Not as weak-willed blunderers have we undertaken this war. We wanted it because we had to will it and could will it. . . . It strikes the hour of Germany's rising power." There you have it — what other Ger- mans call and boast of as the "unbounded will," superior to the moral law and reckless of hu- manity. The next German witness is Prince Lichnow- sky, the Imperial Ambassador to London. The Memorandum which this Prussian noble, friend of the Kaiser and trusted agent of the German Government, has been forced by his conscience to write, is a complete vindication of Sir Edward Grey's honesty and strenuous efforts to preserve the peace of Europe. Prince Lichnowsky says: "My London mission was wrecked not by the per- fidy of the British but by the perfidy of our policy."^ "We encouraged Count Berchtold to attack Serbia ... we rejected the British pro- * This German admission is a complete answer to the statement of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald: "We shall find that the only reason from beginning to end in it is that our Foreign Office is anti-German and that the Ad- miralty was anxious to seize any opportunity of using the Navy in battle-practice." THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 25 posals of mediation ... we deliberately de- stroyed the possibility of a peaceful settlement. ... In view of these indisputable facts, it is not surprising that the whole civilised world outside Germany attributed to us the sole guilt for the world-war." And then this man of the world, this diplomat, this member of a class not given to quoting Scripture, has to go to Scripture to find terms adequate to his country's crime; and there, from all the Divine sentences at his disposal, he chooses the heaviest of all, those awful words in which the Judge of the World defines the one un- pardonable sin. "I had to support in London a policy which I knew to be fallacious. I was paid out for it, for it was a sin against the Holy Ghost." Another damning witness against Germany is inscribed on her own statute-book. It betrays one of the basest of the many base forms in which her Government prepared for war by intriguing against the unity and order of other peoples with whom she was still at peace. In the German Imperial and State Citizen Law of 22 July, 19 13 — one year and a week before war broke out — Section 25 deals with the case of a German emi- grating to another country, and provides that 26 OUR COMiMON CONSCIENCE "citizenship [i.e. German citizenship] is not lost by one who before acquiring foreign citizenship has secured on application the written consent of the competent authorities of his Home State to retain his [German] citizenship." What Is this but to corrupt the decencies of civilisation and to sap the good faith between nations on which the peace of the world depends 1 We know that there are thousands and tens of thousands of Germans, settled In your country and in mine, who are too honest to take advantage of a treacherous law like that; who in this war have proved as loyal as native Britons or Americans to the interests of their adopted countries. But the law is the inven- tion of the German Government, and can have had no other purpose than to plant in countries, with which Germany was then at peace, a multi- tude of persons professing allegiance to those realms but secretly living and acting In allegiance to Germany. Allegiance is one and indivisible. No man can serve two masters, no citizen two laws. The same man can no more serve that flag of yours and the Kaiser at the same time than he can serve God and Mammon. I need not remind you of the loud boasts with which Germany entered upon this war — boasts of THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 27 the superiority of her civilisation, of her right to impose its discipline on other peoples, and of her purpose to annex such territories as would give her ports on the English Channel and I know not what else. Nor need I recall how at other times — particularly when things were going against her — Germany has pretended to repudiate all plans of aggression and conquest, or how the Reichstag by a majority declared against annexa- tion, or of the many German promises to the Bol- shevik authorities in Russia. Of the worth of these last professions let her final treatment of the Russians, in cool defiance of her treaty with them, and her whole conduct in Belgium be the measure. Take the last and most conceding thing she has said about Belgium, Chancellor von Hertling's assertion that his Government only holds Bel- gium as a "pawn" against the negotiations for peace. What criminal impudence ! As if a burglar who had broken into a house and re- moved from it all the valuables were to say that he only proposed to hold the goods till the police came to terms with him! There Is a less stupid confession in the "Testament" of the late General von Bissing, Military Governor of Belgium, friend of the Kaiser and familiar with the plans 28 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE of the military party in Prussia. He has left on record the declaration that Germany must never give up a square yard of Belgian territory. Why? For four reasons. She needs a bastion or bulwark to the Rhenish provinces of Prussia. She needs all Belgium's famous mineral resources. She means to exploit the as famous industry and skill of the Belgian workmen. And fourthly, and here the matter touches yourselves, she needs Ant- werp and the Belgian coast as the best jumping-off place for South America. Von Bissing says noth- ing of Britain; that evidently is to be a mere bite on the way, an hors-d' osuvre to the banquet which Germany sees spread across the Atlantic. Noth- ing is said of North America, because even Ger- man arrogance pauses at an invasion of your States. For you another fate was intended. We British have wondered why the German Govern- ment so wantonly provoked you to war. Had they not already enough of enemies? Why did they go out of their way to strain your patience, to insult and tempt you to fight, to challenge your sense of justice and humanity by countless outrages, to meddle in Mexico, and so forth? It all looks so needless and so wanton; but it was done with a purpose. Remember, Germany has THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 29 never failed in her assurance of winning the war. Well, in that case, who was to pay her the indem- nities on which she has set her heart, who but your- selves? She has sucked Belgium like an orange. Italy was already poor. She believed that she had impoverished France (which is not true) , an^ she even thought that we British were getting to the bottom of our deep breeches' pockets. But there was your wealth and the inexhaustible re- sources of your Continent. So, whether reck- lessly or deliberately, she counted on you to pay her the indemnities she confidently intended to extort. Indemnities forsooth ! The costs of such a war as this are not to be indemnities paid by one nation to another. They are the judgments of God, and while no nation may escape them they are certain to fall most heavily on the criminal that provoked, and alone provoked, this wanton war. There are many other German witnesses to the same verdict. We should all read the testimony of at least one of them, Herr Stuermer, the Con- stantinople correspondent of a German paper, whose experience of the Eastern policy of his Government led him to resign not only his situa- tion but his German citizenship. He has written a book "My Four Years in Constantinople," in 30 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE which he exposes the crimes of the German Al- liance with Turkey, and in particular clearly proves the responsibility of Berlin for the mas- sacres and deportations of the Armenians. Mr. Morgenthau, your Ambassador to the Porte, has told me that Herr Stuermer is a reliable man. But as I have said, the blunders of Germany have been as damning as her crimes, for they have been the blunders of the criminal mind. One can never be reckless of the moral law without being reckless of reason and prudence as well. The greatest, the fundamental blunder of Ger- many, was in beginning the war at all. Had she been willing to keep the peace for fifteen or twenty years longer she might have obtained everything which she hoped to win in a war of a few months. Bethmann-Hollweg confessed this (fortunately for our enlightenment this Chancellor had a habit of confessing) when at last he sought to defend his people from the charge of willing the war. "Why," said he, "we could have got, and were actually getting, by peaceful means all we now fight for." That is very true. The world wel- comed the gifts of German genius when offered by clean and peaceful hands. The seas were free to the growing commerce of Germany. Under THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 31 British guarding they have been free for a century to all but pirates. Our ports were as open to German ships as to our own. To their hurt other states were lenient to the intrusion of German merchants and factories, and, in the case of some, to German exploitation of their natural resources. By these opportunities and by her ruthless effi- ciency and powers of organisation, Germany was fast rising towards the economic domination of Europe. Again, she had received as colonies, territories five times as vast as her Empire in Europe, and this by the goodwill of other powers and without striking a blow for them. Again, one of the main highways to Asia was more open to her than to any other Western people; her in- fluence with Turkey was supreme, and the rest of Europe left to her the direction of the new railway across Asia Minor^ and provided her with funds to carry it out. But her governors were blinded by the criminal passion for war, and for two generations her people had been educated in the doctrine that a strong state grows stronger by ^ Which her engineers laid down, not upon lines cal- culated to develop the resources of the country or otherwise assist the population, but on lines dictated by purely military considerations. 82 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE war, so war they chose when their Interest was plainly to keep the peace for at least a time. The same German voice which in 19 14 boasted that Germany needed no excuse save her will to war now cries: "The war is a mistake and a cruel misfortune."^ Another line on which the blunders of this criminal power have been obvious runs through its estimates of other peoples. The world gave Germany some credit, and she took more to her- self, for psychological expertness. She would claim to understand us better than we understood ourselves, and she certainly took pains to do so. For years she abused the hospitality of other peoples by scattering through them battalions of clever, amiable, patient spies. And yet with all her gifts and all her instruments she never pene- trated the soul of one of us. She believed that Belgium would yield to her insolent demand for free passage towards France; and, for the first desperate weeks of the war, the small Belgian army withstood her hordes with a valour that will shine as Imperishable through history as that of the Greeks at Thermopylae. She satisfied her- self that France, distraught by political and re- ^ Max Harden in February, 19 16. THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 33 llgious quarrels, was also dissolute and decadent; and for four years France has fought her with a courage and a skill at least equal to her own. Decadent! Which people shall posterity judge to have been the decadents — those who planned and who gloated over the sinking of the "Lusi- tania," or the French, who never once allowed such prolonged "frightfulness" as makes even the sinking of the "Lusitania" seem tame to abate their courage or their steadfast will to overcome. Again, the German Government believed that Great Britain could not and would not fight, and it sought to bribe us by an insulting proposal that we should betray our friends of France, that we should sacrifice our honour for a safe neutrality. Germany measured other peoples by herself and judged them, in the weakness she blindly imputed to them, to be as faithless as she was in her scorn- ful might. When we amazed her by daring to fight, she called our armies "contemptible" and boasted that she could beat them in a few weeks. She knows better now. She has said similar things about your army and will soon know better about them too. These fatal blunders have all been due to an excess of pride. They recall the judgment once passed on a great but arrogant writer: "A 84 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE quality of self-sufficiency so inordinate as scarce to be distinguished now and then from an im- mense stupidity." From the first the eyes of Germany have been too inflamed by her passion for war to see the situation steadily or to see it whole. The "mailed fist" has been too heavily mailed for its fingers to feel the pulse either of Europe or of America. These, then, are some of the materials with which our enemies have strengthened and articu- lated the conscience of my people. The first duty which called us, the deliverance of Belgium, is still our duty, and by all the cruelties and extor- tions inflicted on that land has become more urgent than ever. In the whole world outside Germany and her confederates there is not a man, however pacifist be his temper, who does not agree that the first indispensable condition on which Germany may have peace is that she shall sur- render Belgium and make every possible repara- tion for the cruelties she has inflicted upon its people. But Belgium is only a detail of the Ger- man crime. The breach of faith through which that country was invaded but tore the mask off a face, and off a spirit behind the face, which every month we have had to confront them has more fully dis- THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 35 covered to us to be implacably hostile to the moral- ity on which the peace and the progress of man- kind depend, and to be resolute by force of arms to impose on the world in the place of that moral- ity a philosophy and discipline fatal to freedom and to justice. To such a spirit what is the use of talking peace? Whenever the rulers of Ger- many have done so, this has been without any penitence for that first crime which, in assaulting Belgium, assaulted the most sacred interests of humanity as a whole. We know what they intend by the ambiguous terms they have offered; for franker Germans, soldiers and civilians alike, have told their people that the peace they seek is to be a fuller preparation for again assailing civilisation with the same aims and the same temper as they have shown from first to last In this war. How can you parley with such a foe till he is beaten and knows he is beaten? He has boasted that the only right he knows Is his might; how can he be convinced he Is wrong till he learns that that might is useless? He has openly warned us that "fright- fulness" Is the means by which he proposes to subdue the world; how can one meet such a power except in arms? These are the questions to which our experience of Germany has supplied us with S6 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE but one answer, ready as we were to find at first more peaceful solutions. Your own President has stated the issue exactly: "The German power, a thing without conscience, honour, or capacity for covenanted peace, must be crushed. Our present and immediate task is to win the war, and nothing shall turn us aside till it is accomplished." That is what we have felt throughout the whole four years of war. That is where our conscience and our will still stand to-day. And now you Americans have come in to con- firm that conscience and to reinforce that will. That we should have grudged your delay was natural; had it been possible for you to come sooner this, of course, would have meant a swifter ending to the war. Our regrets, and your own regrets, that when the Germans launched their recent offensive your soldiers were not already in France in millions instead of in hundreds of thou- sands were also natural. But such considerations have been overborne by the moral results of your postponed arrival, and for these we are grateful even more than for the inexhaustibleness of the THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 37 material resources which you have brought to the Alliance. The pregnant patience of your Presi- dent has had at least these two effects. It has brought you in a united nation — on that I need not linger, for you know it better than we do. But it has also had a moral effect on ourselves and on the French which you cannot feel as we feel it. Remember what I said of the suddenness of our call to war. We had to make up our mind and interpret our conscience not in a few days but actually in a few hours. You took two and a half years. For over two and a half years you patiently bore with German intrigue and treach- ery. You treated Germany by every means short of war, and you proved the futility of such a treat- ment. You explored and exposed the German mind to its depths. And after all that patient experiment and experience, you came deliberately to the same conclusion as we had been rushed to — necessarily rushed — at the first, and you took your place in arms by our side. That was the most powerful moral vindication which one people ever brought to another in the whole range of history. I am here in the name of my people to thank you for it. But we feel more than that. We know you to 88 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE be a people that have never put your hearts and hands to any just cause but you have seen it through to victory. Through years of sore and fluctuating war you struggled for and you won your Independence — won it against us, and yet not against the whole of us, for half of us were with you all the time; and besides, you must remember that we were then somewhat handi- capped by having a German King. Again, through years of sore and fluctuating war you fought for and firmly established your Union. Now you are out once more to fight for Freedom and for Union, but this time for both of them on an infinitely larger scale. Then your aim was your own liberty, now it is that of every nation menaced by the most formidable and obstinate conspiracy against the natural liberties of mankind. Then you fought for and achieved the United States of America; now your ultimate aim is the establish- ment of the United States of the World — such a League of Nations, based upon conscience and justice, as shall for ever render impossible the recurrence anywhere, or by any Power, of the criminal assault which Germany has delivered upon civilisation. THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 39 3 I come to you from a people that through four years have drunk the cup of the agony of war to the dregs. Week by week these years we have walked ever deeper and deeper Into that Valley of the Shadow of Death which you are now enter- ing. There is hardly a home known to me — and here I speak not only of my private acquaintance, but also of those opened to me as Principal of a University over 250 of whose sons have already fallen — I say there is hardly a home known to me that has not lost one, or in some cases two, and even three sons. My country of Scotland is full of mourning, but it is mourning In courage and with faith. I am come to tell you that the countless sacrifices we have endured have but further hal- lowed the sacred cause entrusted to us. As you join us, you find us a people war-weary and war- sick, one may say without exaggeration a people bleeding at every pore, but be sure that in spite of all we have suffered and spent, our conscience is undlstracted, our faith in the justice of our cause is undiminished, and that, whatever further sacri- fices await us, we are unshakably determined with you and our other Allies to see that cause through to its inevitable victory. BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR II BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, friends, allies, and comrades in the great war! — Before proceeding with my address, I must thank you for the heartiness with which you have just sung the National Anthem of my people along with your own. These are the first times I have heard American audiences do so. I want to tell you what good grounds you have for joining in that prayer for our King and Queen. They have both of them been a great moral asset to us during this war; by their simple lives, their courage, and their hard and cheerful work they have proved true leaders of our democracy, setting us an example of service in loyalty to the Word of Christ, "Let him that is chief among you be as he that doth serve." The subject on which I have been asked to speak is no less than the part that my country has taken, for now nearly four years, in the present 43 44 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE awful war. That is a large subject, and in the time at our disposal can be treated only in outline, with the addition, perhaps, of a few particular sections of its contents. I am not now to detail why we are in this war. You who have followed us into it, with the same conscience, hardly need to be told that; and I have dealt with the question in other addresses. It is enough to say that, sud- denly as the call came to us, it came in a very clear and signal form. As I have described elsewhere, we were in no little confusion and darkness. War always darkens the heavens, and this war espe- cially raised heavy clouds between the faith of many and the sovereignty of God. We were humbled by the disruption of Christendom. We were dismayed by the apparent failure of the spir- itual forces which make for the peace of the world, by the rupture of those mutual ministries of man- kind on which the progress of the race depends. We were haunted by the sense of our unprepared- ness for a great war, and we knew how equipped and ready to the moment were our powerful ad- versaries. There was the deeper sense of our national sins; before such a crisis a people must feel their guilty weakness. But through it all our duty was clear. Our enemies left us in no doubt BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 45 of that. And the conscience of our people at home and across the seas rose to it like the con- science of one man. We have had now nearly four years of war, and there is nothing during all that time that our foes have done or said, and nothing that we have bitterly learned or suffered, but has strengthened and articulated those first instincts of our duty and confirmed our faith in the justice of our cause and our resolution to fight for it till the end. In that original conscience we have waited for you and are waiting,^ and you will find us determined, at whatever further cost to ourselves, not to yield nor flinch till you and we with all our Allies have won a righteous and a stable peace. Now to my present subject! I have first of all to emphasise what is undoubtedly the greatest fact of our warfare, and most significant of the moral forces which have moved us — what poster- ity will regard as the most wonderful event in the history of modern Europe. It is this. When we ^ This was spoken at the beginning of my mission, before the American troops had reached France in any great number. 46 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE entered the war our army did not number more than a few hundreds of thousands, of which about 160,000 were all that we were ready to send to the help of Belgium and France. Yet in about two years that army, without conscription or com- pulsion, had grown to about 5,000,000. Every man was a volunteer. That, sir, is a fact un- precedented in the history of Europe, and it could not have happened except under the influence of a great, a profound moral inspiration. That is one of the many manifestations of the justice of our cause, one of the many proofs that, in forcing war upon the world, Germany had challenged the moral instincts of the race. Some of us, sir, were sorry at the time that conscription had at last to be enforced. We had hoped to see the whole available manhood of the nation sweep freely into the ranks of so sacred a cause. But that could not be, and at last we had to adopt conscription for the same reasons as you have more immediately done. Only I must add to what I have said about the rise of that mag- nificent volunteer army, the largest ever raised in history, that the spirit which has distinguished their successors who have come in under conscrip- tion has been not less gallant, not less willing, and BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 47 not less resolute than that of the volunteers them- selves. Sir, it is sometimes said by pacifists on our side of the water — and I saw an echo of this from the mouth of one of your pacifists quoted in a news- paper the other day — that this war, and the re- cruiting to which it has compelled us, is the con- spiracy of old and elderly men, the effort of my own generation to push forward, with safety to themselves, the youth of their nation to bear the brunt and the agony. It has been asserted that the war has been due to the greed and the blunders of aged diplomats, and that its spirit has been fostered mainly by elderly bellicose parsons like myself — a set of selfish Abrahams driving their Isaacs to the altar. I have seen these very terms used in a certain journal more than once. Sir, that is a sheer falsehood. I can say so from my own experience as a father and as Principal of a large University. Our young men, whether they went to war under our voluntary system of enlistment for the first two years or later under conscription, went deliberately and with clear consciences, not ignorant of the solemn possibili- ties that lay before each of them, but convinced also of the moral issues that were at stake, 48 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE and resolved at whatever sacrifice to do their duty in carrying those issues to victory. If there were any regrets, misgivings and with- holdings, these were not in the hearts of our sons but in those of the parents who saw them go forth. Every war is a young men's war, but this has been the war not only of the physical strength of our youth, but of their conscience, their moral resolu- tion, and their faith. Nor has this temper been confined to our youth, but has been shared by the older men as well. Before the age of service was raised I suppose that more members of my sex than ever before in history perjured themselves with regard to their years. You have heard, I daresay, of the French lady who celebrated the seventeenth anniversary of her thirty-fifth birthday. Well, there were many of my countrymen who made a similar pre- tence, and who said they were thirty-five when they were forty-two and fifty-two and even up to sixty. And the rest of us could only regret that we were not thirty years younger. In fact, the whole of our population, with very few and negli- gible exceptions, were stirred by the call to war, and united in the determination to prosecute it as the British people never have been stirred or BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 49 united in their history before. And that was just because of the common conscience which possessed us. Nothing else could have effected so universal a result. Let me now give you a few sections through this national movement. In Scotland we have a population under 5,000,000. I am informed that out of that population over 900,000 have already been enlisted. The nearest part of Scotland to America is, I think, the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The population of that island all told Is some 30,000 — men, women, and chil- dren. How many men do you think passed into the ranks of His Majesty's forces, either Into the Navy or into the Army, within the first two years of the war, out of that population of 30,000? — 6000 men. Again take these facts. When the war was about two years old a roll was drawn up of the sons of ministers of the Church of Scotland of military age, and it was found that no less than ninety per cent, of them had enlisted or held com- missions in the forces. The ten per cent, who are over may well be accounted for by physical and other disabilities. Approximately the same figures hold good of ministers' sons in my own Church, 50 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE the United Free Church of Scotland, and the other Scottish Churches. That is to say, practically all the "sons of the manse" in Scotland, who were available, volunteered for service with the colours. There are no statistics for our other Christian homes, but if there were they would show similar results. Or take the Universities of Great Britain.^ I have the figures for most of them up to the spring of 19 1 7, and I find that the number of male students then left was in no case more than one- third of what it had been in the year before the war, that in most cases it was down to one-fourth, and that in Oxford and Cambridge, whose students on the whole are a little older than those of other Universities, some of the colleges had only one-tenth of their former numbers. Of the four Universities of Scotland, taking them ac- cording to their seniority, St. Andrews has now about 800, graduates and students, on its Roll of Service; Glasgow over 3200; Aberdeen over 2600; and Edinburgh over 5100. Let rnc give you some details of my own University oi Aber- deen. The only men students we have left are * See further Address VI, "The Universities and the War." BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 51 either under military age or otherwise ineligible for service, or have returned from service wounded, or are completing their medical studies. Their numbers are about one-fourth of what they used to be. When conscription came in, and all our students above eighteen were called up in the middle of the spring term of last year, the local recruiting authorities agreed to allow them to remain at their studies till the close of the term, on condition that they would not then apply to the military tribunals for exemption. I called them together and put the question before them, and I need hardly say that they repudiated the idea that any of them would claim exemption. They went to the colours as eagerly as their purely volunteer predecessors In previous years. The register of our graduates, men and women, of all ages from twenty-one to eighty and ninety, numbers barely over 5000. Of these, no fewer than 1759 have gone on naval or military service, while a large number more whom we have not yet exactly counted are engaged in Government offices con- nected with the war, in munition-work, in research for the purposes of the war, or in indispensable medical or educational service. I know the reg- ister well, and can assure you that there are not 62 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE many upon it of suitable age who are not engaged in war-work of some kind or other. And this is even true of many above military age. Among professional men our schoolmasters distinguished themselves from the first by their eagerness to serve, and I know several cases where their wives, being themselves certificated teachers, have taken up the duties of their husbands in order to let these off to the war. Take another section in illustration. The other day I asked the Colonel of the reserve bat- talion of a famous Highland regiment how many men his battalion had supplied since the beginning of the war to the two regular battalions of his regiment. He replied between 14,000 and 16,000 men. A battalion, as you know, consists of from 850 to 1000 men — that is to say, each of these battalions has had to be refilled from seven to eight times over. I believe the same to have been true of many other British regiments. Two years ago, when I was out on the front in the Somme valley, our motor-car was stopped in its place in the endless columns of regiments and ammunition trains marching up and down, and I got out upon a great muddy field sloping under the cold sky and swept by a bitter wind, where the BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 53 fragments of a Manchester regiment, one of the New Army raised by Lord Kitchener, was rest- ing, after some days on the front line of our ad- vance. I found them mustered for the roll-call, I think one of the most pathetic scenes I have ever witnessed. The regiment had gone to the front some days before between 800 and 900 strong, and I now saw them mustered in a total strength of 256, on this field of mud where their only shelters were shallow pits hastily dug and roofed with waterproof sheets. When they broke up I spoke to a group of four of them. I said to one, "What were you before the war?" He said, "I was a ticket-collector, sir." "And what were you?" "I was a conductor." "And what were you?" "I was a lawyer's clerk." I forget what the fourth said he was. But here were four ordi- nary civilians who had never expected to handle a gun in their lives, and yet they were out there doing their duty on the front of the war, and among its dangers and privations as cheery and as resolute as could be. That was the spirit which inspired our volunteer armies from first to last. Scenes like this could Le multiplied indefinitely. On the whole, England and Scotland have sent to the war one man to every seven and a half of 64 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE the population; Wales one man in every ten and a fifth; Ireland one man in every twenty-six; and our kinsmen overseas one man in every fifteen.^ In all, Great Britain and her Dominions overseas have raised 7,500,000 of soldiers for this war. This huge and rapidly raised army has been sent not to the single front of the war on which so far your American eyes still rest,^ but to many fronts all round the world. First of all, there was the battle-line through France and Flanders. There, with the French and Belgian armies, British troops, on a line fre- quently over 100 miles in length, have repelled sometimes far larger and better equipped German armies. They assisted in turning them on the Marne and the Aisne, they kept them from getting to the Channel ports. At and around Ypres especially, against enormous odds, they held their untrenched lines, sometimes sacrificing themselves almost to the last man. And that long critical line they will continue to hold till your soldiers in their millions have joined them. ^ These figures are brought down to July, 1918, and have been supplied by the British Office in New York. ^ This was spoken in April, but of course is no longer true. BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR m Another part of the British Army, as you know, has helped to stay the disastrous Italian retreat as well as support the fresh Italian advance on the banks of the Piave. We have another large army, beside a French one, defending, on a long line above Salonika, Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean from Ger- mans, Austrians, Bulgarians, and Turks. We have had another army garrisoning Egypt, repelling from its western borders the attacks of the Libyan Arabs tempted by German gold, de- fending the Suez Canal, and now advancing slowly but surely through Palestine. Whatever the end of that campaign may be, General AUenby's troops, English, Scottish, French, Australian, and Indian, have established themselves in an Impreg- nable position upon the hill-country of Judea and have secured the coast well to the north of Jaffa. ^ There is every prospect of the deliverance of Pal- estine from the Turks, who have no right to it, either natural or moral; but who for four cen- turies have wasted its fertility, neglected its com- ^ By the beginning of October they have captured Damascus and dispersed the Turkish forces on both sides of the Jordan. 56 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE mercial and Industrial possibilities and oppressed its hard-working peasantry. Another smaller force at Aden holds back the Turks and their Arab vassals from interfering with our water-way to India down the Red Sea. And there is that great host both of combatant forces and many labour battalions, with its base in India, which has reached Mesopotamia by the Persian Gulf and has already, under the brilliant leadership of General Maude, taken Bagdad, as General Allenby has taken Jerusalem, and has vic- toriously advanced far beyond that up both the Tigris and the Euphrates. But our Mesopota- mian campaign has not been one of conquest only. Behind the combatant forces, the labour bat- talions, recruited in India, have been busily at work; and the country has been organised and is being irrigated and cultivated with the near pros- pect of the full restoration of its marvellous fer- tility. The Arabs, delivered from that Turkish neglect and oppression which has for so many centuries devastated the country, have been as- sured of our good will, and promised their inde- pendence and the secure practice both of their religion and the immense economic possibilities of their wonderful soil. BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 57 We have another army garrisoning India, not so much for the purpose of controUing the popu- lations who throughout the war have exhibited a remarkable loyalty to the cause of the Allies, but in order to repel invasions by the half-savage tribes of the North-Western frontier, excited by German gold and equipped with German muni- tions. Let me give you here a Hindu testimony to the justice of our cause. Dr. Sarvadhikari, a Hindu gentleman of the Hindu religion and vice- Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, in ad- dressing Convocation in 19 15, spoke as follows: "Thanks to the strong arm which protects us in our seats of learning we are free to follow con- genial pursuits. There is reason for abundant gratitude for the ability and means to continue our work. England and India have been long work- ing together in the fields of peace. They have now been called side by side in the common cause. It was Great Britain's singular triumph to en- circle the world with steel. To-day she has achieved a greater glory, and is able to summon and receive prompt and willing assistance in de- fence of the Empire from all parts of the globe. It is still more glorious to be able to encircle the world with a girdle of united prayer from all 68 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE. races and creeds In the cause of righteousness." Now we come to Africa. In Africa we have had several other armies at work since the begin- ning of the war till, as you know, Germany has lost all the vast colonies which she used to possess in that continent. What are the troops which have been fighting for us there? Only some of them have been British. The rest are South African Dutch, our foes less than eighteen years ago In the Boer War. We came to terms with them, bringing them Into the Commonwealth of the British Empire. We promised them the same freedom which other parts of that Commonwealth have always enjoyed. And we kept our word. What was the result? The Boers, in spite of their close kinship to the Germans, have from the be- ginning of this war not only proved loyal to the British cause In South Africa, but have fought the Germans out of South-west and East Africa with a skill and determination equal to our own. We have had no more able generals on our side than our two former enemies. General Botha and Gen- eral Smuts. General Smuts Is a member of the Inner circle of our Government, and there Is none of our Councillors or Statesmen whom all of us, whether Irish or Scottish or English, trust more BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 59 than we trust himself. Would these Dutch, so recently our enemies, have thus planned and fought had they not realised In our Empire some- thing essential to their freedom and prosperity, and had they not seen in the German power and form of culture something that menaced justice and freedom all the world over? I have left little time to speak of the work of the British Navy, but there is no need for me to instruct an American audience on that side of my subject. Since coming to the United States I have had many proofs of how well you realise the in- dispensable service rendered by the Navy and the Naval Reserves of Great Britain to the cause of the Allies. With the assistance of the smaller navies of France and Italy they have not only driven the German High Fleet into the refuge of its ports, but have swept the oceans of the world of German commerce. They have defended the coasts of Great Britain from invasion by a foe not 200 miles away. They have kept a ceaseless watch round three continents and, above all, ac- cording to my information, they have transported 60 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE overseas 13,000,000 men, 2,000,000 horses and mules, 25,000,000 tons of explosives, 51,000,000 tons of oil and fuel, and 130,000,000 tons of food and other stores. Now for more than a year, in close and cordial co-operation with your fleets, they have continued their colossal task and have held and are holding in check those piratical submarine forces on which Germany has staked her conquest of the world. Since the beginning of the war, the British Navy "has tripled its personnel and doubled its fighting armament." You must add that to what I have told you of the rise of the British Army. If you wish to read of what our mercantile and fishing marine have done, both for our home seas and in waters as far away as the Adriatic, in mine-sweeping, in scouting and patrolling, and in fighting enemy submarines, get Professor Mac- Nelle Dixon's volume "The Fleets Behind the Fleet". There you will find the record of a vig- ilance, endurance, and courage worthy to be placed for its splendour beside the most heroic achieve- ments of our Navy In the past, and far exceeding them both in the variety of its details and the wide range of its operations. I know of what I speak, for I have both visited BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 61 the Grand Fleet and in a common drifter have watched the operations of mine-sweeping and patrolling among the stormy seas of our Scottish coasts. The courage and resolution of men who before the war were peaceful fishermen and sailors is equal to those which I have described of their brothers in the armies of Flanders and the Somme. As an illustration of the ceaseless vigi- lance with which the widest oceans are still patrolled, let me give you the following instance. In coming over here on an Atlantic liner, we were suddenly stopped one morning at twilight by a shot fired across our bows. It was a British cruiser which, not content with interrogating us by signal, circled round us several times before letting us continue our voyage. The reason, we were told, was this. Our ship used to carry three masts but had left one behind in the port of our departure, and the cruiser had therefore failed to recognise her. We proceeded on our way with a fresh sense of security. That cruiser, the only ship we saw upon our voyage, coming out of no- where, was proof to us of the unseen eyes by which the vast waste of waters is ceaselessly watched. Let me add this. I have seldom been so thrilled in my life as by the sight of American and British 6S OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE fleets lying side by side in one of our Scottish firths. Those great forces, of course, have had to be fed, to be munitioned, and to be doctored. Speak- ing only of the Western front, the only front of which I have personal knowledge, I may say that I was in constant doubt at which to marvel most — the fighting-powers of our army or the wonder- ful organisation behind their lines by which they are fed and otherwise supported. Our troops there have the best of our beef and bacon, the finest of our wheat, and full supplies of sugar, coffee, tea, and other articles. From the great bakeries at the bases to the travelling kitchens of each unit at the front the system works with a rigorous efficiency. To effect this, we have long been rationing ourselves at home. I need not go into detail, but the following instances may in- terest you. Wheat had long been a stranger to our homes before I came away. In my part of the country each family's weekly supply of butcher meat had been cut down to half of what it used to be in normal times of peace. In the first week of March I took up to a friend in a good position BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 63 in London a roast of beef of six pounds in weight, the first that had crossed his threshold since Christmas. The total material used in brewing beer in 1914 was 1,500,000 tons; it has now been reduced to 500,000. The strength of beer has been largely reduced and during 19 17 no manufac- ture of spirits for human consumption has been permitted. No unmalted barley is now in the hands of brewers. One million acres were added in 19 1 7 to the cultivated area within Great Brit- ain, and 850,000 tons of cereals and 5,000,000 tons of potatoes were produced in addition to the average of previous years. Talce next our munitions. In June, 19 15, the Ministry of Munitions was formed, and since then our output has been increased twenty-eight times over. In 19 14 our steel output was 7,000,- 000 tons, and the estimated output for 19 18 is 12,000,000. The output of machine-guns has in- creased thirty-nine times; of light guns nineteen times; of heavy guns seventy times; and of very heavy guns two hundred and twenty. Towards the end of 1917 about 2,000,000 men and 700,- 000 women were engaged on munition work proper. Besides 90 National Arsenals our Gov- ernment now controls 5046 factories working day 64 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE and night on munitions and supplies. There are parts of my country growing out of recognition; here and there whole cities of factories and dwell- ings for the workers have arisen since the war began. We are now expending ammunition each week at sixty-five times the rate of the expenditure during the first ten months of the war. I come now to the medical care of our armies. I have not the full figures but, as you know, the sanitary and preventive departments of this work have been so efficient that, in our Western armies at least, the suffering from disease is but a frac- tion of what prevailed In previous wars. Armies used to be ravaged by typhoid and by other epi- demics; in our vast forces in the West the cases of these diseases have been comparatively few. The Army Medical Service and the British Red Cross have been splendidly organised. The trans- port of the wounded has been marvellously effi- cient and rapid. In London hospitals I have talked with men who have been comfortably bedded there before midnight of the same day on which they were wounded. In my own city of Aberdeen we have the most northerly General Hospital in the Kingdom, some five or six hundred miles distant from the Channel ports at which BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 65 the hospital ships arrive from France. Well- equipped ambulance trains have sometimes de- posited in Aberdeen men within forty-eight hours of their having been wounded in France. The medical profession of our country has been mobilised for the war, and all its best ability and experience have been devoted to our troops. Let me give you one incident which illustrates this. In the early months of the war I was calling upon the mother of one of our students who had been among the first to fall. She was a widow with only one other son, and at first she was un- able to do anything but moan repeatedly, "Oh, why was it my laddie that was taken, oh, why was he taken!" After some time of this she suddenly turned round — she had been lying with her back to me — and with pride in her eyes she said: "But he had fower speecialists wi' him afore he died". Sir, the same surgical skill and devotion have been at the service of every wounded private in the British Army. The drain upon our medical re- sources has been exhausting. In 19 17 alone the casualties among officers of the Royal Army Med- ical Corps have been very numerous. But al- ready you have sent additions to their depleted ranks, and we are grateful for the American doc- 66 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE tors and surgeons who are at work in our military hospitals at home or attached to many of our units in the field. How are we paying for it all? Our war costs us almost £7,000,000 a day or about $35,000,000. That includes the payment of troops, the cost of their upkeep and equipment, and the loans to our Allies. Before the war our national debt was £645,000,000 sterling. By September, 19 17, it had risen to £5,000,000,000, of which £1,100,- 000,000 had been lent to our Allies and £160,- 000,000 to overseas Dominions. Multiply these sums by five and you will get their equivalent in dollars. We are meeting this enormous expenditure partly by taxation and partly by war loans. Our income-tax, including super-tax, will yield, it is estimated, during the coming year £224,000,000, and the excess profits tax £180,000,000 leaving £208,000,000 to be derived from other sources, including indirect taxation. At the same time the prices of the necessaries of life have very largely increased. I may say, that our middle classes have to meet the doubled cost of living on about two-thirds of their former income. With regard to our war loans, of which we BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 67 have had a number, I have to say this first of all. Their results have surprised us beyond measure. In each case the amount subscribed has been be- yond what was asked for and far beyond what was anticipated. I give you the following illus- trations for your encouragement in similar efforts, speaking as I do while you are engaged in raising your third Liberty Loan. I feel sure from what I have seen and heard that your experience will be similar to ours. Our last War Loan, raised in January and February of this year, amounted to £1,000,000,- 000 sterling, which, however, included £130,000,- 000 of converted Exchequer Bonds, while the im- mediately preceding loan was only £616,000,000. For the latter there were 1,100,000 subscribers, but for that of this year the subscribers were 5,289,000. This loan was collected in war-Tanks which had been at the front and were now sent round our principal cities. One of them came to Aberdeen on the last day of January. The population of Aberdeen is a little over 160,000. In five days that Tank had collected £2,500,000 — that is to say $12,500,000. Deducting a proportion of this as contributed by the surrounding district, we may 68 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE say that $10,000,000 were contributed by 160,000 of a population. In Dundee, with a slightly larger population, they raised over £4,000,000, or $20,000,000. In Glasgow, with over 1,000,000 population, they raised, also in five days, £14,- 000,000, or $70,000,000. London, where the Tanks had opened their campaign with somewhat meagre results, when she saw what the provinces had done, made another effort, and in March raised no less than £74,000,000. Multiply that by five and you get the amount in dollars. And some other centres of population, for which I have not the figures, did even better. All this has astonished us by its proof not only of the amount but of the mobility of our wealth. We have seen what we can do under the urgency of a great and a righteous cause. But it has caused us to reflect on the meagreness of our giv- ings in times past to the causes, no less urgent, of peace. We see to our shame how easy it would have been, had our consciences been equally roused, to give far larger sums than we used to devote to education, to housing, and to the other needs of our population. I trust that the lesson will abide with us when peace comes again, and we have to tackle the reconstruction of our social BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 69 welfare. But in the meantime you and we have to win the war. The costs of it are still enormous. Take the sum which I have quoted as raised in five days by my fellow-citizens in Aberdeen — £2,500,000. That hardly amounts to the cost of eight hours of the war. I have now to speak of our costlier sacrifices in men. I am told that "during the first sixteen months of the war the casualties totalled 550,- 000 or about 78 per cent, of the entire original land-forces". This brings us to the end of 19 15. In 1916, they were 650,000 and in 1917, 800,000, "due mainly to the heavy fighting in Flanders dur- ing which we had 27,000 men killed in one month," and to the battles of Arras and Mes- sines. "The figures for the great battles which began on 21st March, 19 18, are not yet available, but the total of British officer casualties published in April alone exceeds 10,000." As I have said in a previous address there is hardly a family in our land but has contributed a son, a brother, a husband, or a father, to this awful list. Our slain number very many hundreds 70 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE of thousands. The national loss in the sacrifice of so many rich and promising lives is immeas- urable. It is our duty to see that it shall not be in vain. We say, as our fallen would say with us, that it has not been in vain. But for the future — if such loss lead to the victory of right over wrong; if it avenge the banished and the tortured; if once for all it warn the world from the fatality of broken faith; if it not only preserve the traditions and liberties of our free Empire but secure the same freedom for all the weaker nations of the world; if, still more, the example of the courage and willing self-sacrifice of our youth quicken those of us who remain to unsel- fishness and purity, and pour down all the com- mon ways of peace the heroism which war has evoked, it will not be in vain. The example of our sons and brothers is upon us with a moral power such as no generation in all our history has ever before felt the weight of. When we are tempted to lose heart in the fierce- ness of the struggle or the prospect of the long and arduous way we have still to travel to peace, we rekindle our flickering courage at the imperish- able flame of their devotion. THE BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS Ill THE BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS We meet to-day under the impression of events as stupendous as any that ever challenged the con- science and the mind of man. We cannot measure them nor forecast their consequences. But it lies with us to see that they neither bewilder us nor distract our hearts from our faith and duty in a warfare which is no less ours who are here than it is theirs, sons of both our peoples, who watch for us on the seas or who fight for us on the fronts of the greatest war of all time. Their strength and their valour have proved up till now in- domitable — indomitable even in defeat; but their victory hangs on the steadiness and fidelity of their peoples behind them. The strain is uni- versal — if your people have not yet all felt it they shall before many weeks or months are past. The strain is universal, the sacrifices required must be borne by all, and the Issue under God depends 73 74 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE on the understanding, the courage, and the reso- lution of our peoples as a whole. What I propose to do, in this my first discourse on the war to an American audience,^ is to offer a summary account of what we in Great Britain have felt and have dared since first we were forced into the war three and three-quarter years ago; what we felt we stood for and stand for still, and what has given us strength, first to decide upon our duty in the few hours when decision was open to us; then to make up for our almost ab- solute unpreparedness for war; and then and all along to bear the strain and the constantly in- creasing sacrifice and agony, imposed on us to an extent far beyond our worst fears at the start of it. In the present crisis such a review may be of some use to you for two reasons. First, the United States stand to-day to the war on pretty much the same stage as that on which we found ourselves during its first months. You have mo- bilised your manhood for fighting, and are push- ing to the front a relatively small but a compact, eager and valiant army to the help of your Allies, and particularly of France, against a resolute ^ Delivered first to a public meeting in Union Semi- nary, New York, on 2nd April, 1918. BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 75 German invasion that not only has Paris for its goal, but seeks nothing short of the dismember- ment of France and the crushing of her people. That was precisely our position in August, 19 14, when General French led his force of only some 160,000 men through Normandy and Flanders to the borders of Belgium, and we had still before us our years of strain and costly sacrifice. And in the second place, I hope to be able to show you by my survey what exactly the armed accession of America to our sacred Alliance has meant to us morally — has meant to us French and British peoples, war-strained and war-weary as we are and working and fighting to the pitch of our power there, years before you were able to join us. From the first the call to ourselves and to our Allies was clear and signal like every call upon the conscience. Our duty was Immediate and simple — to resist a powerful and treacherous as- sault upon the peace and liberties of the world — however unprepared we knew ourselves to be — to resist it to the uttermost, and that not only on be- half of the outraged people, to whose security we had pledged our word twice over, but (as we in- stinctively felt) in defence of justice and of free- dom all round the world. You know what a 76 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE good conscience we had in this matter. Germany had broken her word to Europe. Suddenly and without excuse — for the assertion that France in- tended an invasion of Belgium was an after- thought and a falsehood — suddenly and without excuse the German Government violated the neutrality it had twice sworn with us to maintain, and shattered the faith on which the amity of nations is founded. Nor was this an isolated con- spiracy against the peace of the world. Up to the verge of breaking with our friends of France and Russia, our Government urged proposals of arbitration upon the question of Serbia, which, accepted by other powers, Germany alone de- clined. Sir Edward Grey, as Prince Lichnowsky admits, did everything possible to maintain peace. But the German mind was determined and had long been determined upon war, and for two frankly avowed reasons — that it thought itself superior to the minds of all other civilised peoples, and saw in war its chance of asserting that superiority and establishing its domination over the world. Why, Germans were shouting that in your own thresholds! Towards the close of 19 14, a leading German journalist (Max Har- den) in the "New York Times" exhorted his Ger- BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 77 man kinsmen in the States "to cease the pitiful attempts to excuse Germany's action. Not as weak-willed blunderers have we undertaken this war. We wanted it because we had to will it and could will it. It strikes the hour of Germany's rising power." There you have it — "the Un- bounded Will" as they call it themselves, superior to the moral law and reckless of humanity. And with our Allies we did resist and break at least this wider menace to mankind. The claims of the culture of modern Germany to impose itself upon the world by right of sheer will and brute power as well as of boasted worth, were lowered on the Marne, on the Aisne and before Ypres, by forces inferior to the German in every material respect, but endowed with the super- natural strength of men who knew that they were fighting for all that is highest and most precious in human life. The accent of the enemy began to falter. He lessened his claims, though he did not render them less fantastic. From the right to organise the world in her own spirit, Germany fell back on the hegemony of Central Europe over the rest of the Continent; upon a claim to a gateway to the East which no one had denied her and which she had been fast winning already in the 78 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE days of peace; upon a spurious championship of the freedom of the seas — and at last from all these upon the cry that she was fighting, and from the first had been fighting, only in self-defence. That is, they who had at the outset refused to plead any excuse for their war on mankind except that they willed it because they had to will it and could will it, now deny that they ever did so — and seek to throw the blame for war upon their noto- riously reluctant and unready opponents. Of every phase of this shifting pretence Belgium, Serbia, Poland, Roumania, and now the conquered provinces of Russia are the damning exposure. On the other side, the conscience and declared duty of the Allies have remained the same. The strain, the costs, and the sacrifices have infinitely exceeded our worst fears. But that has made no difference to our duty. For the cost of a duty can never affect its urgency; and among our faculties conscience is the one which feels a strain only as an added strength. The promise has been fulfilled, as so often before in history. To the bare sense of righteousness with which our nation entered the war all things have been added — men, re- sources, and powers of mind of which we had not dreamt ourselves capable. In France and on more BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 79 than one Eastern front the will to fight for fight- ing's sake, or for tyranny, proved Inferior on the field to the will to fight in defence of the oppressed for justice and freedom. For the moment this proof may be obscured. Italy, with full victory almost in her grasp, has been beaten back to the Piave; where, however, she stands firm. The fresh German offensive still advances, reinforced by the troops which her fraud on Russia has released for the Western front. And Russia has failed us: Russia which up till a year ago had rendered to our Cause so many and so effectual sacrifices. The war has let loose forces of which in its first days few dreamt, and fewer still made serious reckoning. Political movements, slowly gathering in depths no war controls, have burst and swept across not only the lines of strategy but the shining path- ways to those ideas by which the warfare of the Allies has been inspired. Our Cause and our duty to it lie to-day beneath a heavier strain than we have felt since the winter of 19 14. The end of our warfare which appeared reasonably near has been indefinitely prolonged, and costs and sac- rifices are already upon us greater even than those which we have endured during the past terrible 80 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE years. On what have we rallied our minds — our minds and hearts — beneath so aggrav^ated and pro- longed a test? On, I believe, three things: jirst, the memory that such trials are not new in the his- tory of our people, but that in God's Providence our fathers passed through them, and even worse, to victory over a tyranny similar to that which threatens us; second, faith in the undimin- ished righteousness and urgency of our Cause; and third, the example of those who have already fought, and died, for it and for us. I take the memory first not because it is the most decisive, but it comes first chronologically. The two wars which our fathers waged against Napoleon between 1793 and 1815 (for the Waterloo campaign was but the appendix of the second) — these two wars separated by the incon- clusive peace of Amiens in 1802 — present in their conditions, and the trials to which they subjected our people, extraordinary resemblances to the war of to-day. We entered them as we entered this in coalition with other nations of Europe, whom also as now we had to finance; so that as to-day our BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 81 national debt went up by leaps and bounds. At first Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Spain were with us, but one by one they fell off and Britain stood practically alone against the tyrant. Hol- land fell to him at a blow as Belgium has fallen to Germany. Lombardy was not merely threat- ened as now, but wholly overrun by the young conqueror. Though, as to-day, we had some vic- tories in the far East, we had been defeated in Holland; war fostered by the intrigues and bribes of the enemy was raised against us in India; there was an Irish rebellion; and also just as to-day there was sore trouble with the neutral states, who claimed the right to carry contraband of war and indeed went further and armed themselves to en- force that right. Then, as now, the enemy pro- posed peace, really in order to find his breath for future conquests. We accepted his proposals. Everybody knows the inconclusiveness of the Peace of Amiens in 1802 and how war broke out the following year. It is a warning to us now; its terms of "mutual restitution" leaving the tyrant's powerful will to war untouched, just as they would leave Germany's if we were to listen to her offers of them. Refreshed by the armistice Napoleon threw off every disguise, set up his Empire, un- 82 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE made the republics he had created, and menaced ev^ery nationality within his reach. In 1803 Sir James Mackintosh wrote: "Every other monu- ment of European liberty has perished. That ancient fabric which has been gradually raised by the wisdom and virtue of our forefathers still stands; but it stands alone and it stands among ruins." To Britain, therefore. Napoleon directed his ambition and planned her invasion. The im- mediate response was the enrolment of 300,000 volunteers. By Pitt's care our people formed a new coalition. But in 1807 Russia again failed us and made her peace with France. Spain, by an act of treachery, became a kingdom of the French Empire; Holland was already another of the same. In 1809 we held upon the Continent only a piece of Portugal, and Moore's retreat on Co- runa, even though tempered by his victory there, reduced the nation wellnigh to despair. Our blunders were many both abroad and at home; and there were grave moral defections among cer- tain classes of the people just as now — as Words- worth notes "rapine, avarice, and expense". But the Government and the nation pressed on, and though Austria failed us, and it took Wellington full four years to advance from Torres Vedras to BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 83 the gates of Paris, Napoleon at last yielded in 1 8 14. And from 18 12 onwards we had also on our hands a war with you of the United States. What to all those troubles are our present ones — even the great danger that now besets our Cause from the paralysis of Russia and the defeat of Italy? Yet our fathers prevailed; and we know from Wordsworth — Wordsworth who followed the fluctuations of the war with an incomparable series of poems — we know from him what it was that kept Britain, with all her faults and blunders, steadfast to the victorious end. With Mackin- tosh, whom I have quoted, he saw, and the nation saw, that earth's best hopes hung upon the Cause for which his country fought so long alone; that the issue was "victory or death" — death to all that makes a nation virtuous and wise ; that the enemy was Impatient to put out the only light Of Liberty that remains on earth; ^hat In ourselves our safety must be bought, That by our own right hands it must be wrought, That we must stand unpropped or be laid low. O dastard whom such foretaste doth not cheer! 84 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE Yet even such courage and tenacity are helpless for victory except they be the instruments of a righteous cause. When Bonaparte a second time broke the peace of Europe all its powers joined in the declaration that "he has deprived himself of the protection of the laws, and made it evident in face of the universe that there can be no longer peace or truce with him. The Powers declare that ... as the general enemy and disturber of the world he is abandoned to public justice." But such had been the instinct of the British nation with or without Allies all along — all along these twenty-two years of war against the tyrant. O joyless power that stands by lawless force And if old judgments keep their sacred course, Him from that height shall heaven precipitate. I need not draw the moral for ourselves, in ad- versities less severe, with Allies more assured, and with a Cause, if possible, still more just and sacred. To the proclamation of Napoleon's outlawry BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 85 your own President's words regarding Germany offer a close parallel: — "The German power, a thing without con- science, honour, or capacity for covenanted peace, must be crushed. . . . Our present and imme- diate task is to win the war and nothing shall turn us aside until it is accomplished." I have already spoken of the things that have been added to our Cause in proportion to our belief in it, and to the works by which we have shown our faith: our vast armies, mountains of munitions, and other fresh resources, a new ex- perience of the extent and mobility of our wealth, the discovery of unexpected capacities of organisa- tion, of devotion, of endurance. But above all you have joined us, not only with your boundless re- sources of material and energy; but with your national record of never having put your minds and hearts to any just cause but you have carried it to victory; and with this further moral rein- forcement of our conscience and will that after two and a half years of deliberation, and of ex- perimenting with the enemy by every possible means of peace, you came to that same conclusion to which we had to rise in a few hours, when the war was rushed on us — that Germany must be 86 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE fought out on the field if the freedom and peace of the world are to be rendered secure. What a vin- dication you have given us of our original in- stincts of duty!^ What a remedy for the moral distractions of these years of fluctuating war! What a full compensation for the collapse of our most potential Ally! What a buttress against the threatened fall of the Italian front and ours, and the French retreat before the new German offen- sive I Subtract Russia as we must — and even Italy if your fears compel you to do so, though I think they are unfounded, for Italy now stands and is certain to advance again — you still have these three, France, Britain, and America : surely an in- domitable alliance both in battle and in the coun- sels that shall after this establish for the world a free, a just, and a lasting peace. Yet whatever be our Allies and our resources, to us British it is the Cause that matters; and we feel that it shall be woe to us if either by a negli- gent war or by a timid and selfish peace we im- peril the interests of that Cause and the future of the world that hangs upon it. Whether we look at that Cause or the material resources it has evoked by the sheer strength of its justice, we have * See above, Address I. BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 87 no reason, even to-day, for aught but faith In God, courage and a confident hope — Hope the paramount duty that Heaven lays, For its own honour, on man's suffering heart. I have left but little time to speak of the third of the strong things on which in these dark days we British have rallied our hearts: the example of those who for us and for our Cause have fought and died. But indeed, except for our vows, words are not needed where deeds have been so sacra- mental. Righteous in itself, our Cause and the hopes it has gathered have been further hallowed by the volume of sacrifice they have evoked. Our hearts feel the steadying and the cleansing power of these examples. Our young men who have fallen gave their lives when still out of sight of victory, and cheered by nought beyond their sense of duty and devotion to a high ideal. But they did so — for the most part in conditions neither of glory nor even of promise — because sustained by the assurance that they fought and died not for the moment nor for themselves, perhaps not even for their own generation, but for the future — a 88 OUR COIVIMON CONSCIENCE far off, but, as God reigns, a certain and a blessed future for the world. They were willing and cheerfully willing that it should be so. They have left their warfare unfinished, have left it to us in the confidence that we shall see it through, and win for humanity the fulfilment of the ideals for which they have died. We are ready to carry on in their spirit, and if it must be that we see neither victory nor peace for ourselves, to secure these by our patience and sacrifice for the generations to come — to fight till the will to war is broken and consents to disarmament and the restoration of freedom. No other end is worth struggling for: we dare no other with these examples behind and about us. I leave you with the words of one who not only expressed this spirit with a rare direct- ness, but fought in it and laid down his own life for it soon after he had written them — Robert Vernede : — If through this roar o' the guns one prayer may reach Thee, Lord of all life, whose mercies never sleep, Not in our time, not now, Lord, we beseech Thee To grant us peace. The sword has bit too deep. We see all fair things fouled — homes love's hands builded Shattered to dust beside their withered vines, BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 89 Shattered the towers that once Thy sunsets gilded, And Christ struck yet again within His shrines. Hark the roar grows . . . the thunders reawaken — We ask one thing, Lord, only one thing now: Hearts high as theirs, who went to death unshaken, Courage like theirs to make and keep their vow. Then to our children there shall be no handing Of fates so vain — of passions so abhorr'd . . . But Peace . . . the Peace which passeth understand- ing .. . Not in our time . . . but in their time, O Lord. THE WITNESS OF FRANCE IVi THE WITNESS OF FRANCE Americans, the conscience which we share in this war is not ours alone. It is France's and Italy's and Belgium's and that of all our Allies. There never was an Alliance so closely bound by a common conscience. In this address I wish to speak of France's witness to the character of our aims. It is one of the most vivid of all the allied testimonies to the justice of our Cause. With that power of intuition in which they excel, the French though sorely divided as a people, sprang from the first to the moral issues of the war with a unan- imity that surprised themselves and the world. And French being, as one has said, "the language in which thought rises most easily to the surface,"^ they have expressed their convictions with a clarity and fulness beyond the rest of us. In its individ- ual forms, as when speaking of faith and God ^ R. W. Barbour. 93 94 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE and the other life, the French testimony fre- quently contrasts with the greater reticence of our own soldiers. We understand and respect the latter, but we turn to those spiritual confidences of French fighters as to a day of southern sunshine. Remember too, that as France, of all the greater Allies, has suffered most from the war, her moral witness is the more appealing. We shall best approach our subject by recalling the state of the French people before war broke out. It Is not extravagant to say that of all civil- ised peoples this was then the most divided, fis- sured, and rent. There was first, the widest and bitterest of all schisms, the religious, which has been firmly set, though not started, by the Revolution. In no country has the opposition to religion, the pro- fession of sheer atheism, been more resolute, out- spoken, or aggressive. The conflict had again come to a head, some few years ago, over the divorce of the Church by the State. With the principle of that divorce many in my country, and (I suppose) all In yours would sympathise. But it was largely Inspired by hostility to religion as well as to the Church, and It was carried out with THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 95 heavy exactions and deprivations. The bitterness became intense, and the parties appeared to be ir- reconcilable. Then there were the political divisions, some of them crossing the religious. In the domestic politics of France more groups and factions ex- isted than perhaps in any other civilised commu- nity. You remember with what bewildering rapid- ity they overturned and succeeded each other in the Government of the country. M. Paul Saba- tier has described the "extreme mutual animosity of the various political parties." "Political pas- sions were raised to such a pitch that the very foundations of the moral unity of the country seemed to be shattered thereby. 'Do you always devour one another in France?' I was asked not very long before the war, by a German diplo- matist. ... It was only too true — ^the French were devouring one another." * [Another Frenchman has said that "Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Free-thinkers, Trade-Union- Ists, Internationalists, Traditionalists, were moved * "A Frenchman's Thoughts on the War," translated by Bernard Miall. London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1915. 96 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE by forces which drove us at each other's throats".!] But now there Is no people more united than are the French. They present to us all the ex- ample of unity — of ungrudging comradeship among all sects and parties in devotion to a com- mon aim — an example which is one of the sharp- est edges on the solidity of our great Alliance. How has this wonderful change come about? Certainly not by the mere physical pressure of self-defence, nor mainly by a community of suf- fering. These indeed have been so terrible that they might have been deemed sufficient to ac- count for the effect on the national temper. When we British go to France we become silent about our own sacrifices. We have not seen one of our richest provinces pass into the hands of the enemy. We have not had our minerals and our industries ruthlessly exploited, nor our towns ^ Maurice Barres, "The Faith of France." I did not read this volume till I was returning from America. I have entered a few quotations, which I make from it in this address, in square brackets. They are taken from the translation by Elizabeth Marbury, with introduc- tion by Dr. Henry Van Dyke. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918. THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 97 ruined, nor many of our villages erased and their rich fields tortured and poisoned or turned into vast cemeteries. We have not had great sections of our population deported to till the enemy's lands, nor our women and children enslaved nor — in the same awful number at least — murdered by his policy of "frightfulness." But from all these agonies France has suffered for four years. Yet the French will tell you — and this is true — that it is not the fires of that material furnace which have fused them into one — which have tempered the steel front they present to the foe. They are now compact and sympathetic, not by the necessity of fighting for their national exist- ence, but by the conscience which, to judge from countless declarations by their soldiers and from their hterature on the war, all parties feel in them- selves and recognise in each other: the conscience of the moral character of the struggle forced upon them. A community of spirit has descended on this sorely divided people, and the spirit is something greater than the spirit of patriotism. Factions and sects have forgotten themselves not merely in the larger self of France, but — as I shall quote to you from their own words — in a France which is fight- ing for humanity and a new world, against a power 98 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE absolutely hostile to those spiritual ideals that are mankind's highest interests. It Is striking how the word glory, which the world indentified with France, has been replaced in her books and in the letters of her soldiers by the words duty and sac- rifice. You Americans remember the idealism and disinterestedness of those first French who in the days before Napoleon came to fight for your freedom. The French of to-day are showing the same idealism and disinterestedness, but on a larger scale and under a far more terrible test. The testimonies to this spiritual devotion that I shall quote I take mainly from two books which the war has brought forth in France. One gives us the witness of her intellectuals, men for the most part of no religious confession, some of whom before the war abjured religion altogether; and the other the witness of French Catholics. And I shall add to these the testimony of some French Protestants. In "L'Universite et la Guerre,"^ M. Thamin, Rector of the Academy of Bordeaux, quoting from the letters of many schoolmasters and other graduates engaged on the Front, gives us not only the testimony of intelligent and educated men, who * Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1916. THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 99 had previously been indifferent or hostile to re- ligion, to the spiritual ideals which now inspired them, and the religious spirit these have awakened in them, but their tribute as well to the equally ethical and unselfish temper they recognise in the Catholics along with whom they are proud to fight, shoulder to shoulder, in the same trenches. Amply supported by the evidence he quotes, M. Thamin declares of the trained, thinking men of whom he writes that it was their mobilisation which dis- covered them to themselves and developed the faith, the sense of duty, the wonderful tranquillity and even joy in their terrible tasks, of which they had not before known themselves to be capable. He does not exaggerate when he sums it up in these words : — "It had to be that this extraordinary war should mobilise the ideas after the men. All the Ideas of France are ranged In battle. The country has again acknowledged that which it believed, the University that which it taught. There is the secret of this mutually reinforced confidence; there also is one of the secrets of a unanimity which surprises ourselves. The most unbelieving have discovered for them- selves a faith, the most realist an ideal; and 100 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE They are at the bottom of the soul of those this faith and this ideal are the same for all. even, who acknowledge [getting] them from others."^ "For us it is a philosophic crusade which is at stake. The word has been printed for the first time, I believe, by M. Boutroux. But the thought has been often expressed. More conscious for the intellectual elite, it has pene- trated the souls of all the combatants, and be- comes for them a supplementary principle of courage. All have heard the same voices. And though one of them has spoken it more loudly to us, all have more or less felt descend on them as it were the supernatural succour of the idea for which they struggle. They know that it cannot prevent them from dying, but that It itself does not die, and that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it," - And M. Thamin quotes from the letter of a teacher to himself: — "Even under the cannon we do not forget the ideal for which we combat. To know that the accomplishment of our present duty surpasses in range both our own person and ^P. i6o. 2p_ 162. THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 101 our time and even our country — since it con- cerns humanity in the most profound and com- plete sense of the word — is to us a stimulus of incalculable vigour. This sentiment you will not find only among those whom a certain culture has refined and rendered fully con- scious of the role which they play; you will find it again very powerful, though necessarily a little vague, among the humblest and least cultivated of the soldiers."^ [In illustration of this last sentence we may take the following, quoted by M. Barres, from the answer of "a simple man" to the question of a neutral journalist, in the winter of 19 14-15, as to what he was fighting for: *'Simply that more gen- tilesse prevail in the world". And another soldier, in 19 15, said: "The spiritual element is the dom- inating force in this war".^] M. Thamin also gives instances of the recognition by his intellec- tuals of the equally disinterested devotion of their Catholic comrades and of the reciprocal feelings of the latter. He quotes the homage of a Jesuit father to his captain, a state-teacher, and he adds this sentence from a teacher, a sub-lieutenant: "Be- lieve, that among the most brave, without boast- ^ P. 3 1 • ^ Pp. xiv, xvi. 102 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE ing, there are always found a teacher and a cure".^ On the other side, the Catholic, we have that remarkable book, "L'Allemagne et les Allies de- vant la Conscience chretienne".^ It bears the Im- primatur of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, and consists of nine essays by leading clerics and laymen of the Gallican Church. They are writ- ten in answer to the Catholics of Germany, who had violently reproached their fellow-churchmen in France with supporting a political system and a national temper which were anti-Christian, with allying themselves to Britain and Russia, who not only were responsible for the war (to which poor Germany had to submit in self-defence) but are, either as Britain is, Protestant and free-thinking, or, as Russia, schismatic and hostile to Catholi- cism. The different essays engage themselves with these points. They quietly but very firmly con- vict Germany of the sole responsibility for the war. They expose her crimes in violating the neutrality of Belgium, in cruelly treating her prisoners of war and the civilians of the countries she has wan- tonly invaded, in being accessory to the Armenian massacres, and in attempting to excite the Moslem ^ Pp. 21, 22. - Paris: Bloud et Gay [1916]. THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 103 world to a "holy war" against Christians. They have no difficulty in exposing that characteristic lack of humour, which permits German Catholics, more than half of whose countrymen are Luther- ans, and so many of them rationalists, to reproach French Catholics with their friendship for "Eng- lish Protestants and free-thinkers". But they go deeper and discover that the present war, as a whole, is one between essentially Christian ideals which inspire France and all her Allies, and the German ideals that are fundamentally immoral and anti-Christian. Monsignor Chapon, the Bishop of Nice, in meeting the charge that French Catholics have become partners with a Govern- ment in France, whose principles are atheistic and whose policy has been inspired by malignity to- wards all religion, admits the injustice and cruelty which his Church has suffered from the State. Yet (he says) these notwithstanding, the French Catholics are with the French Government to- day, because it and the people behind it oppose, with the vision and generous courage that are characteristic of the race, ideals of justice and freedom which are necessary to the peace of the world and the brotherhood of nations, against a German philosophy and policy, which would surely 104. OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE be fatal to these. The Bishop boldly declares for the essential Christianity of the principles of the French Revolution — Liberty, Equality, and Fra- ternity — which, as he justly shows, have their deepest sources In the Gospel of Jesus. And as justly he contrasts the German philosophy of the State, as a thing above moral law and deriving Its authority from power alone, with the dominant French Idea of the State, as merely the larger family, In which the rights of the Individual on the one hand, and the duties of the nation to other nations, are carefully observed. There can be no doubt which of these is the Christian philosophy, and therefore deserving of the support of the Church. Or as Monslgnor Baudrillart puts It In his "Avertlssement" to the volume: — "Monslgnor the Bishop of Nice shows that, in very reality, behind the facts and the crimes, behind all the warlike enterprise of to-day, with the proceedings It Involves, there Is a doctrine which consecrates, inspires, and directs it; the culture and the militarism of Germany strictly hold together; they only exist the one by the other and the one for the other; pan-Germanism has become a theory of the world, a philosophy, a religion; It has informe THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 105 the German soul to the pitch of appearing to have engrossed it altogether. France, whatever be her errors, has at least not in- carnated them to the point of making them her own with unanimity and of fixing herself in them as in the absolute. Moreover, the ideal which she professes is a generous Ideal, which, in the last analysis can be reconciled with the Christian Ideal". ^ M. Bompard, the French Ambassador to the Porte, has given a vivid picture of how Catholic clerics and laymen, monks and nuns, professors, teachers and others, who had been driven from France by the laws against the Church, flocked back through Constantinople from the further East, on the declaration of war, in order to return to their fatherland and take service either in the combatant or the medical units of her forces. In their ardour they struggled with each other for passages home. For they said (I cannot give you the exact words, but they were In substance these) : "The sins of our own Mother are as snow com- pared with the scarlet guilt of the German power". I am told that by 19 15 there were no fewer than 25,000 French priests in the fighting ranks of ip. vi. 106 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE France, of whom looo had given their lives for the Allied Cause. Nor have the French Protestants been behind their countrymen in conscience and courage. By October, 19 17, 450 pastors had been mobilised and 120 students of divinity. [Another estimate gives 68 Protestant chaplains and "scattered throughout the ranks as officers or soldiers 340 more . . . not a large number — but how many Protestant pastors are there in the whole of France? A thousand at the outside, including all sects''.^] By the above date there had died for their country 23 pastors, 4 evangelists, and 31 students. Here is the witness of one of them, Alfred Eugene Casalis, an undergraduate of the University of Montauban. "Too young to be called up; but though strongly and even passion- ately opposed to war and militarism, he could not stand by while others were giving their lives. . . . He had Volunteered' for the Mission Field, and in the same spirit 'volunteered' to serve his country and her righteous cause. . . . Young as he was — barely nineteen — he looked upon the France of 19 14 not as she was, but as ^ Barres, "The Faldi of France," translated by Eliza- beth Marbury, p. 48. THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 107 she might one day be. With the clear vision of the soldier-mystic and the soldier-lover, he beheld his Ideal France, the France of to-morrow, rising renewed and purified from the ashes of the war. For that France he not only laid down his life with all its gifts and promises, but poured out his soul, praying only that whatever of spiritual force might have dwelt in himself should by his death flow out and inspire all who had shared his own efforts and ideals."^ "I am a soldier, of my own free will, and not by compulsion. What can one do ! It is all very well to be a pacifist, there are cir- cumstances in which nothing can hold one back. To begin with, when we see what atrocities our enemies commit, we can't help realising that they must be put a stop to as quickly as possible, and if one can help in doing that, one must lend a hand at once. And when you know there are such creatures as slackers, people who are shirking their bit, one can't ^ "A Young Soldier of France and of Jesus Christ: Letters of Alfred Eugene Casalis, 191 5," translated by C. W. Mackintosh. Eastbourne: Strange the Printer Ltd., 1916. 108 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE hang back : one must come out.^ The cardinal virtue of the Christian soldier Is tenacity, Hold fast that which thou hast. ... I shall fight with a good conscience and without fear, I hope, certainly without hate, because I be- lieve our cause to be just, because France vic- torious will have a mission to fulfil, In elevat- ing and educating mankind for brotherhood. I believe this, because I myself have accepte'd this vocation, and because I know many others who have made It theirs. I feel myself filled with an illimitable hope, which shows me through death the beginnings of a renewed and glorious life . . . you have no Idea of the peace In which I live. . . . Francis Monod, Robert Prunier, and others, many others have died thinking of this glorious reign which must come, which is coming. Their death Is a step towards the coming of this Kingdom, as was their life. And then the new France must stand up for that: 'to make Christ King'. We take oath of allegiance. Lord; we will work to bring about Thy Kingdom: we will give our lives for that ideal." Then at the fighting front he wrote : — ip. 14. THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 109 "Often I dream of the France that is to be, the France that will be born of the 'War for Freedom'. She must understand that it is her duty to be humane. . . . For me, military life has simplified everything. Things have taken on their true values, their full signifi- cance. Difficulties which have seemed almost insurmountable for me have disappeared. In- tellectual sacrifices which I thought I could never accept have accomplished themselves al- most unconsciously and without a pang. And instead of them I find a new vitality, an in- tense desire for action. And with this al- ways peace. . . . My central preoccupation is as to the legitimacy of this war. I am con- fident our cause is just and good, and that we have right on our side. But it is essential that this war should be fruitful as well, and that from all these deaths a new life should spring forth for humanity." How amply he had fulfilled the noble resolu- tions he made on his first call to serve : — "We must search our hearts to see whether we can fight . . . whether we have firmly resolved to be the champions of Right, of Jus- tice, and of Liberty; whether we are suffi- 110 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE ciently in love with the Justice that must he established afterwards to fight in the certainty that our victory will give another good work- man to the task of universal regeneration. . . . "That is the Vigil for us. And our watch- word is 'Christ and France'." Alfred Eugene Casalis fell on the 9th May, 19 1 5, at Roclincourt, Artois, when charging with his company against the foe. [M. Barres gives us other utterances of Pro- testants, some indicating the inner conflict they felt between their Christian heart for peace and their sense of duty to a cause so manifestly just; and he says truly — after noting that besides their passion for the redemption of Alsace is their con- viction that they "are struggling for the freedom of the smaller peoples" — that "without this cer- titude many of these Protestants would be tor- mented, paralysed, and made incapable of action". He quotes Pierre de Maupeou, killed on 28th May, 1915 : "So that at moments I may not fail in my duty, I must, indeed, be convinced of the beauty and of the righteousness of this cause". Another, Francis Monod: "War! why, more than ever we seem to be struggling for peace. When the fictitious unity which was nearly established THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 111 east of us forty-four years ago shall be dissolved, France, at the head of progress and liberty, shall aim effectively, then as always for the peace of the world." M. Barres gives many other ex- pressions of the faith and vision of those Protes- tant soldiers.^] I have read to you these utterances of believing Frenchmen, not only because they reveal the in- domitable idealism of their own people, but also because they express, as Frenchmen most frankly can, the high faith and conscience of the justice of our common cause, which equally inspire multi- tudes of the more reticent soldiers of the British Army. They speak not for themselves only, but for all the Allies in this war for the freedom and the peace of the world. It is a wonderful con- cord of testimony. Frenchmen who had no creed, French Catholics, French Protestants, [and M. Barres quotes in addition the witness of French Jews, French Socialists, and those whom he calls Traditionalists^], ready before the war "to de- vour each other," are inspired to-day by the same moral aims, and in close and generous comrade- ship fight for their country as the champion of ^ "The Faith of France," ch. iv. ^ Chs. v., vi., vii. 112 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE ideals on which the future of humanity depends. The war has yielded no more signal proof of the spiritual character of the forces which have roused and which bind the Allies in this awful Crisis. Yes, Americans, in the French we have com- rades splendidly worthy of the best efforts we can put forth in our warfare. God grant that we, on our part, may prove worthy of the French. PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE^ My Fellow Ministers, — Before I begin the subject on which I am to address you, it is fitting that I should read you some sentences from the Letter in which the Commission of the General Assembly of my Church has commended my pres- ent mission to the Churches and Christians of the United States. "At Edinburgh, the sixth day of March, in the year one thousand, nine hundred and eighteen. "This Commission of the General Assembly of the United Free Church of Scotland, understand- ing that the Very Reverend Sir George Adam Smith, D.D., LL.D., Principal of the University of Aberdeen, Ex-Moderator of the General As- ^ An Address delivered at various Conferences of local Federations of Ministers of Christian Churches, and in parts given also at public meetings. "5 116 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE sembly, has accepted an official invitation from America to address public gatherings on the moral aims of the war, and having learned that he Is shortly to proceed to America on this mission, takes the opportunity of conveying through him to the Presbyterian Churches in America the frater- nal greetings of the United Free Church of Scot- land, and affectionately commends him to the ministers, office-bearers, and members of these Sister Churches across the seas. "It authorises him to express to these Churches and to the people of America the gratification which Is felt throughout the United Free Church of Scotland at the resolution adopted by Congress a year ago, which led to America's entrance into the war, and its admiration of the response which the American nation has made to the call ad- dressed to It by Its President. It recognises that President Wilson has interpreted the highest spirit of the American people, and that the adhesion of America to the Cause of the Allies has brought to them not merely an increase of material strength, but also a deeper sense of the sacredness of the moral and spiritual issues that are at stake in the present conflict. Profoundly convinced that the high ideals of a nation draw their inspiration PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 117 and support from the Gospel of Christ, this Com- mission desires Sir George Adam Smith to be its representative in assuring the Churches of Amer- ica of the value which it attaches to their co-opera- tion in the work of maintaining in their purity and in their strength the spiritual motives which have drawn the allied nations into this war, and in promising to the Delegation which the Presby- terian Church in the U.S.A. is sending to this country an enthusiastic welcome." In the middle of the war our General Assembly of 1916 "gave thanks to God that the nation was sustained and united by a clear conviction of the righteousness of its cause," and expressed their confidence "that a policy so disinterested would be pursued to the end with unflinching resolution." In the spirit of that deliverance the Commission of the same Assembly exhorted the men of the Church to respond to His Majesty's call for fresh levies and "join the ranks of those who had al- ready given themselves to maintain the cause of righteousness." My Church thus expressed a double conviction — of the justice of the cause of the Allies, and of the duty of all Christians to support our Government In defending it by arms. The same double conviction was generally shared 118 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE by all the other Churches of Great Britain. The response of their members was immediate and practically universal. An exact register of the sons of ministers of the Church of Scotland proved that at least 90 per cent, of those of them who were of military age had joined the colours before conscription came in. Similar figures were ob- tained for other Churches; and, had it been pos- sible to procure statistics for all our Christian homes, I believe that the results would not have been far short of the same. With few exceptions the Christians of Great Britain were, however reluctantly, convinced of their nation's and their own duty in this crisis and were resolute to carry that duty through. I say "however reluctantly," for like all other Christians we were devoted to peace. We hated war. We saw with dismay the disruption of Christendom. We remembered what our religion owed to Germany. Our missionaries were co- operating with German missionaries in various parts of the world. In recent recollection we had the world-conference on missions held in Edin- burgh, attended by many Germans, and the good hope it gave of a firmer alliance among the Churches of the nations. And not a few of us PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 119 had grateful memories of German schools and teachers. Our desire for peace, and our honest efforts for many years to ensure it, had been shared, with few exceptions, by all the people of Great Britain. You know how unprepared my people were for a great war. That unpreparedness was part of the proof of the sincerity of the national will for peace. And when the crisis came our Government went to the utmost length — went the length of straining our relations with the nations friendly to us — in the effort to avert war. The Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey, proposed arbitration on the questions that had risen between Austria and Serbia, and all the Powers except one agreed to his proposals. That one was Germany, for even Austria — doubtless conscious of the moral weakness of her case against Serbia after the lat- ter's almost complete submission — seemed Inclined to arbitration. Sir Edward Grey then asked the German Government to suggest some other plan. This also they refused to do. They had but one plan, long prepared for, and that was War, and they thought that the day for its execution had arrived. Had the diplomatic correspondence published soon after the outbreak of war left us 120 OUR CO^IMON CONSCIENCE in any doubt as to this, the doubt would have been dispelled by Prince Lichnowsky's Memorandum. That German testimony shows how earnestly and how honestly Sir Edward Grey had laboured for peace, and how Germany alone frustrated the achievement of a purpose accepted by every other people. Here are the German Prince's own words : "The impression became even stronger that we desired war in all circumstances. The more I pressed the less willing were they [the War Lords in Berlin] to alter their course." "Thus ended my London mission. It was wrecked not by the perfidy of the British but by the perfidy of our policy." "I had to support in London a policy which I knew to be fallacious. I was paid out for It, for it was a sin against the Holy Ghost." "We encouraged Count Berchtold to attack Ser- bia ... we rejected the British proposals of mediation ... we deliberately destroyed the possibility of a peaceful settlement. In view of these indisputable facts It is not surprising that the whole civilised world outside Germany at- tributed to us the sole guilt for the world-war." Such is the deliberate witness of the German Am- bassador to London, this Prussian nobleman, this PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 121 friend of the Kaiser, this unwilling and alarmed agent of his policy. Thus were the Allies forced to war, some in self-defence, some, like Russia, to defend their allies or dependents, some, like Great Britain, to keep their sworn word to preserve the integrity of Belgium, but all alike in order to restore peace, in face of the most treacherous and criminal assault upon peace which was ever conceived by any nation or group of nations. That original conscience which drove us to fight Germany, the instinct that we were battling for the peace of the world, and that this would be impossible till Germany was conquered by force of arms, has been confirmed and articulated by all that the successive stages of the war have exposed to us of her policy and methods. As your President has said: "The Ger- man power, a thing without conscience, honour, or capacity for covenanted peace, must be crushed." Both in your country and in mine there have been not a few who, though convinced of Ger- many's guilt, have declined to approve the deduc- tion that it was our duty to fight her; and some go so far as to affirm that in no circumstance is it right to meet force by force; and that no Chris- 122 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE tian ought to bear arms for any cause however just. I wish to examine these positions so far as they are held by Christian men on supposed re- ligious grounds. Their pacificism, it seems to me, rests upon a misreading of our Scriptures, and upon a confu- sion between merely political peace and the only peace which Christ promised or ensures to His people — the inward spiritual peace which follows on reconciliation with God, on duty faithfully done, and on sacrifice patiently borne, if need be, to the uttermost. The truth is that in the New Testament as in the Old, Peace the Blessing is promised only as the result and reward of other things; Peace the Duty has never a primary but always a secondary place. Righteousness comes first — justice, truth, purity, discipHne, patience, and courage: the peaceable fruits of righteousness; the wisdom that is from above is first pure then peaceable; the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance for ever. Christ never promised political peace. Nor did He condemn all war between nations any more than He condemned the forcible execution of justice within the nation itself. It would be dif- PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 123 ficult to believe that He who bade His disciple Render to Casar the things that are Casar's, by the payment of a just tax, would restrain His people from serving the State with their lives in defence of its freedom or at the call of interna- tional justice. In such circumstances the things of Casar and the things of God become the same things, and in serving the one we also serve the Other. To quote Christ's own example, as of Him who did no violence, is beside the argu- ment. To say to Christians — as is sometimes said — ^that they ought not to be soldiers, because it is impossible to conceive of their Master, if on earth to-day, as bearing arms, is just as true and just as irrelevant as to say that He would not have been a statesman, nor a judge, nor an active guar- dian of civic order — that He would not have acted as President of the United States, nor have sat in any of your courts of justice, nor served as a policeman on your streets — of&ces which, never- theless, though we have not His example, no one doubts that Christians may accept, and Indeed ought not to refuse, if God have granted them the strength and talents for such vocations. Nay more, it is true that a war for justice for others and the redemption of the oppressed, may some- 124 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE times offer the signal line along which Christians are called to obey both their Lord's Word and His Example by taking up their cross. Let me quote to you these sentences of a young Scottish thinl^er: "It needs no argument to prove that a soldier, using the weapons of his special calling, may dismiss all thought of his own inclination and safety as completely as the noblest of martyrs; while, on the other hand, methods outwardly peaceful or even sacred, may, in the rivalry of commerce or of ecclesiastical policy, be used with all the ruthlessness of the sword. . . . The final test is inward. Not outward force, but inward malice, is the unfailing mark of the natural order in its contest with the Spiritual."^ In this, as in everything, it is not the letter of the New Testa- ment but its Spirit that must guide us. The foundation which is in Christ Jesus Is truth and justice as well as love ; if on anything less than all these we strive to build peace, we are building on sand. To put peace before justice, before the redemption of the slave, before the deliverance of the tortured and the defence of women and ^ G. F. Barbour, "A Philosophical Study of Christian Ethics," p. 374. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1911. PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 125 children, is to turn Christianity upside down. You remember the word of the Lord which came to the prophet Ezekiel when he lay prostrate un- der the sense of the awful preparations for judg- ment which were revealed to him, Son of man, stand on thy feet! On thy feet, not on they head ! It seems to me that our Christian pacifists are standing on their heads when they deny our duty to fight the cruelty and perfidy of the German power with the only weapons which that power understands — as you in America have proved by your two and a half years' peaceful experiments with it. They are standing on their heads. We may admire the gymnastic of the attitude, but we can- not ascribe it to either reason or moral strength. In their debate our pacifist friends sometimes throw the Old and New Testaments into a false antithesis, as though the one were all for war and the other all for peace. What are the facts? The history of Israel is the record of how a na- tion, under the guidance of God's Spirit and His chastisement of them, gradually rose above their primitive barbarity and lust of iconquest, and nevertheless retained a conscience of their duty, when challenged, to witness for their faith and their freedom by force of arms. And you 1«6 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE know how in loyalty to this conscience they rose against the Greek tyrant who sought to crush them into apostacy, who drove them from their land and ruined their temple; and how by the sword they beat him back, and not only regained their liberty to keep the law delivered by God to their fathers, but out of their martyrdom in war, out of the faithfulness of their sons, who fell for the Nation and the Faith on the battle-field, de- rived as their reward some of the strongest assur- ances of the resurrection and the life to come which are expressed in the Old Testament. But it is this very faithfulness under arms which the New Testament glorifies — praising the heroes, who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens, what time women received their dead raised to life again, and others not accepting deliverance obtained a better resur- rection. Of whom the world was not worthy f^ ^ In the days of our Lord and His Apostles the present national conditions were not in being. When religious bodies or individuals in our midst deduce from the New Testament the principle that no Christian state should ever fight, even for freedom, faith, or justice to others, it must be pointed out to them that the New Testament PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 127 Let me quote to you some utterances of great Christians upon this point. The first shall be one of John Calvin, very relevant to the present case which civilisation has against Germany: — "Since it makes no difference whether it is by a king or by the lowest of the people that a hostile and devastating inroad is made into a district over which they have no authority, all alike are to be regarded and punished as robbers. Natural equity and duty, therefore, demand that princes be armed not only to repress private crimes by judicial inflictions, but to defend the subjects com- mitted to their guardianship wherever they are hostilely assailed. Such even the Holy Spirit in many passages of Scripture declares to be lawful." Mr. Gladstone said: "The peace party has sprung prematurely to the conclusion that wars may be considered as having closed their melan- choly and miserable history. Such a view, though respectable and even noble, is a serious error. You cannot detest war too much. No war, ex- gives no direct teaching on the subject, for the problem was not present to its writers — no Christian state then existed. The indirect teaching of the New Testament has been dealt with above. 128 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE cept that for liberty, does not contain elements of corruption as well as of misery. But however deplorable wars may be, there are times when justice, when faith, when the welfare of mankind require a man not to shrink from undertaking them." Or take this from Dale of Birmingham, very appropriate to our present warfare and Its moral aims : — "I believe in peace — true peace — at any price; in peace even at the price of war. . . . Wrongs so flagrant may be committed by a despotic and irresponsible Government as not only to provoke the indignation of the civilised world, but to justify peremptory and forcible intervention. ... By all means let us try moral Influence first [as you Americans have fully and patiently tried It], but while me maintain a large army and splendid navy to protect our own shores, I trust that we shall never shrink from using both on behalf of justice and freedom, wherever our national duty and our national honour require us to afford the good cause material as well as moral support." And I quote still another, both because he is a German, and because his words, though written more than fifty years ago, are singularly relevant PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 129 to the position of the Allies in the present crisis : — "The characteristic of a lawful war," says Har- less, in his "Christliche Ethik," "is that it is neces- sary in the interest of justice. Its justification is to be found in those international duties which flow from the special callings appointed by God to the several nations in their mutual relations, and the violation of which a regularly constituted association of nations has a right to avenge."^ The italics are mine. Here we have already the idea of a League of Nations for the enforcement of justice and of peace. That is one of the ideals the Allies are fighting for. It has been accepted by their leading statesmen. Though the practical difficulties in the way of carrying it out are very great, we must keep in mind that to a certain ex- tent it has already been realised by the league of the Allies in this war. Inspired by a common con- science for moral ends in the highest interests of all mankind; and, as essential to these ends, united in an endeavour to beat down the most terrible assault ever delivered on the freedom and justice of the world. In whatever form "the League of ^ Quoted by Luthardt, "Moral Truths of Christian- ity," English Translation, p. 368. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1873. 130 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE Nations" may be possible or desirable, this is certain, that it can be realised only through the defeat of Germany and in her disillusionment of the false ideals which have driven her to war. During these four years of war we British have indeed appreciated — by contrast — the infinite blessings of political peace. Not a day has passed without yielding its tragic motives for praying and for labouring towards such a peace, if only it may be secured without cost to conscience and to duty. But never was a people granted so full an oppor- tunity, as God has granted us, of distinguishing between the peace that is false and the peace that is true. We narrowly escaped the one; we have had rich experience of the other. We might have had peace as the world calls it. Germans, insulting our honour, sought to bribe us into a neutrality which would have be- trayed our friends of France, and left Belgium in the lurch. Yes, we might have had peace. But It would have been peace without righteous- ness — peace with a bad conscience — peace with shame as we knew ourselves unfaithful to weaker but gallant peoples who trusted our 'vord for the security of their national existence; peace with re- morse as we saw them deprived of their freedom, PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 131 and our allies, taking the field without us, crushed by a ruthless and remorseless foe; peace with dishonour as we proved faithless to our fathers' traditions of liberty and justice, and found that we had betrayed those national interests and free in- stitutions with the charge of which Providence has entrusted us throughout our vast Empire; and peace with fear, when we came to realise, as in neutrality we should assuredly have done, that without allies or friends, we must meet, in our turn, the onset of the hatred and ambition of ar- rogant and pitiless victors. On the other hand, what has God given us since we went to war and, we may say, just because we went to war as our signal and inevitable duty? A peace unprecedented throughout our kingdom and Empire. A unity and co-operation that have never been matched among us — not perfect, I admit, but surpassing all our expectations and deserts. Party strife and faction have been hushed almost entirely. Class and race passion have been greatly reduced. It is, I repeat, a national and imperial unity far above what we or any other Empire ever experienced. But deeper still there has been the tranquillity of heart, reserved for all who devote themselves to moral, unselfish ideals, 132 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE and who have resolved, come what may, to do their duty by God and their fellow-men. Such a peace, the surest source of courage, we have seen in our statesmen, and in all who bear the chief and most agonising responsibilities of the war. Such a peace has filled the hearts of our sons who have so magnificently faced death for God's sake and their country's. And such a peace — as I can testify from personal experience — fills the homes which have given of their dearest to the war and may never see them return. In all the bereaved families which I have visited, or corresponded with, I have with one (perhaps two) exceptions found no complaining or resentment, far less any dismay or despair. They had yielded their best to the cause of righteousness, and in humble patience and faith they rested sure of reunion with their dear ones in God's own time. In retreat as in advance, in defeat as in victory, Great Brit- ain has found the peace of God — tested, where Christ said it was to be tested, in great tribula- tions and found unfailing. THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR VI THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR^ Mr. President, Members of the University of Chicago, Graduates, and Gradiiands : — It has been my privilege and honour to teach in this University under both of your great Presi- dents. I wish it were once more in order to teach that I had come among you on this occasion. But neither my present office in a sister-University nor the cruel circumstances of our times permit of that. I am honoured to come here as Principal and Vice-Chancellor of a sister-University, and with all the validity of that office I convey to you her greetings, to which (by the commission of the Principals of the other three Scottish Universities, ^ Delivered on the occasion of the One Hundred and Seventh Convocation of the University of Chicago, held in Hutchinson Court, nth June, 1918, under President Harry Pratt Judson. James Vincent Nash, A.B., 19 14, courteously made this stenographic record. 135 186 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE I am empowered to add their greetings as well — St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. We congratulate you on your rapid progress, on the solid foundations on which you are built, and upon the hope, the ambitions, the prospects which you have in your short history already so worthily earned. Coming back to you as Principal of Aberdeen, I am, first of all, of course, impressed by our dif- ferences, the differences between our two Uni- versities, and these in many directions. I come to your Western World from the most northerly University of the British Empire, and almost the farthest north University in the whole world. That may suggest to you something Arctic, and indeed in Scotland we live in the latitude of Labrador, but thanks to the heating system which your great continent works for us in the Gulf of Mexico we enjoy a more equable climate than your own, suffering neither of your great ex- tremes. In fact, the summer of the east of Scot- land is pretty much like the spring of New Eng- land, and I know no better climate to do one's best work in. There are two other differences between us. One, of course, of age. We are just about 400 THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 137 years older than you, having been founded in the year 1494, by Papal bull, by a Pope whom I hardly dare name in this gathering, Alexander VI, Alexander Borgia, notorious for his crimes; and I believe that this foundation of my University was the one good act which he was ever known to have performed. The other difference Is that, of course, of wealth and size. And I confess that on this visit to America, which has included visits to many of your great Universities, I have never entered one, and I have not entered this, without breaking anew the tenth commandment. I congratulate you on your wealth, on the lavish- ness of your space, and the greatness and the beauty of your buildings. I congratulate and envy you. But there is this to be said of us: The Scottish Universities have always been thoroughly demo- cratic. Through our system of parish schools, and now of numerous higher grade and secondary schools, we in Scotland have always provided a ladder to the learned professions, reaching from the steps of the poorest cottage and croft in our land. The students of my own University are gath- 138 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE ered from every class of the people, and during the last few years some of the chief places in our entrance bursary competition have been taken by the sons or daughters of working men, one among them being, I remember, the son of the widow of a railway porter. Before I begin the special subject on which I have been asked to address you there are two preliminary points on which I wish to say a word or two. First of all, I want to remind you of the continuity of University development in Great Britain and America. Have you ever considered the close succession of your own Universities to our earlier Institutions of learning In Great Brit- ain? The last three of our ancient Universities — Edinburgh, Trinity College, Dublin, and Mari- schal College, Aberdeen, with the full rights of a University — were founded in 1583, 1591, and 1593, respectively, and no other British University was founded between that last date at the close of the sixteenth century, and the foundation of London University in 1826 and of Durham in 1832. But that great gap of more than two centuries was amply and generously filled by the glorious succession of American Universities. Harvard, THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 139 your oldest University, founded In 1636, Is only forty-three years younger than the last of our ancient Universities; William and Mary followed in 1693, Yale In 1701, and between that date and the founding of London University there ap- peared Pennsylvania, Princeton, Brown, Colum- bia, Dartmouth, Rutgers, Amherst, and I don't know how many others. You gloriously, as I say, filled that great gap of ours, and it has always been a proof to me, sir, that the Pilgrim Fathers, and other English, Scottish, and Irish emigrants who laid the foundations of the United States, carried away not only a great part of the soul and character of Great Britain but a very large por- tion of her brains as well. The other point on which I wish to touch Is this : The time has long been due for a closer co- operation between the Universities of America and those of Great Britain, and for some measure of co-ordination between their degrees. Always de- sirable, such measures have at last become urgent In the circumstances created by the present war. They are rendered Immediately necessary by the closing of German Universities, for a very long time we must expect, to British and American stu- dents; and, to say the least, it is up to us people of 140 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE America, of France, and of Great Britain to show that in this respect the German Universities are not indispensable to us. These measures are rendered all the easier by the new alliance, and I trust the lasting alliance, between our peoples. The times are both favour- able and most compelling for their realisation. Practical steps will be taken to this end in the course of the year. A conference on the subject, between delegates from Britain and representa- tives of your Universities, was called for May in New York, but has been postponed till October or November; and I trust that conclusions will then be reached which may commend themselves to the Universities on both sides of the Atlantic. The special problems with which that conference will have to deal are, first, the interchange of teachers, and, secondly, opportunities for post- graduate studies. As to the first, your experience with Germany and France will be of great value to us of Britain in this respect, especially with regard to the length of the period, and to the character, of the lectures to be given by the visiting professors — whether they are to be short, supplementary courses, or longer courses fitted into the regular curriculum of THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 141 the Universities visited, and qualifying for their degrees. With regard to the second point, opportunities for postgraduate studies, the chief problem that lies before us is the provision of suitable degrees in recognition of postgraduate work. I emphasise this as postgraduate work, for I think it would be detrimental to the national interests of any of our three peoples if it sent its undergraduates out of their own country. It is during undergraduate years that the national spirit and the capacities for proving proper citizens of one of the great nations ripen and are most developed and most easily trained, and I would deprecate, from our experi- ence of the presence of Indian students in Great Britain during their undergraduate years, the ex- change among us of undergraduate students. But we all want to see the postgraduate stu- dents of all three peoples taking advantage of the opportunities of research and the fresh aspects of teaching which are possible to them, by passing from one set of our national Universities to the other. Now, on all these points I offer no further opinion. At present it is enough to assure you, and I do so heartily, that in the British Uni- 142 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE versities to-day there exists a very strong desire for an effective collaboration with the Universities of France and the Universities of the United States, The various Universities in my country are applying their minds, and have been applying them for some time, to the discussion of details; and I ought to warn you of the appearance al- ready of a considerable variety of opinion. I now come to my proper tale this afternoon, "The Universities and the War." I asked President Judson to make the title general, be- cause I want before I close to say something about the Universities of France and their contribution to the war as well as about that of those of my own country. I believe that no institutions of modern society, not even the churches, have been more powerfully affected by the war than the Universities of all the belligerent countries. They have contributed, among the Allies, to the understanding of the great issues; they have swelled, more than most institutions and I believe in a degree equal to the churches, the volume of that national conscience which is our chief and our lasting power in fighting for a cause so just and so sacred. Above all, they have sent lavishly of their men, both teachers and THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 143 taught, both students and graduates, to the forces of the Allies; and they have contributed, in full proportion to their number, to the colossal sacri- fices which the manhood of their nations has made to the most sacred cause ever fought for in the whole range of human history. We have had in Britain, not a perfect, but a very considerable organisation for public educa- tion in the meaning of the war, both morally and politically; and naturally the staffs of our Uni- versities have been called upon to contribute to this propaganda, as well as to the great campaign so successfully conducted from one end of my land to the other, in the interests of recruiting, while the volunteer system of enlistment still prevailed among us. Now, I need hardly say to you who have al- ready, in your year of warfare, done so much in this direction, that our laboratories and their staffs have been occupied in the researches and manufactures connected with munitions and ord- nance, with the prevention of disease among the troops, with the development and economy of food supplies, with the supply of new fertilisers, with assisting new or revived industries, many of which had been virtually monopolised by the Ger- 144. OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE man people; in researches leading to the manu- facture of glass, textile fabrics, army cloths, aero- plane fabrics, dyestuflfs and drugs, of the last of which we had in our country, owing to the lack of foresight, a very inadequate supply. Some University buildings have been turned, as with you, into hospitals, others into training schools, others into barracks for cadets. Others have become workrooms for volunteer service in the production of war dressings and hospital gar- ments. Time does not permit me to furnish you with details under each of these heads, but I may say, by way of illustration of the last, that in Aberdeen University, in eighteen months, our University Women's War Work Association completed 15,- 400 hospital dressings and comforts and over 257,000 war dressings for military and Red Cross hospitals and ambulances. I haven't the figures for the last year, but I confidently believe that by this time the figures I have given you have been doubled. The engineering departments in several Uni- versities have been handed over to the Admiralty or the Ministry of Munitions for steel testing and other purposes. In other departments assistance THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 145 has been given to His Majesty's forces in meteor- ology and other sciences connected with aviation, in methods for detecting submarines, and mat- ters connected with transport and embarkation, and countless other purposes of the war. And all this in addition to the fact that, though our num- bers have been reduced, and some of our courses shortened, and a large proportion of our staffs are absent on whole-time service for the war, the regular work of the Universities has been gen- erally sustained from first to last through the four years of our strenuous and bitter fighting. I may say again, just as a point in illustration, that out of the hundred or so members of the teaching staff of my own University no fewer than thirty-one are giving whole-time service either to the Army or to the Navy, while about twenty or thirty others are giving half-time service — half to the University and half for war purposes. I come now to the numbers of our men stu- dents and graduates who have enlisted or been commissioned for direct war service. Generally speaking, I may say that while the volunteer sys- tem of service prevailed the students of our Uni- versities were reduced in most cases to one-third of their former number, in many cases to one- 146 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE fourth, nearly so in Aberdeen, but in Oxford and Cambridge I believe to nearly one-tenth of their former number. That was, of course, because Oxford and Cambridge receive students at a higher age, nearer the military age, than the rest of us do. The response of University graduates within military age was practically as full as that of our students. In Aberdeen, for instance, we have a list of graduates, men and women, of over 5000, all told. On the fifteenth of February, this year, 1750 of these were on naval or military service — practically every man who was of military age and could be spared from the practice of his civil profession. Among them all, it may be of interest to you to know that I have found only four ultra-pacifists and conscientious objectors. Taking graduates and undergraduates to- gether, by the beginning of 19 17, when almost all who served were still volunteers, the following are the most notable of the numbers contributed by the Universities: Oxford by that time had sent 10,688 men to the colours; Cambridge had sent 13,128; London University had sent over 20,000. Take, again, the four Scottish Universities: THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 147 Edinburgh — and these numbers are correct up to the middle of February last, a somewhat later date — had sent something over 5000; Glasgow, 3222; Aberdeen, 2645; and St. Andrews, 742. I come now to the gravest part of my story — the tale of the sacrifices of the Universities for our common cause, the number of their members who have been killed in action, who have died of wounds or disease, or who have gone down with their ships. At the beginning of 1917 Oxford had lost 141 2 of its men, and I expect by this time that the number is over 2000; Cambridge had lost 1405. At the beginning of this year the fallen of Glasgow University were 472; of Edin- burgh, nearly 450; of my own University, nearly 250; and of St. Andrews, 86, making for the Scottish Universities a total of ov^er 1250 out of 11,000 of their men on service, not all of whom had reached the front. Now, I wish to tell you, as I can from my ex- perience as Principal of Aberdeen University, who have been privileged to enter by correspond- ence or sometimes in person, over 200 of the families of those nearly 250 of our fallen, that except in one or two cases I never found any mur- muring; far less despair or dismay or resent- 148 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE ment towards God at the great sacrifices which they had been called to pay, but, on the contrary, everywhere a resignation to it and pride in the fact that their sons had been called to fight and to suffer for the sacred Cause, as they believed, of their country and their God; and, in the power of that, everywhere a humble hope of reunion with those whose deaths in such a faith, for such a Cause, they could not but regard as entrances upon a higher and a nobler service above. I want to devote, for I feel we have a great debt in the matter, a few words, before I sit down, to the University of France. I shall best bring this before you by reminding you that before this Great War broke out there was no people, no civilised people, on the face of the earth so broken, split, and fissured as the people of France; split from top to bottom by the greatest of all schisms, the religious; and broken, more than any other political unity in the world, into groups, parties, and factions. What do we now see? What did we see be- fore two years of the war were over but that split and fissured people united again and as compact and as concentrated upon the moral issues and aims of this war as either the British people or THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 149 now the people of the United States. What had worked this miracle? The Rector of the Acad- emy of Bordeaux tells us what it was that worked the miracle. In his interesting book, "L'Univer- site et la Guerre," he shows that it was not merely the physical pressure of self-defence, but, on the contrary, a common devotion which bound all parties, communions, factions, and sects alike in dedication to the spiritual ideals which the war revealed. • ••••••• [Here followed a summary of what I have given in the address on "The Witness of France," now No. IV in this volume.] Now, I have delayed you too long, but I want to close (being a minister and unable to help it) with a practical application. And for this purpose I must go back to what I told you of the awful toll of our sacrifices. As I said the other day in this University, I come to you from a people that have drunk to the dregs the cup of the agony of war for the last four years. But whatever the destruc- tion, whatever the sufferings, whatever the sacri- fices we have endured these four years, my mes- sage from my people to the American people is that that conscience with which we began the war 160 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE is as strong as ever it was; our faith in the justice of our Cause and our determination to see it, with our Allies, through to its inevitable victory, have not failed us and will not fail us. We who are older, and some of us much older, than those who have fallen in their thousands and tens of thousands, in my country and in France — for remember the worst of war is that it falls most heavily on the younger men — recognise the debt of our age to the youth of our nation, and feel an added duty toward their ideals. To the inspiration we have drawn from their courage as individuals we are trying to add this care — that the visions and the enthusiasms of our sons do not suffer from this desperate thinning of their ranks across the whole of Europe; that more than ever we control the accumulating prejudice of our years, our growing contentment with things as they are; that we husband such force and fresh- ness as remain to ourselves and continue, along- side the young men who may be left to us, to play our diminishing part with unabated zest and courage. But on you, my younger friends, who are the contemporaries of those young martyrs who have fallen in their tens of thousands in Europe and to THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 151 whose great army your youth have begun to add (God grant It may not be so great a number, but it sometimes looks like it) — on you, who are either their contemporaries or just behind them, there has fallen an obligation heavier than per- haps was ever felt by any generation of youth in all the history of your people. In those whom it is most natural for you to follow you have a wealth of example that should control and inspire you throughout your lives. See that you cherish to the end the value of spiritual ideals, both for man and for nation, and without flinching face the full cost of your duty to such ideals, in life and in death, in ways that may show no heroism, but need no less virtue and toil. See that you practise that faithfulness in service, and in sacrifice to which those heroes have risen. Accept discipline as patiently as they did. Accept discipline — that is the foundation of all heroism, of all really good service to our fellow- men, and the first condition of a noble sacrifice. Be careful for details in the routine of your life, but be equally ready for life's emergencies. Never grudge the call to extra work nor shrink from any danger that may spring upon your way to it. Ever keep back from uttering any selfish remonstrance 152 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE at the Inequalities of reward or fortune, some- times as great in peace as they are startlingly so in time of war. If you thus train yourself in the work of ordinary days and in answer to God's more urgent calls, you shall be able to make the last resignation of life itself in humble hope and peace. Friends, disasters may await us as peoples and as armies; troubles, sacrifices, and suffering greater than any we have yet experienced may fall upon us. Let us remember those who have suf- fered, who have fought, and who have died for us, and rekindle the flickering flame of our cour- age at the imperishable fire of their devotion. SOME RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR VII SOME RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WARi I HAVE been asked to speak on the Religious Effects of the War. I do so with great hesitation, because my experience is limited, because there is much contradiction in the testimony of those whose knowledge Is both wider and more intimate than my own, and because It will not be possible for anyone to form a just estimate of the religious effects of the war, till our soldiers have returned to civil life and till, Indeed, we see how our whole people bear themselves when these calamities have overpassed. At least, keep In mind that what I say Is but the saying of one man; and that one man, however wide his experience, cannot speak in matters of religion for a whole nation. ^ This Address was delivered in various forms to sev- eral meetings of local Federations of Ministers, Min- isters' Clubs and gatherings of Churchmen and Church- women in different parts of the United States. 155 156 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE In other addresses I have alluded to the general effect on Christian faith of the outbreak of the war, with all that it threatened from the first.^ I go Into that more fully now. The outbreak of such a war could not but shock the faith of many Christians. Not only did It rend Christendom asunder, and seem to spell the failure of religious forces which had been at work in Europe for nineteen centuries; but in the professed motives of those who were alone responsible for starting It, and In their measures for its conduct, the war exposed a moral reckless- ness and malignity more awful than faith had ever encountered. Germans proclaimed Might as Right, they exalted the State as superior to moral- ity, they enforced the duty of a strong state to develop its strength by war, if necessary, but in any case irrespective of the rights of weaker states; and they not only announced a policy of "fright- fulness" but they have carried this out in a train of atrocities on sea and land, more dreadful — because applied with all the resources of modern ^ See above, pp. 43-45, no, 118. RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 157 science — than the world had ever seen. The minds of men staggered before this conspiracy of brute force and remorseless intellect against the common moralities, and trembled at the possibility of its triumph. In such a crisis, in face of the awful purposes and powers of evil exposed by Germany's assault on law and liberty as a whole, mere talk about the failure of the churches seemed small and irrelevant. There was just as little use in lamenting the frustration of the recent efforts of statesmen (partly inspired by the churches) to submit all international quarrels to arbitration.^ Things greater and more fundamental were at stake. The sovereignty of God Himself was chal- lenged. The moral universe seemed shaken to its basis. And something nearer home than the crimes of our enemies startled us. We were haunted by a deep sense of our own unfitness for such a crisis. Were we worthy to have faith at all? ^ The origins and progress of the war also proved the futility of the easy arguments, based on purely material grounds, that war was becoming a less possible event and if started could not endure beyond a few months, because of the terrible costs and sacrifices involved by the modern scientific conduct of it. 158 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE What was it that rallied us? You remember that scene in the Temple, when the prophet suddenly felt his vision of the Near- ness and the Majesty of God blotted out; when the House filled with smoke, the thresholds were moved and there came upon him the sense of his own and his people's sin; yet at that moment the seraph flew with a live coal from the Altar to his lips, a mission was proclaimed, and he sprang at once to fulfil it. So, in part at least, was it with us four years ago. The smoke of war swept between our hearts and the throne of God, our world shook around us, and nothing articulate seemed left save a sense of our guilty weakness. Yet through all that darkness and confusion im- mediate duty flashed, clear, firm and inevitable. The conscience of our people — ^the conscience not of this nor that great man nor of a few, but of our people and of our race, vocal to the farthest bounds of the world without need of prophet or interpreter — answered, as with the lips of one man, to what we felt to be the call of God. I have qualified the analogy I have drawn; because you will ask, where with us was the assur- ance which came to the prophet that his and his people's iniquity was taken away and their sin RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 159 purged? My answer Is, that, though the gospel of forgiveness may not have been articulated to our minds as it was to the prophet's, a strong measure of the moral force of forgiveness came upon us in the very fact of so signal a call to duty. In the Divine forgiveness there is nothing more cleansing, nothing more uplifting than the assur- ance it brings, that God trusts us once again, in spite of ourselves and of our past, with duty and service In His Kingdom. Such a trust took pos- session of us. Unworthy and unprepared, we were called to defend the right, to succour the oppressed, to battle for justice and freedom; and our Immediate instincts of this became daily more clear through our further discoveries of the aims and conduct of our foes. This conscience of a trust has been with us all along. Our statesmen have defined its fulfilment as our main and prin- cipal aim In fighting; our self-defence and the security of our empire being only the necessary means for fulfilling It. Thus, as so often In the experience of men, faith, confused and stunned, was rallied first of all upon conscience and the clear call of duty. 160 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE Time brought us, or at least some of us, these further reflections. When people asked, as cer- tain kept asking, did not such a war mean the destruction of faith, "the collapse of Christianity" as their panic phrased it, we remembered that man's trust in the Most High had passed through trials as fiery as this, even some in which the powers of righteousness seemed for the time com- pletely overwhelmed; yet these trials proved not fatal to faith but corrective and the discipline to a more thorough theology. Above all we remem- bered that it was in periods not only of war, but of wars closely resembling the present in their conditions and issues, that the Hebrew prophets both laid the foundations on which our faith still rests, and descried, though far off, the full out- lines of its promise and assurance. When Assyria and Babylon successively sought the conquest of the world in a spirit like that of Germany to-day; when, boasting their superior culture, they claimed the right to impose it by force of arms on other peoples; when they denied the claims of the smaller nations to a separate existence; when they RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 161 marched their armies forth, as the Kaiser marched his, in the name of a sheerly national god; when they avowed a policy of "frightfulness," and car- ried this out with massacres and deportations of civilians, as Germany has done,^ and when they achieved their ends and did conquer the world — it was even then (as we remembered) that the profoundest thoughts of God's nature and will were formed in His prophets' minds, and the widest visions of His Providence opened to their eyes. It was amid such experiences that they laid down those truths of the Sovereignty of God, of His Righteousness and inevitable Law, of His ^ A study of the works of the younger Delitzsch, Winckler, and other German Assyriologists reveals many resemblances between the modern German spirit and the spirit of Assyria and Babylon, which they have done so much to interpret to their people. There are the same confidence in sheer magnitude and incapacity to appre- ciate spiritual values, the same beliefs that small peoples have no inherent powers of culture, and that everything worthy in the history of man is the offspring only of the immemorially trained and organised intellect of some great world-power; the same symptoms of megalomania — the tendency to overlook or distort facts and the want of humour. These observations are not the result of the war. I published them in January, 1907. 162 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE equal regard for all the nations of mankind, and of history as the tribunal of His Justice, on which truths our faith still rests as its deepest founda- tions. And we told ourselves that the recurrence of experiences, out of which had been born the strongest faith men have found, surely could not be fatal to faith now; that, as Israel had, we might find in it not the overthrow but the dis- cipline and enlargement of our faith. I think that on the whole this has proved to be the case. The war indeed has been fatal to many forms of faith, partial, facile and selfish forms, and for that we can only be thankful. But we have felt it — I know I speak for many — to correct, purify, widen and re-establish our knowl- edge of God, and that in several directions. I have spoken of partial and selfish forms of faith. In the softness of mind bred by our com- fortable civilisation, we religious people had grown to be content with easy views of God as a God of Love and Peace and not of Truth and Law as well, the foundations of Whose throne are justice and judgment; Who spared not His own Son against the evil of the world; and Who, even, when He pardons and trusts them once more with His Service, exacts both from nations and RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 163 individuals the consequences not only of their presumptuous sins, but of all their slackness, in- dolence, and neglect of His laws, whether in the natural or in the moral sphere. Accepting Christ as our Priest we had failed to follow Him as our Prophet and our King; we had selfishly tended to use Him as our Peace without obeying Him as our Conscience. We had rested in the comfort of our Lord's teaching, and had forgotten its rigours. Or we had been satisfied with being warned off the grosser vices; and had ignored, how, for in- stance in His Parables, our Lord's judgments are less frequent against sins of passion and excess than against sins of neglect and indolence — want of watching, leaving talents to rust, unfaithfulness in little things, lack of foresight and prudence — all the sins of the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, with easy thoughts of God and cheap views of our fellow-men. Now the war has at least brought us back to all this, has exposed our partial thinking about God, our grudging measures of each other, our indif- ference and guilty inefficiency — the unthorough- ness both of our faith and of our service — and has reminded us of how offensive these are and cer- tain of the Divine judgments. If with any it has 164 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE failed to do so, they have missed the power we shall all need for the even greater problems and tasks which await us in the re-organisation of our life when the war is over. Objections have been raised to the many calls to Repent, which the Churches have addressed throughout the war to themselves and the Nation. But these objections are due to ignorance of what Repentance means. Repentance is of an infinite fertility in life. History testifies to its indis- pensableness in liberating the finest energies of our nature. Even Gibbon acknowledges the sin- cere and powerful impulse which the early Church gave to human progress by awakening this primal ethical passion among men. Repentance is the womb of forces both moral and intellectual, as its New Testament name implies. It brings a clearer and a further vision; it disposes to sympathy and therefore leads to a juster knowledge of our fel- low-men; in these days of war it is well to remind ourselves that it makes us readier to forgive our enemies by discovering how much we share the guilty tempers we abhor in them. It cleanses the RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 165 mind to an increase of the mind's capacity and grip; and while it enfranchises, at the same time it concentrates, the will, under the grateful urgency of a heavy debt both to God and man. As St. Paul said to the Corinthians : what earnest care it wrought in you, yea what clearing of your- selves, yea what fear, yea what longing, yea what zeal, yea what avenging! Repentance is not a passion only. It is an energy and the liberator of energies: the redeemer, in the first place, of conscience, and that works both ways (as with the Corinthians), for besides producing in men conviction of their own sins, it gives them a firmer sense of any justice which may be inherent in their cause — what clearing of yourselves — and there- fore courage to stand upon it, and strength to op- pose the wrong. So repentance begets an energy and enthusiasm of service, and even of righteous war — yea what zeal, yea what avenging! All this is true not only of individuals but of nations. Our Puritan fathers, in time of war or other calamity, like the Prophets, always called to a national repentance; and in times of peace men like Wilberforce, Chalmers, and Shaftesbury in my country have done the same in preparation for the reforms they led. But it has not only been 166 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE the evangelicals who have roused this primal passion of morality. I have mentioned Gibbon's testimony to its worth. Take also Edmund Burke. He does not use the word repentance, but the shame which he bends his eloquence to stir in his people for their political and social sins, is of the same ethical quality. The war has roused us to our need of this repentance. I do not say our whole people, for as history shows a national repentance is always more or less vicarious, but all our spiritual and earnest minds. Whatever their other failings, our Churches have at least been true to this first demand of their Lord, and have not only pro- claimed it, but, for themselves and with many beyond their membership, have fulfilled it. And first for our national sins of commission — the selfishness of our classes and their interests, our factiousness, the obstinacy of our prejudices and disposition to quarrel over lesser things to the sacrifice of the greater and more urgent, our love of money, greed and wide intemperance; as well as, in particular, the tolerance shown even by religious people to unworthy tendencies in art and journalism — our criminal transgression of the apostolic warning, not to be partakers of other RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 167 men's sins. But still more has the war exposed to us our need to repent of the partial and selfish faith of which I have spoken, of the carelessness and waste in our public and private yfe, of sloven- liness in thinking as well as in doing, of our notorious contempt of discipline, both physical and moral, of our want of watching and unfaith- fulness in the little trusts of life. In another address* I have spoken of the serv- ice of the War in clearing up our thoughts about Peace. It has proved to us the constant teaching of the Bible, that Peace is no primary blessing or duty which can be sought or achieved in disregard to other duties, or may be preferred before them; but is always and only the fruit of truth, justice and the conquest of evil, which are precedent and necessary to it, and must be striven for, at what- ever cost, if peace is to be clean and enduring. The war has bitterly taught us to distinguish be- tween merely political peace, with Its Inestimable benefits, and the inward peace promised by Christ to the doing of God's will, a good conscience, the ^ V. Peace — False and True. 168 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE brave acceptance of duty, and sacrifice nobly borne — the peace which not only endures in spite of war but may find in war its temporary yet in- evitable instrument. By this and other ways the war has brought us very near the Cross, and renewed those supreme lessons of life of which the Cross is the eternal symbol. We had been forgetting that the end of sin is tragedy and death. We had been forget- ting that all the evils which sin breeds require for their overthrow the uttermost men can give, that they are to be defeated only by the sacrifice of what we hold dearest, even life itself — that there are powers and purposes of evil which can be en- countered in no other way than by resistance unto blood. This war has brought us again face to face with the stern facts. The truth that such sacrifice is mainly vicarious, the suffering by men for sins not their own, and for the peace and freedom of others than them- selves, has also been brought home to our hearts with the keenest pangs that men and women can feel. But that truth is no more than what runs through all the history of the human family on earth, and finds its most signal proof in the Cross of Christ. The moral value and influence of RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 169 sacrifice lie in Its vlcarlousness. That this quality and this moral effect, of what they do and suffer, have been present to multitudes of our young soldiers and have inspired them, we have abundant proof. In another address^ I have quoted the avowals of this truth by a number of Frenchmen on the fighting front. And these speak not for themselves only but for hosts of our more reticent British martyrs. What has sustained and stimu- lated them in a warfare they detest, has been the thought that they fought and died not for themselves or their own salvation, nor even for their country alone and their homes, but for a better future for the whole race - — that the gen- erations to come might never suffer from the hor- rors which have accumulated upon our own — that once for all the arrogance and Impiety which had caused these might be overthrown. We know that this is the spirit of Christ and His Cross. But besides bringing us thus Into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings God has not left us In this war without the power of His resurrection. I ^ IV. The Witness of France. ^ See especially pp. 99-101, 106-109. 170 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE have had occasion to speak of this also in other addresses,^ and I speak of what I know. I have seen or have corresponded with the families of students and graduates of my own University who have fallen in the war. And as Moderator of my Church I have had to visit several provinces of Scotland, particularly the northern. We did not touch a family but had some member on naval or military service, and hardly one but had made the uttermost offering for the cause for which we were at war; till every home in sight stood for a symbol of sacrifice, and every smoking hearth seemed an altar. But among all these, save one or two, I have found no fear, no complaining, no resentment, far less either any vindictiveness or any despair: nothing but quiet resignation and a patient hope. The grounds of this were just the conscience of the sacredness of our cause and trust in the Faithfulness and Love of God, and in His power over death as well as over life — the simple faith that the Lord redeemeth the soul of His servants, and that none who trust in Him shall be desolate. The deaths of the sons of those Christian homes in such a faith for such a cause could only be the entrances on higher forms ip. 148. RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 171 of service; and the survivors had the example of the faith and courage of their heroes to bear them up through the time of their separation from them. I am bound to say that it was these gen- eral convictions rather than any specifically Chris- tian dogmas and facts, which I found to be the sustaining power in those families. But at the same time we must remember that those are families which have been trained for generations in the life and immortality which Jesus brought to light through His gospel and in the knowledge of the fact of His Resurrection. Still It was the Faithfulness of God which mainly inspired the assurance that such sacrifices could not be in vain either for this life or for the next. Side by side with this faith there have been produced, as you know, among many of our mourners — more in England than in Scotland — those revivals of "spiritualism" (so-called), which the experience of war so often seems to favour. The temptation to seek for physical communica- tion with the beloved dead is a very ancient and most natural one; the motives which excite it com- mand our respect. And who can fail to appre- ciate the genuineness and the pathos of the hunger, which readily accepts the slightest fragments of 172 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE evidence that such communications have been achieved? Yet from the experience in our own day of the effects of the habit we must appreciate the anxiety of the prophets to warn their people from it. For neither then nor now does it seem possible to resort to such practices except at the cost of the rational and ethical forces in religion. We have among ourselves proofs that the habit does weaken the judgment of those who seek the dead by such ways, and does taint the characters of the media who profess to satisfy them. These media and the alleged results they produce are often unworthy both of the pious yearnings which prompt a resort to them, and of the blessed souls that are the object of those yearnings. Fre- quently purely pagan in temper, the offered com- munications are on the whole so ambiguous, or so irrelevant, or so scrappy, as to suggest that if real, they have been framed to evade the jealous scrutiny of some celestial censor. What are all such results, even when the most charitable judg- ment has been formed of them, compared with the sufficient assurances we have through His Word and Spirit of the mercy and faithfulness of our God. For the rest we have Christ's own judg- ment that messages from the dead would have no RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 173 real moral influence on the living: // they hear not Moses and the prophets neither will they he persuaded if one rise from the dead. There is just one other point on which the war has brought us baclc to the teaching of Christ. You may remark, and justly, that in what I have said on the fellowship of Christ's sufferings and the power of His Resurrection, I have been speak- ing only of Christian families and of their sons. What of the many soldiers who, without faith or consciousness of the spiritual ideals for which we fight, have evinced an equal heroism and as freely given their lives for our cause? A countless number of rough, wild men, as careless and profane as Esau, have made as full a sacrifice as the religious souls of whom we have been speaking. Well, in them we see but another proof of how readily our timid respectability escapes from the teaching of our Lord. His tests were different from ours, and the tests of war are different, and those two are sometimes startlingly similar. Our Lord told us plainly that greater love hath no man than that a man lay down his 174 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE life for his friends; He pointed the righteous of His day to the harlots and publicans going into the Kingdom of God before them; and on the Cross He accepted a fellow-sufferer who after a life of crime acknowledged Him in the moment of death. The strictest of us dare not limit the number of our fallen or of our enemy's fallen, who for the character of their dying were recog- nised and accepted by so searching and merciful a Judge. But apart from the question of their particular fates in another life, which is not before us now, do not the heroism and self-sacrifice, the cheerful bearing of hardships and pain, and the comradeship faithful unto death, which so many untrained and reckless characters have shown, recall our Lord's vision of the spiritual capacity of the common man and His test of men not by profession but by loyalty to His spirit? Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, hut he that doeth the will of My Father. Certainly the war has discovered to us moral possibilities that are latent in the most unlikely men — possi- bilities for the latency of which the men them- selves are less to blame than is the society whose routine in peace furnished them neither with ex- ample nor with any sacred urgency. RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 175 The question is often asked what attitude will our returning soldiers take to their churches and to the forms of religious service to which they were accustomed before the war. And it is some- times answered that they will come back indiffer- ent to our creeds and impatient of our routines of worship and old-fashioned pieties; drastic changes will be required for them in all these. That re- mains to be seen; their experiences in the war may work both ways. If some come back with the de- sire, created by camp and hut services, for briefer, and more broken and varied forms of worship and religious teaching, others may return only hungry for the older fashions — as some in my country have already done. But be that as It may, the results we can predict with certainty will be simpler and more funda- mental. Our men are coming back with great ex- periences of reality, of catholicity, and of com- radeship. They have faced death, either in them- selves or in others they have known to the utter- most what sacrifice means; and we may be sure that they will have keen eyes for any pretence in 176 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE our preaching and for any slackness in our living. They have seen men of all creeds and denomi- nations happily join in worship and equally rise to duty; and they will not be tolerant of our many religious divisions. They have known what com- rades men can be in danger and fronting death and they will expect a heartier comradeship among their fellow-members in the churches. On these things let us be in no doubt. We shall all need to be more real, more self-sacrificing, more catho- lic, and more loyal to each other. For the rest let us remember that, as in war so in peace, the eternal moralities abide and the gospel of God through Jesus Christ His Son is the same yester- day, to-day, and for ever. FAITH AND SERVICE VIII FAITH AND SERVICE Give Thy strength unto Thy servant, And save the son of Thy handmaid. — Ps. Ixxxvi. i6. O Lord, truly I am thy servant, And the son of Thy handmaid; Thou hast loosed my bonds. — Ps. cxvi. i6. The Psalm to which the first of these verses be- longs has been called "The Prayer of the Aver- age Believer". It is an awkward description, but with this truth in it, that the Psalm rises from a sense of need universal among men, and that its faith, like that of the other Psalm, rests upon grounds which are the only sure bases of faith anywhere or at any time : the nature of God Him- self ; the believer's experience of a personal rela- tion to Him; and (in consequence) the believer's place and share in the family which God has founded on earth — the Church, which in the Psalmist's day, and hardly less in our own, has 179 180 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE come by a community of suffering and faith to be almost coincident with the nation. All the prayers which these Psalms utter, emerge from a very human sense of helplessness and need, / found trouble and sorrow. I was brought low, and He helped me. I am poor and needy. In the day of my trouble do I call unto Thee — or my day of trouble, as though "in my time of sorrow". The phrase brings us all to His side, for which of us is without such a day — whether it be dim and unheroic, that perhaps we could not define any more clearly than our brothers, these Psalmists, have defined theirs; or whether it carry those nobler agonies, which have fallen upon our nation and on each of us singly in the present tragedy of the world. The first of the grounds of the Psalmist's faith is the Divine Nature — God Himself, God's char- acter and power. Many of the verses In the eighty-sixth Psalm, Introduced by the word for, are simple declarations of what God is and wills to do. For Thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in mercy. For Thou art FAITH AND SERVICE 181 great, and doest wondrous things: Thou art God alone. For Thou, O Lord, art a God full of com- passion, and gracious, long-suffering, and plente- ous in mercy and truth. The primal and everlast- ing confidence of man lies here. According as men have understood the character of God their own characters have developed; according as they have trusted that character their hope has been sure both for this life and that which is to come. From the first of revelation to the present day our prophets have begun here and have come back here, while even those who have lost faith in everything else have at least clung to the instinct that God is good. You remember that when God would redeem His people from the tyranny of Egypt, He bad^ them believe in His sufficiency: / am what I am. And it was because they believed in this — without at the time understanding all it meant — ^that when His call came they rose like one man and followed their leaders to the desert and to war. Their re- ward was given them even there in the unfolding of what that sufficiency contained; so that with the righteousness of the Law there were revealed the riches of the Divine Grace, and the love of the Almighty came home to their hearts even among 182 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE the thunders of Sinai. The Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord, a God full of compassion, and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and truth; keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee through the wilderness — yes, and we may add through years of sore and fluctuating war — to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep His commandments or no. And thou shalt con- sider in thine heart that as a man chasteneth his son, so the Lord thy God chasteneth thee. You see that (to use Scriptural language) God would not only bare His arm as when He smote their enemies before them, but He would lay bare His Heart as well. And so through every following generation, the progress of their religion meant the progress of their knowledge of God — of His Righteousness and of His Grace — and every rise and refinement in their morality was their response to what He told them of Himself. Even the assurance of the life to come which was so slow to arrive in Israel, even the conviction of the immortality of the individual, found its sources in the people's experience of the reasonableness, FAITH AND SERVICE 183 the faithfulness, and the power of God. And just because God is Love, a love more true and self- sacrificing than the most heroic among men, just because humility, patience, and suffering to the utmost for others are the essence of the perfect character, we find it not difficult but natural to believe in the Incarnation, the Passion, and the saving Death of the Son of God Himself. All the uncertainties and corruptions of faith have sprung from forgetfulness of this; and his- tory is strewn with the wrecks of religions that have sought from God something else than Him- self. We commit the same mistake still. We put our creeds, we put our Churches, we put even the letter of Scripture between our hearts and the liv- ing God. My brethren, it is trust, not in a scheme of salvation, but in the heart of the Eternal and Almighty, which thought of us when we were yet sinners, in the Infinite Love which came to our side in our warfare with temptation, and took the curse of our moral defeats upon Itself — not trust in Scripture, but the vision which Scripture gives us of the Living God; not the amount of creed a man believes nor the Church he belongs to, but the powers of God's justice and grace, with which both of these bring him into touch. For 184. OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE everywhere and always this is eternal life, to know Thee, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. Certainly there is nothing else which is going to carry us through the present war. The arro- gance of arms and the criminal statesmanship which provoked it, and the atrocious cruelties with which it has been conducted by our enemies, espe- cially in Belgium, Armenia, and on the seas — as the Lord reigneth, these cannot triumph. As righteousness and judgment are the foundations of His throne, such forces are destined to fail. They have failed already in the ambitions with which they flung themselves on the peace of the world. If we be dismayed before them, our dis- may is due to our want of the knowledge of God. If our faith in Him be sound, and our obedience abide to the strong conscience He kindled among us, there can be no fear of the end. Whatsoever troubles or disasters may still befall us, there can under God be no fear of the end. It was the same truth which Thomas Chalmers used to enforce. In a sermon which he preached during our last great war against a tyranny that threatened the liberty of Europe, he applied this truth to our conduct. "Dismiss," he said, "your scholastic conceptions of the Deity, and keep to FAITH AND SERVICE 185 that warm and affecting view of Him that we have in the Bible. For if we do not, our hearts will remain shut against its powerful and pathetic representations of the character of God." "Not only do we owe to His liberality every breath, but draw from it every comfort we enjoy. It proves His love to men that He opens His hand and feeds them all; but it is a far higher proof of love that He so loved them as to give up His only begotten Son in their behalf. All your gifts are as nothing to this. Before such an example there can be but one test of the adequacy of your benevolence — what is the extent of your sacrifice in performing it? Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect." Yes, for our conduct as well as our faith — and especially for those duties of self-denial and sac- rifice which the righteous cause of our nations at present demands from us — the one sufficient in- spiration is God Himself, as He is in Christ Jesus His Son. If the first ground of the Psalmist's faith be the character of God, his second is his personal re- lation to God. His expression of this is somewhat 186 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE distorted in our English versions: preserve my soul, for I am holy, or, as the Revised Version gives it, / am godly. So rendered, it sounds self- righteous. But it is something very different. The original cannot be put in one English word. It describes not moral merit but a religious ex- perience and temper. It means one who has known the faithful mercy of God and who has shown love and loyalty to Him in return. When the Psalmist says to God, / am godly, he means "I am Thine by the experience of Thy grace to me, and by the answer of my heart to it" ; and he makes this relation the second ground of his faith: not only Thou art God, but Thou art my God. There are two subjects which each of these Psalmists calls his own: my trouble and my God. For as really as a man is sure of the first, so can he be sure of the second. Pain gets a long way into the heart, and there is nothing that a man may feel more to be his very own; the heart hwweth its own bitterness. Pain gets a long way into the heart, but the Love of God goes deeper and awakes an even keener sense of possession. Deeper than any sorrow or doubt are a tender conscience and penitence for sin. Yet these are FAITH AND SERVICE 187 only the beginning of our God's dealing with us; the first fruits of His Spirit to each of us per- sonally. The rest will come. How much con- science and penitence promise, how much they en- sure, the experience of millions of common men who have responded to them can testify: the being brought away from one's past, the assurance of pardon, the conquest of evil habits, the ineffable persuasion of being trusted by our merciful Father, the sense of such permanence in the new elements of character granted to us that neither life not death can be conceived as destroying them, with all those instincts of faith and trust which a faithful God cannot forsake or disappoint. It is on such experimental grounds that men grow sure of their future in this life, and, without any other argument or promise than are here im- plicit, adventure upon the life beyond. In addition, each of the Psalmists says, / ant Thy servant. There is no greater assurance that a man can lay to his heart than the conscience that he is doing God's will and in the spirit of Christ serving his fellow-men. Whatever doubt or failure fall on him the sense of being loyal to his trust, and of being of use in the service God 188 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE has commanded, must sustain and make quick the hope of deliverance. Whether in darkness or light, in perplexity or clear vision the test is unfailing. Am I Thy servant? Am I profitable, and even if that cannot be claimed, am I at least obedient, obedient to the orders and example of my Lord? Be it ours, my brethren, to maintain through the distractions and disasters of these times the strength and purity of our personal religion; to see to it that our communion with God and our private obedience to Him are not broken or weak- ened by other interests and engagements however sacred these may be; to be instant in prayer, regu- lar in our use of the means of grace, and care- ful to maintain the pieties which the strain and sacrifices of the war sometimes threaten to inter- rupt. Our nations and the sacred cause commit- ted to them depend on the faith, the purity, the obedience and honour towards God of their in- dividual members; on the resolution and buoyancy of their single souls. And these are to be main- tained by communion with Him who said, My Grace is sufficient for thee. FAITH AND SERVICE 189 Interpreters have been divided as to the mean- ing of the words son of thine handmaid. The metaphor itself is clear; in ancient times no slaves were regarded as so reliable as those born in the household. But do the Psalmists apply the meta- phor to the natural or to the ecclesiastical family? Some interpreters take the first opinion and say that the Psalmist calls to mind his own pious mother. Others hold that the phrase refers to the Church, which in those days was the Nation, and, by our community of faith and sacrifice, has to- day again so much become the Nation. Others think that the Psalmists only intend a servant truly devoted to his Lord and His personal interests. Among these possibilities St. Augustine, as usual, takes his own beautiful way, and applies the say- ing first to Christ and then through Him to all believers. "Thy servant, and the son of Thy handmaid — *of what handmaid?' (he asks, and answers), 'Of her who, when He was announced as about to be born of her, answered and said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord!' Of her the Lord was born in the form of a servant. And 190 DUR COMMON CONSCIENCE each several Christian placed in the body of Christ may say, save the son of Thy handmaid." So far Augustine; and Matthew Henry remarks: "The children of godly parents who were betimes dedicated to the Lord may plead it with Him that if they come under the discipline of the family they are also entitled to the privileges of it." In this question the most of us Scots and of you Americans can have no difficulty. What seem to others to be exclusive alternatives we combine. We were reckoned of the membership of the Church on the strength of our birth into a Chris- tian family, and on the vows taken for us by our own parents. None of us can separate the Mother at whose knees we first learned to pray from the Mother-Church to which she brought us and by which we were baptised, instructed, and received to Communion. To us the Church and the Home are one. It is a noble heritage, a debt heavier than most children born into this world owe to their families, their Church, and their Nation. Let us abide loyal to the obligation, especially when in our own sons we have the in- spiring example of courage and obedience unto death. The present war has given heroic evidence of FAITH AND SERVICE 191 the integrity and devotion of the children of the Christian homes of my own land. It is a certain fact that, while the voluntary system of enlistment still prevailed, some 90 per cent, of the sons of the manses of the Church of Scotland, who were of military age, had gone on service with their country's Forces ; and I believe that the proportion was just as great in the manses of my own Church. Figures are not available for the other homes of our Scottish Churches, but if they were they would tell the same tale. To our young men the call, acclaimed by the conscience of the whole Nation, came from the Highest source; and in answering it so nobly, and (as so many have done) in freely laying down their lives for its sake, they were ful- filling the prayers of their parents and the vows which in baptism their fathers and mothers and their Church took to God for them. Not for glory went they forth from us, nor to fight for fighting's sake, nor in ignorance of the awful possibilities which lay before each of them; but conscious of the sacred issues of the war, de- liberately, and because the Hand of God was upon them in the strength of the most righteous cause for which nations were ever called to do battle. Some months ago I received a letter from a coun- 192 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE try manse of the Church of Scotland, whose son, a graduate of my own University, had just fallen, and I take from it these sentences: "From the brave bright letters sent home from the Front one fails to learn the truth, that some of the writers know in their hearts that they are tread- ing the road to Calvary. As I looked at the last photograph sent home from France of our boy, its expression seemed only sad, but I know now what it means — 'I shall not come back, but I am going forward'. And his is the story of so many others." My younger friends, in those immediately ahead of you in years you have examples of unselfishness and heroism more powerful than any generation ever had presented to it. Follow them as they have followed Christ. Remember, as they did, your debts to your Homes, to your Church, and to your Nation, but behind and beneath all these your dedication to your Lord, and — in War and Peace alike — rest on His Character and His Power, His Love for each of you singly, and His Grace that will never fail you. Lord, I am Thy servant, and the son of Thy handmaid. THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES IX THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES "Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith ; who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God."— Heb. xii. i, 2. So great a cloud — rather so dense a cloud. It is a single word used of clouds which pile themselves heavily on the horizon, but it is also applied by- Greek poets to throngs of men on the battle-field, pressing down upon those who stand to meet them; and this is rather the meaning here, as Is seen from the phrase compassed about. The cloud is there- fore not the ve^os ayiov koX SietSes of Clement of Alexandria's fancy, "a holy and pellucid cloud" gloriously resting above in a serene sky, but rather a cloud that has come down upon those who are 195 196 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE still fighting on the earth — irtpiKdiitvov, lying about us, and enveloping our ranks. In Bengel's hap- pier phrase it is "an urgent cloud". And this, as we shall see, is in harmony with the purpose of the writer which is not sentiment but morality. The word witnesses is capable of several mean- ings, of various degrees of moral value, from that of mere "spectators" upwards; and these mean- ings (let us at once admit) may have overlapped in the writer's imagination or swiftly suggested each other to him just as they do to ourselves. But the context makes clear which is the dominant. After a fashion common in the New Testa- ment the writer sees the moral life as a race; and it is natural to begin to interpret his witnesses as its interested spectators: thronging above and about the arena and watching us with sympathy upon the same course over which in their time they too have struggled. Neither in Scripture nor in our spiritual experience is there anything to for- bid such sympathies to our blessed dead. On the contrary, we can hardly realise that continuation of their personalities and their service, of which we are assured in Christ, without the conviction that they still remember and still love us; that, in particular, they cannot remain themselves, they THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 197 cannot still be themselves, if they have already for- gotten how they left their warfare unfinished, left it unfinished to us who still hold the field. And to such inferences of heart and of reason we may cling the more confidently as we read that, when His servants enter the Presence of their Lord and see Him as He is, they become like Him — like Him Who still remembers in the skies His tears, His agonies and cries. Such beliefs are natural and have their proper comfort, provided we hold them in subordination to the faith that He is our great High Priest, who ever liveth to make intercession for us, and whose grace and sympathy are alone our suffi- ciency. For, as the text concludes, it is not look- ing unto them but looking unto Jesus, which is our duty and our salvation. The meaning "spectators," however, if it Is Im- plied In our text, is hardly the main intention of the writer. His witnesses (as we see from other passages In his Epistle) are witnesses not of us but to the faith given them by God and proved by them in life and death. The text enforces not so much their interest in us as our duty because of them: not so much that they are looking on us 198 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE as that we should look in the same direction as they. It is not only their sympathy which the writer sees enveloping us, but the more urgent force of their example; and this not a past but a present example; so that we may bend our wills and stand true to what they have testified and still testify. The central emphasis, then, is that their influence is not past but present; and that we are not to betray all they stood, fought and died for by our slackness. Not lest we forget what they were, but lest we fail to feel them about us still: and so betray them and their cause to their very faces. Their presence, their urgency, and our duty in face of them — these are the three emphases of the text. Four years ago, the cloud of witnesses hung somewhat far upon the skies of my people, drift- ing now and then a little nearer as there passed up into it the face of one we loved or honoured — par- ent, teacher, leader or comrade — taken singly and at intervals, as is Death's normal way in time of peace; but the mass of it remained distant, vague, and cold. How near these four years have brought it all, none know better than the families of the Scottish people, whose sons have already THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 199 fallen in thousands. How encompassing It is, and how densely filled with "kent" and dear faces — for the most part young and fair, yet stamped with as urgent and in many cases, as deliberate and august a witness to righteousness and to faith in God, as the faces of the early martyrs; and like these it is a witness sealed in blood. Nor is it sufficient in this connection to speak only of the Fallen. No one who has watched, as I have watched, our hospital ships at French quays, filling with the constant stream of wounded from the front; no one who has spoken into the faces of thousands of our Scots soldiers or taken the Communion with them on their last steps to the trenches; no one who has seen the shrunken battalions marching back from the battle worn and weary but with steadfast faces — can have failed to feel his cloud of witnesses still more dense and still more closely encompassing. To have to hold back as I saw them go forward felt like being a deserter! We knew, as we watched them, that to be again mean or selfish or unbe- lieving, ever again to compromise with right and duty would be to betray them and the sacred Cause for which they have fought and so many of them have died. 200 OUR COiMMON CONSCIENCE I do not say that all, whether the dead or the living, have been able to articulate their testi- mony even to themselves. But as a French schoolmaster writes from the trenches: "Even under the cannon we do not forget the ideal for which we are battling. To know that the accom- plishment of our present duty surpasses in range both our own powers and our time and even our country — since it concerns humanity in the most profound and complete sense of the word — is a stimulus to us of incalculable vigour. This sen- timent you will find not only among those whom a certain culture has refined and rendered con- scious of the part they play, you will find it again very powerful — though necessarily a little vague — among the most humble and least cultivated of the soldiers." So that whether fallen or still fighting they are all to-day urgent upon us in a volume of faith, of devotion to a spiritual duty, and of fearless self- sacrifice such as no generation in the history of mankind has ever felt the weight of. There is hardly a phrase which this writer applies to his witnesses that is not deserved by ours. Literally out of weakness they were made strong, and waxed valiant in fight; for they came of a people THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 201 unprepared for war, and till it broke they had with a few exceptions no military training; yet in a few months they proved the equals of any soldiery in Europe, and all this by the strength of those spiritual qualities, without which their multi- tude and the armaments we have tardily supplied them would have been of no avail. Did they go out not knowing whither they went? They went in obedience to a call which came to them from the Highest Source, and whose authority was ac- claimed by the universal conscience of their race. Out of a civilisation, which (as we were all com- ing to tremble at) rested upon much that was doubtful and some things that were rotten, and which had been rent from top to bottom by the perfidy of those who boasted themselves as its supreme representatives and guardians, our sailors and soldiers have gone forth desiring, fighting and dying for, a better world, a world that hath foun- dations, whose builder and maker is God. In faith they fought and wrought righteousness; in faith they endured as seeing Him who is invisible. And so, too, many have died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from afar. It is not only for the defence of our lands, it is not only for the turning 202 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE of a ruthless invader from our homes that we thank them to-day; but that they encompass us with so urgent a cloud of spiritual force, and with their conscience, their faith, and their splendid devotion have come between us and the sins which have beset our national life. But our text concludes, looking unto Jesus. The war and the sacrifices it has laid upon us will not have been in vain, if they carry us back, to Christ and His Cross, and especially in these four respects: if they restore to us His full revelation of God; if they bring home to us the distinction between the peace of this world and the Peace He alone can give; if they burn into our hearts the supreme lessons of the Cross — ^the need of sac- rifice even unto death in order to overcome evil, the moral force of vicarious suffering; and if while drawing us into the fellowship of His suffer- ings they throw us back upon the power of His Resurrection. In other addresses in this volume I have tried to show that these are among the religious effects of this war upon my people.^ Here, in connection with my text, I shall dwell only ^ See above, the Addresses on "Peace — False and True" and 'The Religious Effects of the War." THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 203 on the last of them. To us In part has come again what came to Israel from her sons who fell in the Maccabean wars and what the Christian Church won from the blood of the martyrs. There has been born in numbers of our Scottish people a new faith in God as the God of the living, and in His power and faithfulness for the life to come as well as for that which now is. We cannot be- lieve but that the deaths of our sons in such a faith for such a cause are but the entrances on higher forms of service. His servants shall serve Him. We do not pray for their salvation, because we trust the faithfulness of our God. They have fulfilled the love of which Christ tells us there is none greater, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Though we miss their bodily presence with a pain that never lessens, though in an emptier world we shall long for them till the end of our own days in it, we shall not mourn nor com- plain. To use terms applied by the early Christians to their dead they are our "defuncti et prsemissi," those who have acquitted themselves of their duty and who have been sent on before us. Both sea and land are the more beautiful to-day as the scenes of their heroism, and more sacred as the altars of their sacrifice. Yet their passage but 204. OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE draws us nearer to the Lord above, to Whose ex- ample they rose. And they have not vanished. We have them with us still, a cloud of witnesses compassing us about. If our spirits are awake, our communion with them is even more close than when they were beside us in the flesh; for their characters and their testimonies, of which we may have had little inkling before, have grown to a pitch of proof and influence that can never fail to rebuke, permeate, and uplift our own. With such trust in the father, of whom every family in heaven and earth is named, with such assurance of His faithfulness to them and such experience of their present moral influence on ourselves, we have no need to resort to those means by which some — through a noble error of their feelings — are tempted to seek physical com- munication with their beloved dead. But I have elsewhere spoken sufficiently of this.^ We, who are older, and some of us much older, than they were, remembering the worst of war that it falls most heavily on the young, will rec- ognise our debt to the youth of our peoples, and feel an added duty towards the fresh ideals and causes bursting on the world with this last recruit ^ See above, pp. 171-173. THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 205 to Its generations. To the Inspiration we draw from their courage as Individuals, we older men must add the care — ^that the visions and enthu- siasms of our sons do not suffer from this des- perate thinning of their ranks, across all the coun- tries of Europe and soon to take place on your own continent; that more than ever we control the accumulating prejudices of our years and content- ment with things as they are, that we husband such force and freshness as remain In ourselves and continue, alongside the young men who are left to us, to play our rapidly diminishing part with unabated zest and courage. On you who are their contemporaries or just behind them has fallen an obligation heavier per- haps than was ever felt by any generation In the history of our people. In those whom It is most natural for you to follow, as being immediately In front of you, you have a wealth of example that should control and inspire you throughout your lives. See that you cherish the value of spiritual ideals both for men and nations, and without flinching face the full cost of your duty to them. In ways that may show no heroism but need no less virtue and toil, see that you practise that faith- fulness In service and sacrifice to which they have 206 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE risen. Accept discipline as patiently as they did. Accept discipline, I say, for that is the foundation of all. Be careful of the details in the routine of your life ; but be equally ready for its emergencies. Never grudge the call to extra work, nor shrink from danger in the way to it. Never keep back your strength in selfish remonstrance at the in- equalities of reward or fortune, which in peace are almost as great as in war. If you thus train yourselves in the work of ordinary days, and in answer to God's more urgent calls, you shall be able, like them who have shown you the way, to make the last resignation of life itself In humble hope and peace. COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES^ Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall yet praise Him, Who is the health of my countenance, and my God. — Ps. xlii. 5, 11; xliii. 5. The two Psalms from which this triple refrain is taken are properly one Psalm, which the re- frain divides into three strophes. In these a wronged and banished man pours out — to use his own words — pours out his soul upon him or about him. He had been in high position among his people. Through years of peace he had led them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, a multitude that kept holy day. But cruel and un- just men had torn him from the sacred habits and fellowship, which had sustained him, and, as it ^ An Address chiefly delivered to soldiers of the United States Army. 209 210 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE seemed, from God Himself. They stabbed him with their taunts of this: as with a sword in my bones mine enemies reproach me, saying daily unto me, Where is thy God? Indeed his own thoughts conspired with them : / say unto God my Rock, Why hast Thou forgotten me? And the strange scenery that surrounded him was in the conspiracy too. In the far corner of the country to which he was banished, the land of Jor- dan and the huge Hermons, where the rains are violent and the waterfalls roar down the steep hills, all these things seemed to re-echo and to swell the floods of his grief: deep calleth unto deep at the noise of Thy cataracts: all Thy waves and Thy breakers are gone over me! He was drenched, deafened, and buffeted by sorrow. But in this threefold refrain he turns on the coward in himself, challenges his doubting soul, and recovers his courage — the health of my countenance and my God. I come to you from a people who, during the last four years, have required every ounce of cour- age they could command. For, to begin with, their faith was shocked by the most sudden and treacherous assault on the peace of the world, the most impious conspiracy between brute force and COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES 211 arrogant intellect which history records. And then, and since then, they have had constant ex- perience of an incredible faithlessness and cruelty on the part of a people calling itself Christian and boasting the superiority of its culture. In the interview with which he honoured me, your own President said: "For four years I have been schooling myself in the incredible till it has become terribly familiar to me." That is the feeling of every civilised man outside Germany. German policy and German conduct, unblushingly acknowl- edged by German lips, have staggered us. Sheer crime has been avowed as a necessity. Weak peoples have been told that their weakness has no rights, and strong peoples that the mere will to war is the proof of strength and sanction suffi- cient for designs, however unjust, upon the rest of mankind. We had to face these forces, which for more than a generation had been preparing themselves for this outbreak — we had to face them, ourselves unprepared. And we knew our unpreparedness. We had to expect in consequence retreat and defeat, and these and many disasters have come upon us one after another. There was the retreat from Mons, the defeat of the only force we had ready. There were the failure and 212 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE the awful losses at Gallipoli, the failure and the surrender In Mesopotamia. All our resources, physical and moral, have been strained to the breaking point. Our sons have fallen in hundreds of thousands, till love, the heart of courage, has almost been drowned in sorrow. Pity and indig- nation, those fine tributaries to courage, have been stunned by the endless recurrence of atrocities upon atrocities. Sometimes, too, Providence has seemed so indifferent to the war and its welter of suffering, so blind to the crimes which have caused It that some could cry with the Psalmist: Why has Thou forgotten me, why go I mourning he- cause of the oppression of the enemy? Such have been our trials and our agonies, and I am come to tell you who are drawing after us into them, and who will have need of the same courage, what, with the Psalmist, we have found the sources of courage to be. Simply and defi- nitely they are these three — a just cause, a clean heart, and faith in God. Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation! The Germans have appealed COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES 213 to a national deity; we know no other God than the Judge of the whole earth, and we have to plead to Him, not ourselves — for we know our unfitness to be His instruments — nor our race, nor any powers He may have given us, but just our Cause. How righteous that Cause is I have tried to show in other addresses, and mainly through the mouths of German witnesses. The Chancel- lor's avowal of crime in the invasion of Belgium; the instinct we had from the first, and which every phase of German policy and war has confirmed and articulated, that this was only one item in a general defiance of the moral law, a reckless, un- limited design on the freedom and rights of all other peoples; again, our sense of duty to a nation we had sworn to defend and whom Germany, equally sworn with ourselves, had betrayed; again, the contradiction between her arrogant claims to impose her culture on mankind, put forth when she seemed to be victorious, and her cries, when things went against her, that she was fighting only in self-defence; again, her further perjuries to Russia; again her responsibility, as her own sons have told us, for the Armenian massacres, and her efforts to stir the Moslem world to a "holy war" against the Christians opposed to her; and 214 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE again, the long ghastly succession of her atrocities on sea and on land — all these are facts which have made clear to us, as they certainly will make clear to posterity, the sure and urgent justice of our Cause. On this from the very first we have based any courage we have had. Through the shock and confusion of the outbreak of war (as I have else- where pointed out) ,^ the narrow but signal line of our duty to Belgium was what we rallied upon. That duty united us as nothing else could have done, and steeled the national heart under the trembling sense of our unpreparedness for it. And the increasing manifestation of the justice for which we were fighting — through every fresh exposure of the aims and conduct of our foes — has been to us a daily source of courage since. Noth- ing but a bare sense of right brought us through the many dark months we had to live. Nothing else could have rendered possible the willing sac- rifices of our sons upon the field; or united their people behind them to those belated, but when they came enormous, preparations, by which, to our own surprise, we at last reached material ^Pp. 156-159. COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES 215 equality with the forty years' preparations of the foe. Soldiers of the United States, you have this firm ground of courage to march out upon. Never were men called to fight for a better cause. You may march, you may fight, you may suffer and die without a single misgiving as to its quality. There is nothing disreputable here. You follow no tyrants, seek no material gain or glory for your country, hunt no selfish ends of your own. Your flag, the flag of freedom and of union, is raised only for the rights of the weak, for the re- demption of the oppressed, for justice, liberty, and peace — peace that, whether it be granted or de- nied to yourselves, shall at least by your sacrifices become secure for the generations after you. But even a just cause is without avail if the fighters for it fail to bring it clean and honest hearts. The firmest ground has no firmness to feet unsteady in themselves. The credit of the strongest cause to which a man may attach him- self is not available for his private debts; nor can the holiest crusade turn him brave of whom his 216 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE own conscience still makes a coward. Primitive men judged it fatal to serve the altar with strange fire. And you and I must know that, easy as it is to serve a cause, whose purity is strength to the honest heart, only because we have been moved by the glamour or popularity of it, no real strength can come to us personally from such motives. We must be worthy of it in ourselves before its in- domitableness can become our individual courage. And we can be worthy of it only by being clean. Collective enthusiasm in a just cause is an im-" mense fortitude. And so is the discipline of the ranks, the touch of shoulder to shoulder, in a loyal comradeship. But war above all things tells us that there is another side to the shield. By wounds, by disease, by the sorrow of the mother, the widow and the orphan, by the last loneliness of each of its million deaths, it teaches us that in the ultimate resort courage must be individual. fVhy art thou cdst down, O MY soul! You remember what Tennyson makes Sir Gala- had say: — My good blade carves the casques of men, My tough lance thrusteth sure, My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure. COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES 217 St. Paul puts it better when, In recounting tlie pieces of the whole armour of God, he tells us to put on the breastplate of righteousness. In other words, the best breastplate is a clean breast — a pure heart, a heart at peace with God and man, the will to think of others and to serve them and not oneself — the unselfish mind that was in Christ. He who has these, whatever be his natural nerve, can rely on himself, can be sure that he will not flinch in emergencies nor give way in danger nor in face of death. And as St. Paul tells us — though we do not need to be told for we have the witness within — we have these not of ourselves. There is not one of us whose past will let him wholly trust himself. But God can give these through Jesus Christ our Lord. There is none so soiled, so stunted, so weakened by self-indulgence, so dis- turbed by passion, so little able to trust himself, but by turning in penitence to God may receive that pardon of which the most ethical content is not even freedom, but the assurance that God trusts him once more for Christ's sake, and sends him back to duty and to trial, strong, indebted, and dedicated. A young French soldier has put it well: **I shall fight with a good conscience and without fear, 218 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE I hope, certainly without hate, because I believe our cause to be just. ... I am confident our cause is just and good and that we have right on our side." But "we must search our hearts to see whether we can fight, whether we are sufliciently in love with the Justice that must be established afterwards. . . . We take the oath of alle- giance. Lord; we will work to bring about Thy Kingdom."^ But a just cause and a clean heart are not enough without faith in God. For the justice is His, and triumphs because God reigns and judges. And His, too, is the power to forgive and make clean and trusty our hearts within us. So this Psalm, which opens with longing for God Himself, comes back to Him again through all its debate and its trouble. Turning on his coward soul, the Psalmist lifts her to God and leaves her with Him. Why art thou cast do'un, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me? Or, as we may more nearly render the original, *See above, pp. lOO, 107-111. COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES 219 Why dost thou give in, O my soul. And be moaning upon me? Why give in! However hard be the war, and triumphant the foe, God is and reigns, God of the Right, and even my God, so far as I hold to the Right, and prove worthy of It. Hold thou to God, for I shall yet praise Him, The health of my countenance and my God. The health, or victory, of my countenance — it is a true version of the Hebrew idiom, but in our language It sounds vague, and probably our tongues have slipped over It many a time without our hearts understanding what it means. Yet it just means health, or victory, of my face. What enables me to face up to things — to face up to duty, to face up to danger, to face up to death, unquivering, undistracted — in short my courage. Hold thou to God, for I shall yet praise Him, My Courage and my God. My Courage and my God! But what, O men, is this, but Jesus Christ Himself, at once the deep- est source and the supreme example of courage. The deepest source, for He can pardon me peni- tent, through pardon give me trust again In myself, and assure me as none else can, of the Love and 220 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE Faithfulness of God Almighty. And the supreme example of Courage — Who in our flesh, and tempted in all points as we are, endured the con- tradiction of sinners against Himself, braved spiritual wickedness in high places, faced agony, wounds and death, to the perfect sacrifice of Him- self for His fellow-men. These, then, are the three secrets of Courage — a just cause, a clean heart, and faith in God. We have yet another — the example of those, mostly your own contemporaries, who have pre- ceded you in this warfare, and have been brave to death itself. The innumerable host of them who have fallen have left their battle to you, unfinished in sacred trust. See that trust, sealed with their blood, through to victory. Can anything base, selfish, timid or compromising linger in your hearts, as you think of their faith, their love, and their full sacrifice 1 Hark the roar grows . . . the thunders reawaken — We ask one thing, Lord, only one thing now: Hearts high as theirs, who went to death unshaken, Courage like theirs to make and keep their vow. EPILOGUE EPILOGUE AMERICA AT WAR In the introduction to this volume I have stated briefly the dates and circumstances of the ad- dresses which it contains. But my heart cannot let these go without an addition, as now at home it goes back on the long and crowded ways upon which it travelled with them. They sought to tell of Great Britain's share in the war and to deliver part at least of the British message from the heart of the war to the American people. But my mis- sion, of course, was one of intake as well as of forthputting. I both heard what America had to say, and saw what she had to give, to her Allies. So here I propose to set down some general im- pressions which the United States at war have left on their British guest, both as he faced large gatherings of their citizens and spoke to them, and as he listened to their representative speakers' on the platform, or to the rest of the talk about the war which filled their land from one far end 223 224 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE to the other. Across that continent our experience was thronged with incidents and personal relations of the highest interest. For all these I can only express my gratitude, with the regret that public duty so strictly curtailed the private opportunities which were generously opened to me. The impression which most steadily grew upon the visitor to the States was that of the practical unanimity of opinion on the character of the war — at least of all opinion which had the confidence to utter itself. The large number of public speakers with whom I had the honour of address- ing the conferences and mass meetings (some of whose names I give below) ^ are examples of the devotion of leading citizens of the United States to the task of informing the hundred millions of their countrymen upon the moral issues of the war. 1 Ex-President Taft, the Hon. Alton B. Parker; the Hon. Theodore Marburg and Mr. Morgenthau, for- merly U. S. Ministers to Brussels and Constantinople re- spectively; several State Judges and University and Col- lege Presidents, Chancellors, Deans and Professors; several Bishops and many chairmen of Chambers of Com- merce, mercantile and civic clubs, and local federations of ministers of religion — the latter including a number of coloured pastors in the south. Of all these I spoke most with Mr. Marburg, Dr. H. C. King, Dr. N. Boynton, EPILOGUE 225 Whether upon America's duty to the war, or on the international relations which should follow it, none of these speakers gave forth an uncertain sound — and the same is true of the series of ad- dresses which we had the privilege of hearing on the voyage home from editors of the principal American journals and reviews. Again, during the five months I was in the States I read leading articles in from sixty-five to seventy different daily papers of all shades of politics; and found them, while frequently criticising the Government, al- ways striking the same notes of the urgent justice of the Allied cause and of America's duty — and striking them with clearness and force. My ex- perience was similar in listening to conversations in what has been called "the most general forum of popular discussion" in America, the smoking cars, on my long railway journeys. In these numerous and prolonged conversations I never heard but one opinion expressed, and vigorously expressed. In talking elsewhere with business and and Dr. Lynch. I had also the honour of speaking along with M. Jusserand, the French Ambassador, Col. Azan of the French Military Mission, Lieut. Le Man of the Belgian Army, and Mr. P. D. Wilson, New York representative of the "Daily News." 226 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE professional men I found that while most of them had sympathised with the Allies from the first, some had felt doubts and some had had a strong prejudice for Germany, but only till America entered the war. Now they were all of one mind without reservations. I had the honour of being invited by the Speaker to address the House of Representatives in the Legislature of the State of Massachusetts. I spoke, and I have no doubt that they listened, with memories of all that Boston has stood for in America's case against Britain. But their cordial reception of the British message was another proof of the common conscience of our peoples and of the American unanimity on the justice of our cause. The same proof, but on a larger scale, was given by the Great Convention in Philadelphia in May, called by the "League to Enforce Peace" by winning the war, and presided over by Mr. W. H. Taft. Three thousand delegates from all the States in the Union enthusiastically applauded the call to the duty of concentrating the national ef- forts and resources on the war as the only way to secure the freedom and the peace of the world — a call that rang throughout the proceedings from the Chairman's opening address to the closing ban- EPILOGUE 227 quets at which he spoke for America, Ambassador Jusserand for France, and (in the absence of Lord Reading) I for the British people. The popular convictions and enthusiasm which this Convention expressed received official endorse- ment, no less hearty, at a meeting of the Gov- ernors of the States held at the same time, and also under the presidency of Mr. Taft. Of course there were and are in the United States, as in Great Britain, those of another opin- ion. But they are more silent in America than here, and the public show less tolerance with them. One discovery of this was interesting. A citizen of a large town in the Middle West showed me beneath his coat a badge, which marked him as one of a group of citizens, voluntarily and secretly organised to detect and expose to the authorities any whom they found talking treason to the nation's conscience of its duty; and it was said that there were similar groups in other cities. The trials of "conscientious objectors" and of unpatriotic agitators, with the verdicts and sen- tences passed on them, were also significant of the national temper. I found some audiences — few indeed — somewhat heavier to lift than others, and was told afterwards that they contained a consid- 228 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE erable proportion of "pacifists". This happened chiefly in parts of the country where there is a vogue for religious theories that tend, through false ideas of the Divine Will, to weaken man's sense of his own responsibility for justice and the betterment of the world. We were seldom inter- rupted by objectors — once, I think, on the question of Ireland, but before we knew what they wished to say they were (to our disappointment) promptly ejected by the audience. The messages of my fellow-speakers and myself (I hope) were delivered with sobriety and restraint, yet the con- sent to what we said was always enthusiastic and in some cases its expression was overwhelming. Of the two related subjects on which I was charged to speak, the moral aims common to the Allies and the British part in the war, I found less need for the first than for the second. As has often been said both by themselves and by others, Americans, with all their supposed absorp- tion in the material interests of life, are a nation of idealists. They have been so from the begin- ning. The nation came into being for an ideal; and the spirit of its Declaration of Independence and of other utterances during the War of Inde- pendence is hard to distinguish from that of the EPILOGUE 229 contemporary idealists of France. Though much of the immigration which has constantly aug- mented the population has been due to material attractions, there have always gleamed over these attractions, as there have been signal to the minds of all the other immigrants, high ideals of free- dom and equality. To-day this national spirit has found consummate expression in the pronounce- ments of President Wilson. But American ideal- ism is not abstract. It has a practical edge upon it, and a personal passion driving behind the edge, not excelled by other nations. Up to a point the Americans are the most patient and amiable of peoples. But let the point be passed and not even the French will outdo them in the logical thorough- ness and eager, stern temper in which they will en- force these ideals. This does not mean that the American temper is vindictive; but where its ideals of freedom are menaced and in real danger — and where the menacing forces have violated in addi- tion the sanctity of the home and have outraged women and children — then American idealism be- comes relentless and implacable. That is the spirit Germany has to encounter in the American soldier, and that is the spirit I have found resolute in his people behind him. 230 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE Among Germany's most fatal blunders has been her failure to appreciate all this. In essence the moral aim of America at war is just that of her Allies. But it is somewhat differently set from theirs. We British had our definite and sworn duty to Belgium to concentrate and inflame us; behind that our instincts of danger to our Empire and its free institutions. To France there was the immediate and urgent task of repelling in- vasion; behind that the hope of recovering her lost provinces. Italy also had concrete aims, the recovery of territories and populations properly her own. And Belgians, Serbs and Montenegrins have been fighting for their soil and the restora- tion of their banished peoples. But while all these objectives of our warfare have been unselfishly adopted by the Americans, their ultimate target has been the autocracy itself, whose power and ambition were the primal, if not the sole, causes of the wrongs the Allies were called to redress. The Americans have aimed at this target with a straighter vision, at least, than the other Allied powers. In the President's words their purpose is "to make the world safe for democracy". As one went through the country one heard this and simi- larly absolute phrases repeated again and again. EPILOGUE 231 Now in years of peace such phrases — even with the piquancy added to them of America's tradi- tional suspicion and contempt for all dynasties — felt monotonously abstract. So long as democracy was not threatened In America herself, and America had neither the power nor the concern to enforce it in Europe, American persistence in repeating its maxims seemed futile; and It was easy to caricature them as Charles Dickens did. When, however, the American as well as other democracies fell under real danger — when It was seen that Germany was making the world unsafe for democracy — and at the same time America felt herself able to strike as far as Europe, then her Ideals took the form of a most practical pas- sion and their enforcement to the very letter of her phrasing of them became certain. A frequent signal of that temper which we heard was the say- ing — "It is this wretched kaiser-business that Is responsible for the war, and it must be put an end to". From Count Bernstorff's and his master's con- temptuous references to the American Govern- ment and people on to even Prince Max's first communication to the President, Germany's stupid blindness to all this has been very obvious to those 232 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE who know the Americans. It will be regarded as one of "the curiosities of history" that Imperial Germany, from whatever motive, should have ad- dressed her appeal for peace to that power among those opposed to her whose purpose was most directly hostile to her autocratic genius and con- stitution, and who at the same time was most familiar with the intrigues and falsehoods of her diplomacy. But President Wilson's replies to Prince Max must at last have roused Germans to the truth, that among all the Allies the American spirit strikes straightest at the heart of what the world has come to know as Germanism; and that American vision, sharpened by two and a half years' experience of German fraud, is at least not less likely than that of the other Allies to be on guard in negotiations with a people whom their own conduct has rendered so suspect and untrust- worthy. On the other side of the task with which I was entrusted — to relate the part which Great Britain had played in the war — there was more need to enlarge. The magnitude of that part and many of its details were either unknown or imperfectly realised. For instance, the facts that, within two years from her sudden call to war and before EPILOGUE 233 conscription was fully established, Great Britain had increased her armies from a few hundreds of thousands to nearly five millions; that these armies had to fight not on one front only but on seven or eight in three different con- tinents; or the distance from home of some of these fronts; or the size and severity of the operations upon them; or the number from first to last of British casualties. There was, too, great eagerness to hear how we con- veyed, fed and equipped our forces, and how they were served by the Royal Army Medical Corps and Red Cross; how Great Britain financed her- self and her Allies, and carried on other necessary organisations behind the fighting lines. It was a simple task to tell all this. Facts and figures told themselves.^ But the impression they pro- duced, often rising to amazement, showed how ^ I was much indebted to the Department of Informa- tion of the British Foreign Office, in particular to Pro- fessor MacNeile Dixon there, and to the British Pic- torial Service in New York under Geoffrey Butler, Esq., for the literature, statistics, and other information with which they provided me. We found frequent proofs all over the States of the value of the literature on the British aims and results, distributed by Professor Mac- Neile Dixon. 234 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE necessary the telling was. The first month of my tour was the time when the Third Liberty Loan was being raised, and the example of the subscrip- tions of British towns to our own last Government Loan was not without Its Influence. But while there was need for such detailed in- formation It must not be supposed that the dele- gates to America from a people, whether British or French, who have endured the sacrifices of these terrible years, had to work up sympathy In their audiences. Alike in the East, the Middle West, the Far West, and the South, the sympathy was spontaneous and immediate. Chambers of Commerce and other gatherings of business men were as moved as meetings of Church workers, men of German origin as much as Anglo-Saxons or the groups of Scots whom one found every- where. The audiences were ready to receive us with heartiness just because we were British or French or Italian or Belgian. It was a novel ex- perience to hear gatherings of American people singing "God Save the King"; the words of which were in many cases thoughtfully distributed among them on leaflets; to listen to choirs trained to ren- der the more difficult "Rule Britannia"; and to speak from platforms on which the Union Jack EPILOGUE 235 hung side by side with the Stars and Stripes — not to speak of the flags and national anthems of the other Allies. The Americans are a generous people, and responded at once to what my fellow- speakers said of the British and French contribu- tions to our common cause. The finest tribute to Great Britain's part in the war, which I heard or read, was made by Mr. Taft in a great speech at Cleveland, Ohio, listened to by the most promi- nent men and women of that city. He said, in so many words, that America could never repay her debt to Britain, and his words were warmly ap- plauded. On 4th August, 191 8, the anniversary of the British entry into the war, ample acknowl- edgment was made in the daily papers and from the pulpits of the country of the critical and de- cisive consequences of that entry. The following extracts from a leading article may be regarded as typical : — ^ "Because England weighed a promise and not the price of keeping it, there could be no swift stroke at lone France, no dash eastward to subdue Russia. . . . "England's day this? Yes, and a glorious ^ "The Sun," New York, Sunday, 4th August, 19 18. 236 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE anniversary for her. She has indeed kept her 'solid engagement to do her utmost'. In a million graves are men of the British Empire, who did not consider the price at which the compact would be kept. Their lives for a scrap of paper — and welcome ! When we think that we are winning the war — and nobody de- nies that it is American men and food and ships and guns that are winning it now — let us look back to the 4th of August, 19 14, and remem- ber what nation it was that stood between the beast and his prey, scorning all his false offers of kindness to Belgium, his promises not to hate France, and his hypocritical cry of 'kin- dred nation' to the England he really hated. "But it is not alone England's day. . . . It is the anniversary of Germany's loss of the war." To one who has known America for the last twenty-five years all these signs — and they could be indefinitely multiplied — form evidence of a change in the attitude and temper of Americans towards the people and Government of Great Britain. It is important to notice that the change is not due to a revival of considerations of blood or language or even community of political heri- EPILOGUE 237 tage, but rests far more happily on a common conscience and a community of ideals. We heard little these months of an "Anglo-Saxon Alliance" or a "League of English-speaking peoples". As the years go on less and less stress can be laid on the physical kinship of us British to the people of the United States. The proportion of gen- uine "Anglo-Saxons" to the mass of the popula- tion is steadily diminishing. The mingling of races and bloods in the United States is a more wonderful commonplace than ever. To our minds it was brought home in several vivid ways. In the lists of drafted men published in the papers of each district the sum of English, Scottish, and Irish names would be conspicuously less than the sum of German, Jewish, Italian, Polish, Russian and other Slavonic names. In camps and troop- ships numbers of soldiers would look at you with the same blue eyes, round faces and fair hair that you were familiar with on the German prisoners in France. Again, I remember, that when we were passing through Arizona a journal gave the "foreign-born" groups, which the Mayor of a small town was adding to the Committee for the celebration of Independence Day. No fewer than fourteen different nationalities were represented. 238 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE But these are not all. On a schedule attached to our steamer tickets were the names of the nations, from one or other of which the American pas- senger had to declare he was derived, and those names are over forty — nearly as many nations as there are States In the Union. It is the richest mixture of nations that history knows. Though it carries the people further from the cradle we shared with them, we British cannot grudge it. We ourselves, in a smaller way, are a mixture too. The strength and quality of our genius depend on the fact that we are not only Anglo-Saxons — praise be to God! — but Norse and Norman, French, Celtic, and much else beside. We should contemplate the ethnic experiment in the United States, on a vastly larger scale, with a hopeful- ness justified by our own experience and more than sufficient to compensate for the rapid disso- lution by foreign bloods of our kinship with the American people. But the war gives both them and us something greater still. The stern sense and the strenuous practice of their duty to so just a cause is doing more to consolidate this dazzling variety of peoples into one nation than anything else could have done. And not only for both our nations is it far more precious that we should be EPILOGUE 239 united by a common conscience than merely by ties of blood or language; but it is also far better for humanity as a whole. That, through the greatest crisis which has ever fallen on civilisation, we have seen with one eye, and have fought, suffered, and our sons have died, together for the Right is the pledge not only that our Alliance shall endure, but that it is certain to secure through the centuries the moral stability and peace of the whole world. But this fresh spiritual union does not lose the ancient buttresses of a common language and a common political heritage. Our language is an invaluable bond. In politics the service has been reciprocal. Americans are fully conscious of the debt they owe to England and Scotland for their political principles and liberal institutions; and we can never forget the lessons of liberty, which they taught us when they broke from our tyran- nous monarchy, and which we have laid to heart in the building of our Empire. I encountered many curious instances of their prejudice against that word "Empire," and endeavoured to show how we had redeemed it from its evil associations and given it new contents and a new spirit. I had also some pleasure in quoting the fact that George Washington did not refuse the name to the Ameri- 240 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE can Commonwealth, as when he called himself "a member of an infant Empire".* The truth is that the spirit and form of the British Empire — that commonwealth of independent states and semi-independent territories — are nearer to those of the great Federal Republic than are even the spirit and constitution of the United Kingdom. Sometimes in the Western States we had ques- tions put to us which revealed suspicions as to the degree and quality of the British democracy. It was easy to answer that whatever be its draw- backs, we are, in some directions at least, more democratic than our republican kinsmen. Neither in State nor in Church nor in the University do our constitutions leave so much power to individ- ual men. Our administration is not so indepen- dent of Parliament as the American is of Congress ; the American caucuses are controlled by "bosses" of a power hardly known to us. There are more labour members in Parliament than in Congress. Bishops in one Protestant Church seem to have authority peculiarly drastic, and some College Presidents are said to exercise powers which, if their British equivalents assumed them, would rouse an academic revolution. ^Letter to Lafayette, 15th August, 1786. EPILOGUE 241 I was asked by a very eminent private citizen, who has filled one of the highest educational posi- tions in the States and has been called to one of the most important of their political posts, whether "England was going Socialist". Scottco more I inquired why he put the question. He an- swered, "Because, if it does, it will wreck any British-American alliance". Whether he is right or wrong, he represents an attitude toward Social- ism held by many Americans. Socialism has less vogue than with us. That is partly because the position of the wage-earners is more comfortable, but partly also because the American conception of freedom is at least as jealous for the rights of the individual as concerned with the idea of equal- ity. Equality of opportunity certainly, but leave the individual as free as possible in his use of the opportunity and in his enjoyment of the results of his use. This is perhaps one of the lines on which may be found the answer to a question that haunts the British visitor to America : what are the differences between the temper of our democracy and that of the American? One may be this individualism of the American temper; due possibly to the 242 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE greater alertness and more mobile energy of the individual, about which In their turn It would be interesting to inquire whether the climate or the greater initiative encouraged in children, both in their families and at school, was at all responsible for them. Another difference It may be more rash to suggest — that while the American mind Is more rapt away by the Idea of Freedom, we British are more content with the slower steps of Justice. But such generalisations are precarious — and after all Freedom and Justice are parallel infinites. Great as was the sympathy and even enthusiasm with which the British message and record were received at our meetings, I am bound to say that the sympathy and enthusiasm for the name of France were. If possible, still greater. In the streets the Tricolor was more lavish than the Union Jack; and at concerts (though there was an intrinsic reason also for this) the "Marseil- laise" was greeted more heartily than "God save the King". And we British did not grudge all this, when we remembered the histories of those two peoples — that France was America's first ally, sending troops and munitions across the Atlantic as America is now sending them to France; how EPILOGUE 243 disinterested the first French assistance had been/ and how effective the whole of it proved to the achievement of victory; how American Indepen- dence had re-acted for the freedom of France; how intimate and affectionate had been the inter- course between the great men of the two nations in those heroic days; and that to-day both states are republics. It is surely natural that there should be in America's feeling toward France a strain of an even more tender quality than in her feelings towards ourselves. After all, the three ^ In his recent volume "With Americans of Past and Present Days" (Scribner's Sons, 191 7), M. Jusserand brings out great evidence of this. And Frenchmen dis- claimed any wish to get Canada back by American help. At the same time there is little doubt that Louis XVI's statesmen hoped to take great advantage at sea and in commerce by the American success. At the Philadelphia Banquet of the League to Enforce Peace on 17th May last, M. Jusserand made a very pretty point. He read a letter from a general at the front dated ist May, say- ing that the position was critical, and urging that all available troops be sent immediately to his help across the Atlantic. When we who listened felt sobered by this appeal, M. Jusserand quietly said: "Do not worry, it is true that the date of the letter was the first of May, but the year is 1781 and the writer General George Washington." 244f OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE are one by the holiest ties of duty and of sacrifice, and equally appreciate each other's spirit and ef- forts. The question of Benjamin Franklin has been answered in fact: "What would you think of a proposition if I sh'd make it of a family com- pact between England, France, and America? America would be as happy as the Sabine girl if she could be the means of uniting in perpetual peace her father and her husband."^ The com- pact is made, and has the assurance of its per- petuity in the community of moral aims on which it rests. To their Italian Allies the sympathy of the Americans has gone forth possibly in a less demon- strative but not in a less sincere fashion than to the French. I had not the opportunity of hearing any Italian speakers, but the most interesting spec- tacle I witnessed was of "Italian Day" in New York, the anniversary of Italy's entrance into the war. For most of Its great length Fifth Avenue was lined by a crowd four or five deep of Italian citizens of the Republic waving the colours of their fatherland, their children seated at their ^ To David Hartley, one of the British plenipoten- tiaries for the peace, dated i6th October, 1783; quoted by M. Jusserand, op. cit., p. 348. EPILOGUE 245 feet on the kerbs of the side-walks. I shall never forget the lines of olive, Tuscan and Roman faces along those pavements of the West. New York is said to contain an Italian population as large as Rome. It is impossible to treat with adequacy the com- plexities of the domestic German-American situ- ation created by the war. Nothing need now be said of the careful German propaganda in the States during these four years, and long before war broke out, or of the insidious intrigue and abuse of America's hospitality, or of the violations of their new allegiance by some German immi- grants, which have exasperated the Republic. Their criminal character is familiar, though per- haps not to the same degree, to every nation on which Germany had set her calculating eye. But apart from these outrages, the way to deal with which was obvious and has been sternly pursued, the situation of Americans of German origin was one peculiarly involved and delicate. The Re- public could not forget the steadfast and often heroic service rendered by her German citizens to the cause of Union throughout the Civil War; yet had reason to be anxious about the attitude of their successors in the very different crisis of to- 246 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE day. For this war has drawn the millions of Americans who are German by birth or descent into a hard conflict between, on the one side, tra- dition and natural affection, and, on the other, their new allegiance and the rights of a cause whose justice was acclaimed by the rest of the civilised world. A visit to the States is bound to create a sympathy with the German families and individuals who must have felt the agony of that conflict; as well as to give the capacity of appre- ciating the honesty and courage of the great mass of them who have emerged from it whole-hearted for the Allies — yet not with hearts wholly healed as they see to what the people, from which they have been proud to spring, has been reduced by its own conduct. All honour to them I Next to the anxiety with which I faced my first week of meetings — in New York and Philadel- phia — in ignorance still of the precise angle at which Americans at war should be addressed, was that I felt on approaching the principal German centres in the country. But it was needless. The meetings in these cities, such as Cincinnati, St. Louis and Milwaukee, were as enthusiastic as else- where. Several of the chairmen were of German origin, and large numbers of those to whom we EPILOGUE Ml were introduced bore German names. But they were all loyal Americans, and spoke for or cheered the Allied Cause as vigorously as their fellow- countrymen. The Lichnowsky Memorandum had powerful effects. When it appeared the editors of a leading German paper in the Middle West acknowledged that they had been misled by the authorities and journals of Berlin and announced that, dropping the German name of their paper, they would henceforth support the aims of the Allies. Another paper, protesting against being classed as "un-American" because it used the Ger- man language, asserted its loyalty to "America's war-aims," without, however, referring to the other Allies. There has been strong controversy over the teaching and use of German, the strenu- ousness of the hostility to which we cannot appreciate unless we realise conditions that do not exist among ourselves. In the State of Nebraska, for example, there appear to have been hundreds of schools in which the general instruc- tion was not only given in German, but was in- spired by German traditions and ideals. In St. Louis and its suburbs there are twenty-eight Evangelical-Lutheran churches, twenty-eight Ger- man-Evangelical churches, and seventeen Ger- S48 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE man-Catholic. By April last twenty-two of the "parish schools" of the first named had discon- tinued instruction in German, and six or seven of the congregations had ceased to use the language in their services. On the other hand, the Catholic Archbishop, affirming that no complaint of dis- loyalty in any St. Louis church had reached him, protested that "we are not making war on lan- guages but on false principles," and added that "as a rule only one of the Sunday sermons is in German," but "he had the question of eliminating German under consideration."^ There and else- where some churches changed their names from German to English. It is said that the number of students of German in the universities has seri- ously diminished. These things show how far conditions in the States differ from those in Great Britain. Other elements in America at war deserve our attention, among them the Negroes and the Red Indians. I had the privilege of speaking to audiences of coloured men and women in the South and of hearing several of their speakers. At a meeting ^St. Louis "Post Despatch," 17th April, 1918; cf. "Denver Post," Sunday, 21st April. EPILOGUE 249 In New Orleans the pastors to whom we were in- troduced had already soldier sons in France. There are separate contingents of negroes in the American forces; and a number of commissions have been given to them. I had the pleasure of telling those meetings that I had seen men of their race In three of the uniforms of the Allies, in the British khaki a West Indian Regiment, in the French blue a Senegal Regiment, both on the front in France, and now an American in the U.S. uni- form. This cannot be said of any other race save the Jews. It was interesting and pathetic to hear negro speakers exhort their brothers to support the Allied Cause as "Anglo-Saxons"; which term they justified because as a race they had never known any civilisation but the Anglo- Saxon, and this war was one for its Ideals against the pagan ideals and policy of Germanism. In this crisis the coloured communities In America have the same conscience as the white, and one heard numerous instances of their fine proof of this in the readiness of their sons to fight, and of their men and women to subscribe to the Govern- ment Loans and the Red Cross. The zeal of many was inflamed by the evidence of how the 250 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE natives in Africa have been treated by German colonists. The Red-Indians are also "on the warpath." In the States there are fewer than 33,000 males of this race of military age, but by May "6000 of them were in the Army, 85 per cent of whom were volunteers, and several hundred more in the Navy, every one a full citizen."^ They are found in every rank, from that of Major downwards. One company of the 142nd Infantry is composed wholly of Choctaws, all volunteers. We saw several Indian sergeants in companies of white soldiers, and they deserved the rank both for their stalwart frames and the military education they had previously received at Government Schools. "At Camp Travis in the 358th Infantry Regi- ment it is said that every company has its Indian non-commissioned officers. No race in the States has a better Liberty Bond record . . . they are not the wealthiest people, but on the three loans they have managed to subscribe more than thir- teen million of dollars." Their engagement in * The total Indian population of the U. S. is just on 336,000, about half of them citizens, 50,000 still in skins and blankets, and only 30 per cent able to read and write English. (From a daily paper.) EPILOGUE 251 the war has included some picturesque incidents. In Washington and Oregon several tribes appealed to a clause in the treaties of 1854-5 by which they agreed "never to make war against any other tribe except in self-defence" ; but "when Government ex- plained that this really was a war of self-defence they decided readily enough that those savage tribes over in Germany needed the Indian sign more than the Iron Cross.'* Another tribe, the Onondagas, drew up a declaration of war against the Kaiser under their treaty with George Wash- ington, which made them a separate nation. They took this step because of the indignities inflicted by the Germans on some of their tribe taken prisoners. The race has already rendered its sacrifices for the Cause, and in Shawano County and other districts with ancient Indian names, aged women, in accordance with tribal custom, have been wailing for their men fallen in France.^ We had frequent opportunity for feeling the weight of the reasons which have been urged for the delay of America's entry into the war, and which even kept some portions of her population indifferent to our Cause for a year thereafter. On the question, whether the President could have *"New York Sunday Times," 4th August, 1918. 252 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE brought in a united people at any earlier stage, American opinion itself is divided. But to an "outlander" like myself, and even though I began my work in the country when the last German offensive and the first considerable lists of Amer- ican casualties were rousing the States, and Prince Lichnowsky's memorandum was dispelling alt doubts of Germany's guilt, the difficulties which had retarded the national opinion and resolution were still very apparent. They are known to the world. There is the extraordinary mixture of races in the American nation described above. There is the distance especially of the Middle and the Far West from the fields of war. How slowly instruction travels and conviction grows across these vast spaces, may be seen from what I was told of the difference between the apathy of the trans-Mississippi farmers to the first two Liberty Loans and the zeal with which they responded to the Third. There were the old and once very wise traditions of the national duty to hold aloof from European quarrels; and the patience required to learn that this war is one not for Europe only but for humanity. And there was (to a less extent) the natural gratitude of many pure Americans to German learning and EPILOGUE 253 German training. But obvious as these factors are, it is necessary for a foreigner to revisit America and to move up and down among her people In order to realise their force and the con- sequent reasonableness of the American delay. And (as I have said In the first of the addresses) the delay has brought our Cause this moral ad- vantage, that when the American decision to fight came about It was a very deliberate decision, and accepted by practically the whole people after a thorough experience of the German mind, and only when through two and a half years they had proved the futility of treating with that mind on any other footing except that of war. The de- layed decision was a vindication and reinforce- ment of our own original and necessarily swifter conscience of the justice of our Cause. It is unnecessary to write of the evidence con- stantly before our eyes that the Americans are following up their convictions and enthusiasm for that Cause, by a strenuous and unselfish organisa- tion of their manhood and mobilisation of their material resources. The people are engrossed, the land is loud, with the preparations for war. The results already spread vastly — in that cease- Jess stream of men across the Atlantic, in the 254 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE two millions now in France, and in the huge con- structions behind them there of docks and quays, of railways and roads, of stores of food and am- munition, of camps, hospitals and schools. I may speak safely now of the great convoy with which we returned to Britain. Eleven ships carried over thirty-six thousand American infantry, the staff of a Division, and a host of military nurses, besides heavy cargoes. We were escorted by United States warships till we met a small fleet of British destroyers that saw us safely into port — a proof of the hearty, vigilant and punctual co-operation of the two navies. The food control in America since the war began has been well organised and loyally obeyed. Americans have, of course, not yet felt the extremities to which the French and British have been reduced by four years of war; and on so great a continent they never will. But this makes all the more conspicuous their recent gift to their allies of one hundred and twenty- six million bushels of wheat, over and above their usual exports and saved from their own consump- tion between January and June last. We saw the process at work. Hotels, restaurants, dining- cars all loyally followed Mr. Hoover's request to save meat, wheat, and other foods. The volume EPILOGUE 255 of the gift has been swollen by rills from prac- tically every home in the United States ; and it is this even more than its volume which renders the gift so precious. Of the shipbuilding we saw in yards old and new along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and even in creeks far up the coun- try where the ribs of wooden vessels rose above the primeval trees ;^ of the ubiquitous munition works and works of every other article of war, and of the almost endless processions of freight trains working eastward I cannot now write. I can only say that it has been a privilege and Inspiration to see a great and a generous people thus roused by their conscience and deliberate study of the facts to an unselfish war in the inter- ests of justice and freedom to all mankind. I had the honour of being received by President Woodrow Wilson. In the course of our conver- sation he spoke chiefly of those moral aims of the Allies of which he has proved so clear and im- pressive an interpreter. His final words were: "Be sure to tell your people, that when the time comes for settling the terms of peace, we must con- tinue to be true to the ideals which have inspired * So one morning on the borders of Louisiana and Texas. 256 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE our warfare — that each of the Allied nations must preserve through those negotiations a na- tional unselfishness and disinterestedness. Other- wise we cannot face the young men whom we have taught and trained and sent forth to fight for these high principles." ■Jf^i Date Due APR 1 JAN 4 MAY 3 .;.;li^I Wd^dW^m 5 19S3 -4988- 1968 lySfj Library Bureau Cat. No. 1137