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 
 
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 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