So long as Russia suffers the Bolshevik Government I think Washington ought to suffer it, but perhaps in that opinion I go beyond the possibilities of the case. Then I suggest that at least Washington ought to set up some well-informed lawyer, some bureau, to play the part of the Russian advocate at the conference. If Russia is not to be allowed a vote in the decision of things, let her at least be heard.
Consider what the future must hold for this great people, and mark the amazing folly of the insults and evils we heap upon their land. Look it up in an atlas or encyclopaedia. Measure what it is we ignore. In a score of years Russia may be a renascent land as vigorous as the United States in 1840. In a century she may be as great and powerful and civilized as any state on earth. For such powers as France and Britain and Japan to sit in council upon the fate of the world without her is as if, in the dark years of 1863 and 1864, they had sat in council upon the future of America without the United States. Indeed, something of the sort did happen in those dark years; France, I recall, sent troops and munitions into Mexico, as recently she has sent them into Poland and South Russia. And somewhere in the world there is a grave, the grave of a “white hope,” a reactionary puppet who was to have restored Mexico to the European system—the friend of the Emperor Napoleon the Third, the Emperor Maximilian.
When I was a small boy learning the rudiments of geography, the earth was presented to me in two hemispheres, the Old World and the new. Not once or twice only has America vindicated her right to that title. Will Washington confirm that great tradition and open a way of escape now from the tangled narrowness of Versailles? Are Germany and Russia to perish amid the incurable quarrels of the Old World or find their salvation in the New?
Britain, France, Italy and now the people of the United States, have honored and buried the bodies of certain Unknown Soldiers, each according to their national traditions and circumstances. Canada, I hear, is to follow suit.
So the world expresses its sense that in the great war the only hero was the common man. Poor Hans and poor Ivan lie rotting yet under the soil of a hundred battlefields, bones and decay, rags of soiled uniform and fragments of accoutrements, still waiting for monuments and speeches. Yet they too were mothers’ sons, kept step, obeyed orders, went singing into battle, and knew the strange intoxication of soldierly fellowship and the sense of devotion to something much greater than themselves.