And supposing, still for the sake of argument, that that same evening some one, ignorant of the German threat or wishful to hamper the invaders at any cost, succeeds in destroying a bridge or cutting a telegraph line. And that, early the next morning, you are awakened by a sudden crash, as though many rifles were fired in unison. And that, hurriedly dressing, you hasten down town to learn what has happened. And that, turning into the main street, you see a row of bodies--the bodies of men some of whom you had known all your life, men with whom you had gone to college, men who were fellow lodge-members, men with whom you had played bridge at the club, the body of your father or your son or your brother perhaps among them--sprawled on the asphalt in grotesque and horrid attitudes amid a slowly widening lake of crimson. Suppose that this dreadful thing happened, not in some European town of which you had but vaguely heard, but in your own town--in Newburyport or Yonkers or Princeton, which it doesn’t matter. Then would you ask “Even if the Germans were to win this war, what difference would it make anyway?” The proclamation just quoted is not imaginary. It was signed by Field Marshal von der Goltz when German governor of Belgium and was posted on the walls of Brussels in October, 1914. I saw it there myself. It is to destroy the monstrous system which permits and approves the execution of people “whether they are guilty or not” that we have gone to war. For if we don’t destroy it, it will most certainly destroy us. The trouble is that we stubbornly shut our eyes to the gravity of the situation which confronts us; we have not aroused ourselves to the colossal magnitude of our task. Sacrifices and sorrows without number await us. Before this business is over with, we must expect to be deprived of many of our comforts and most of our pleasures. We must be prepared to accept without grumbling the imposition of very burdensome taxes. We must be prepared to make countless personal sacrifices, to submit to innumerable annoying restrictions. We must expect months of discouragement and heart-breaking anxiety and gloom. We must gird ourselves for those dark days when the lists of the wounded and the dead begin to come in. For such will be the price of victory. The surest way to bring about an early peace is to convince Germany, beyond the possibility of misunderstanding, that we stand behind the Government to the last cent in our purses and the last breath in our bodies; that in our vocabulary there is no such word as “quit”; that, no matter how appalling the price that may be exacted from us, we shall not relax our efforts by one iota until the world has been “made free for Democracy” forever. THE END The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.