[18] Of all the many young men I knew in England and Ireland, most of them the sons or grandsons of old friends, there are only three alive; two of them, the sons of Mr. Thomas P. Gill, of the Irish Technical and Agricultural Board, have been made invalids in the war.
President Wilson's ideals were, in the beginning, looked on as doctrinaire--breezes from the groves of the Academies. Some of the elders and scribes of Europe, adept in the methods that nullified the good intentions of the Hague conferences, looked on his explanation of the aims of the conflict as the courtiers of Louis XIV. might have contemplated the pages of Chateaubriand's _Genius of Christianity_, if Chateaubriand had lived at Port Royal in the time of those cynics; but the people in all the Scandinavian countries took to them as the expression of their aspirations. The chancelleries of Europe heard a new voice with a new note, but the people did not find it new. President Wilson found himself, when he gave the reasons of our country for entering the war, interpreting the meaning of the people. Until he spoke the war seemed to mean the saving of the territory of one nation, or the regaining it for another, or the existence of a nation's life. Standing out of the European miasma, with nothing to gain except the fulfilment of our ideals, and all to lose if there were to be losses of life and material, we gave a meaning to the war,--a new meaning which had been obscured.
Nevertheless, let us not forget that Germany has not changed her ideals; all the forces of the civilised world have not succeeded in changing them. Of democracy, in the American sense of the word, she has no more understanding than Russia--nor at present does she really want to have.
To a certain extent she conquered us. She obliged us to adopt her methods of warfare; to imitate her system of espionage; to co-ordinate, for the moment at least, all the functions of national life under a system as centralised as her own. If she gave temperance to Russia, an army to England, religion to France, she almost succeeded in depriving our Western hemisphere of its faith in God.
Her efficiency was so expensive that it was making her bankrupt; she was paying too much for her perfection of method. To justify it in the eyes of her own people she went to war. France was to pay her debts and Russia to be the way of an inexpensive road to the East. Her methods in peace cost her too much; a short war would save her credit. To our regret, perhaps remorse, we have been forced by her to fight her Devil with his own fire; and now we hope for a process of reconstruction in this great and populous country based on our own ideals; but we cannot change the aspirations or the hearts of the Germans. We can only take care that they keep the laws made by nations who have well-directed consciences,--this lesson I have learned near to their border.