There is a story, going the rounds of the press, about the bandit, Jesse James:  telling how, on one occasion, he went to a lonely farm house to commandeer a meal.  Entering, he found one woman, a widow, alone and weeping bitterly.  He asked her what was the matter, and she replied that, in one hour, the landlord was coming, and if she did not have her mortgage money, she would lose her little farm and home and be out in the world, shelterless.  The heart of the bandit was touched.  He gave her the money to pay off the mortgage, hid in the brush and held up the landlord on the way back.

Need the moral be pointed?  We have been getting the mortgage money.  During the first years of the War it rolled in, an ever-increasing golden stream, until we held a mortgage on numerous European nations.  We have the mortgage money, but beware of the way back!

Thus the agitation, in one nation, for disarmament, unpreparedness and a patched up peace, while the other nations are armed and embittered, not only renders the situation of the one people critically perilous, but actually cripples its power to serve the cause of world peace and humanity.  If only the peace-at-any-price people had to pay the price, one would be willing to wait and see what happened; but they never pay it, they take to cover.  It is those hundreds of thousands of splendid young men, going out blithely in obedience to duty, to be butchered, it is the millions of women and children, who cannot escape from a devastated area, who pay that price.

Every people in the past that turned to money and mercenaries for defense has gone down.  No people ever survived that was unable and unwilling to fight for its liberties and spend, if necessary, the last drop of its blood for the principles it believed.

X

RECONSTRUCTION FROM THE WAR

We have seen how impossible it is to forecast the new world that will follow the War, we know merely that it will be utterly new.  Nevertheless, the great tendencies already at work we can partly discern and recognize something of what they promise.  It is well to try to see them, that we may be not too unready to welcome the opportunity and accept the burden of the world that is being born in pain.

Peace and prosperity produce a peculiar type of conservatism.  People are then relatively free in action and expression, things are going well with them, and they are instinctively inclined to let well enough alone.  Thus in thought they tend to a conservative inertia.

On the other hand, in periods of great strain and suffering, as in war time, thought is stimulated, all ordinary views are broken down and the most radical notions are widely disseminated and even taken for granted by those who, shortly before, would have been scandalized by them.  Action and certain phases of free speech are, in such a period, much more widely restrained by authority.  There is a swift and strong development of social control, urged by necessity.