The final necessity has put to the proof that which goes to the making of a man and of a nation.
The man who is prepared to lay down his life for his country simply regards it as a duty, and does it regardless of everything. And Duty is a noble leader.
The man who is not prepared to give up his usual pleasures and dissipations, even though his country be in extremity, looks askance at the call, labels it militarism, and will have none of it.
Every age and every nation has its shirkers, who have been only too willing to let any but themselves bear their burdens so that their own personal comfort might not be interfered with. And shirkers such as these have the deserved contempt of every honest man.
But, in strictest justice to the few--like the Friends, and those who believe with them that force is no remedy--while one cannot but wonder what would have become of the world if evil were to be allowed to ravage it at will, and while one finds it difficult to view matters from their standpoint, it must be acknowledged that the military coercion of genuine conscience in these days is an anachronism which galls one’s feelings.
The one thing we have now to guard against in this free land of ours is lest in breaking by force the unspeakable tyranny of Prussian militarism we lay our own necks under an equal yoke.
Germania loved music and so the troubadour sang to her.
Gaily the troubadour sang of glory and empire, and the good German sword.
And he sang a song of _Kultur_, a pocketful of loot.
And a song of tears, the tears of widows and orphans in other lands, widows of foolish men who had denied her omnipotent will; and of foolish reluctant virgins to whom was given the shining compensation of bearing sons to her flushed warriors.
And if he sang of her own sons that lay before Liége, and by the Yser, and on the high road to Paris and to Calais, and Petrograd, it was still a song of glory in a minor but triumphant key.
For also he sang a song of an all-highest promise that, wreathed with the splendid bays of victory, her sons should return before the next ripening of the harvest. But the harvest was gathered and they came not.
And then he sang a song of the sea with the moan of the winds in it, and the cries of little children--which for a sea-song was not a pleasant song.