Winning a Cause | Page 8

to ruin. But you will pardon me for emphasizing that. We are a slow people in these islands--slow and blundering--but we get there. You get there sooner, and that is why I am glad to see you in.
But may I say that we have been in this business for three years? We have, as we generally do, tried every blunder. In golfing phraseology, we have got into every bunker. But we have got a good niblick. We are right out on the course. But may I respectfully suggest that it is worth America's while to study our blunders, so as to begin just where we are now and not where we were three years ago? That is an advantage. In war, time has as tragic a significance as it has in sickness. A step which, taken today, may lead to assured victory, taken tomorrow may barely avert disaster. All the Allies have discovered that. It was a new country for us all. It was trackless, mapless. We had to go by instinct. But we found the way, and I am so glad that you are sending your great naval and military experts here just to exchange experiences with men who have been through all the dreary, anxious crises of the last three years.
America has helped us even to win the battle of Arras. The guns which destroyed the German trenches, shattered the barbed wire--I remember, with some friends of mine whom I see here, arranging to order the machines to make those guns from America. Not all of them--you got your share, but only a share, a glorious share. So that America has also had her training. She has been making guns, making ammunition, giving us machinery to prepare both; she has supplied us with steel, and she has all that organization, and all that wonderful facility, adaptability, and resourcefulness of the great people which inhabits that great continent. Ah! It was a bad day for military autocracy in Prussia when it challenged the great republic of the west. We know what America can do, and we also know that now she is in it she will do it. She will wage an effective and successful war.
There is something more important. She will insure a beneficent peace. To this I attach great importance. I am the last man to say that the succor which is given to us from America is not something in itself to rejoice in, and to rejoice in greatly. But I do not mind saying that I rejoice even more in the knowledge that America is going to win the right to be at the conference table when the terms of peace are being discussed. That conference will settle the destiny of nations--the course of human life--for God knows how many ages. It would have been tragic for mankind if America had not been there, and there with all the influence, all the power, and the right which she has now won by flinging herself into this great struggle.
I can see peace coming now--not a peace which will be the beginning of war, not a peace which will be an endless preparation for strife and bloodshed, but a real peace. The world is an old world. It has never had peace. It has been rocking and swaying like an ocean, and Europe--poor Europe!--has always lived under the menace of the sword. When this war began two-thirds of Europe were under autocratic rule. It is the other way about now, and democracy means peace. The democracy of France did not want war; the democracy of Italy hesitated long before they entered the war; the democracy of this country shrank from it--shrank and shuddered--and never would have entered the caldron had it not been for the invasion of Belgium. The democracies sought peace; strove for peace. If Prussia had been a democracy there would have been no war. Strange things have happened in this war. There are stranger things to come, and they are coming rapidly.
There are times in history when this world spins so leisurely along its destined course that it seems for centuries to be at a standstill; but there are also times when it rushes along at a giddy pace, covering the track of centuries in a year. Those are the times we are living in now. Today we are waging the most devastating war that the world has ever seen; tomorrow--perhaps not a distant tomorrow--war may be abolished forever from the category of human crimes. This may be something like the fierce outburst of winter, which we are now witnessing, before the complete triumph of the sun. It is written of those gallant men who won that victory on Monday--men from Canada, from Australia, and from this old country, which has proved that in