AN AMERICAN CONFESSION.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1510, 15 February 1916, Page 4

AN AMERICAN CONFESSION.

An American contributor to the Nineteenth Century, commenting on the charge that, like Pilate, The American people have washed their hands, says “Yet the main indictment stands. As a people we are heartily in favour of the Allies. We devoutly hope they will win. and win overwhelmingly, because we believe they are fighting the battle of liberty, of justice, of honour, of humanity. Every morning we read the newspapers, eagerly looking for victories of the Allies, and the best pages of our journals have been given up, for a year and a half now, to the news of the great war, to the practical exclusion of our own local interests —and there we stop. It is true that we succour the wounded and help the suffering. It is true that we provide supplies and munitions of war. But in the last analysis, this Is what women are doing in France and England, not what is being done by men. Our feminism, our love of comfort, our gospel of stalled cattle, have brought us to that. In the greatest fight for liberty the world has ever seen, the world’s greatest Republic, the vast nation founded on declarations of liberty, is playing the part, not of the warrior, but of the squaw. Perhaps, in the long run, this will be best for us. The Spanish war made us vain enough. Humiliation —for we shall one day see our attitude of Cain to be — will be safer for us. And is there not cause of humiliation enough, bitter, galling, salutary humiliation in this : that, in this great war for the liberation of humanity from brutal tyranny, and not less from fraud and lying, in this vast struggle for the spiritual principles that exalt mankind towards the angels, in this conflict of principalities and powers, that will set its seal on all future history, determining the fate of humanity for ages to come, we shall have to face the fact that not only little Belgium and little Serbia played a far more heroic role than ours, but that the Ghurkas of the Himalayan valleys, the Negroes of Senegal, the Maoris, the Siberian nomads shed their blood for mankind, while we, the great American nation, the spiritual heirs of Washington and Lincoln, stayed at home among the squaws.”