World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities; World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
The war and the election together have revealed a growing separation
between the ideas of the East and those of the West. This separation
is largely the fault of the East, which prefers to do its thinking
in terms of its own industrial welfare. The life of the West is
a healthier life. There is better balance between industry and
agriculture, more recognition of the value of social equality, more
open-mindedness to new ideas, greater readiness to put them into
practice. The East has been slow to recognize this moral leadership
of the newer country. It has greeted the men and their ideas with
caustic humor and sometimes with an almost malignant bitterness. This
has not weakened the men nor crushed their ideas, but it has lessened
good will. It has led the West to distrust a policy which has the
endorsement of the East.
The German Kaiser said to a distinguished Frenchman whom I know:
"America once divided between North and South. It would not be
impossible now to separate America, the East from the West."
It is time for the East to waken itself from its selfish sleep, and
bend its mind to an understanding of the American community. In the
matter of foreign policy, it is wiser than the Middle West, but in
order to make its ideas prevail it will have to work by sympathetic
coöperation. It will have to prove that its notion of foreign policy
is not based on self-interest, but is a wise program for the American
nation.
I have shown that a section of America of the Civil War traditions
is intensely Pro-Ally, and has proved it in speech and action. The
new America, spreading out over the immense areas of the Middle West,
is neutral. It is neutral because it does not know the facts. I am
sometimes told in Europe that it is the chink of our money that has
made my country deaf. But our neutral people are our earnest Middle
Westerners, hard-working and humanitarian. The Middle West has not
given money, and it is warm-hearted. It has not taken sides, and
it is honest. This neutrality is in part the result of the Allied
methods of conducting the war. In England and France, there has been
an unconscious disregard of neutral opinion, an indifference in the
treatment of its representatives, an unwillingness to use the methods
of a democracy in appealing to a democracy. A Government report, issued
by a belligerent power, has little effect on a community three thousand
miles away. But the first-hand accounts, sent by its own writers,
who are known to be accurate and impartial, have wide effect. It is
unfortunate that through the first two years of the war, more news was
given to American journalists by Germany than by England and France.
There is need that some one should speak the truth about the foreign
policy of the Allies. For that foreign policy has been a failure in its
effect on neutrals. The successful prosecution of a war involves three
relationships:
(1) The enemy.
(2) The Allies.
(3) The Neutrals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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