Militia of Mercy . Gift Book Committee

“ Money will never have that meaning in Russia which it has in the West. It will be the individual, the emotional, the great symbol of the mystic beyond, that will speak from future democratic Russia only in a different and more dynamic form, as it has been speaking in the past.
As Lincoln is the living voice of the American people, thus Tolstoy is and remains the glorified Russian peasant uttering his heart to the world. The voice of this man alone is sufficient to tell the outside world that the Russian democracy is a creation not of form and economics but of spirit and aesthetics. ”

“ The victors are to be victors for civilization and the world, not for themselves. The contest upon which we are unitedly engaged will not only end this war; upon its result will depend the extinction of all wars of aggression. No opportunity must ever come again for any nation or people, or any combination of nations or peoples, however, strong or numerous, to seek that universal domination shown by experience to be impossible, which, if it were possible, would mean the destruction of human progress.
We are proud to be associated with America as Allies in so great a cause. ”

“ A time has now come when both nations are called to defend, and to extend in the world at large, the freedom they won within their own countries. America has harkened to the call. Renouncing her former isolation, she has felt that duty to mankind requires her to contend in arms for the freedom she has illustrated by her example. The soldiers of Britain and France welcome the stalwart sons of America as their comrades in this great struggle for Democracy and Humanity. With their help, they look forward confidently to a decisive victory, a victory to be followed by a lasting peace. ”

“ The war has enriched our language with many new expressions, but none more beautiful than that of "Somewhere in France." To all noble minds, while it sounds the abysmal depths of tragic suffering, it rises to the sublimest heights of heroic self-sacrifice.
The world has paid its tribute to the immortal valor of France, and no words could pay the debt of appreciation which civilization owes to this heroic nation; but has there been due recognition of the equal valor and the like spirit of self-sacrifice which has characterized Great Britain in this titanic struggle? ”

“ It has been my fortune to see something of the war with the army in France, and something also of what war means for those at home who, having sent out sons and brothers, are themselves compelled to wait and watch. I have seen suffering beyond imagination, pain, hardship and misery. I have seen anxiety and sorrow which I should have guessed beforehand men could not have borne without going mad. But I have also seen the human spirit rise to wonderful heights. Men and women have shown themselves greater, nobler, stronger than in the old days of peace I thought they could be. ”

“ Recognition of the potency of peaceful methods in government and industry; the contribution of the individual to his own progress and that of mankind; the gradual triumph of an ordered freedom over tyranny and anarchy; all the achievements, that have gradually made the world over, would have had to be undertaken again, and that, too, without the free contribution from every quarter, which, in the varied history of men, had assured the one great triumph which is civilization. The dream of individual and national conquest—the cause of so much suffering and bloodshed—was again to be repeated. ”

“ Their leaders, elected persons, guides chosen by votes and popular acclamation, have shown in a hundred ways that they will not, dare not, trust the people. Our silly censorships, our concealments of unpleasant truths, our suppression of criticism, our galling infringements of personal liberty, witness to the fact that authority distrusts the source from which it sprang; that the leaders of our democracy reckon the common people unfit to know, to think or to act. If we are defending democracy we are sacrificing liberty. Will you, in America, do better in this respect than we have done? ”

“ The Russian music is the most dramatic phonetic art ever created; it reaches the deepest sorrow and the gayest hilarity and joy. Dreamy, romantic, imaginary, simple, hospitable and childlike as an average moujik, is the soul of the people. Nowhere is there a hint of those qualities which are thrown up as dark shadows on the canvas of his horizon. While with one hand Russia has been conquering the world, with the other she has been creating the most magnificent masterpieces of humanity. In the same generation she produces a Plehve and a Tolstoy, both in a way, true to national type. ”

“ Like most of the men who came out of the trenches he had very little to say about them. It amused him to hear that my new fur coat purchased in America is of so fleeting a dye that I must dart into the subway whenever the sun shines. He was laughing quietly as he wished me a cloudy winter upon my descending the broad stone steps into the empty, echoing courtyard. The unexpected appreciation of my doubtful humor set me musing over the possibility of a duty new to Americans. It is the French who have stood for gaiety. We have warmed ourselves in their quick wit. ”

“ THE POWER OF TRUTH can never be shaken. The force of disloyalty may have its hour of triumph, and treachery may march for a season to victory after victory; but all the while truth is secretly exercising her mastery, and in the long run the labor of falsehood will crumble into ruin. There is no permanent conquest for a lie. You can no more keep the truth interred than you could keep the Lord interred in Joseph's tomb. You cannot bury the truth, you cannot strangle her, you cannot even shake her! You may burn up the records of the truth, but you cannot impair the truth itself! ”

“ The brotherhood of man, which the idealistic Russian sighs for, may only be a far away dream, but the brotherhood of those who speak one language, have one great aim, and fight side by side for freedom against force, law against lawlessness, justice against persecution, right against evil, is a reality, and must surely endure long after the smoke of the world war has faded into the blue sky of peace, and the roar of the guns has died away into the silence of the dawn for which humanity is longing. ”

“ For Britain has a business on hand. Just yonder stretches the misty sea where unsleeping lie Britain's men of war. Beyond the sea bleeding Belgium has bloodsoaked ground crying to Heaven long waiting but soon at length to hear. And France fiercely, proudly proving her right to live an independent nation. And Germany. Germany! the last word in intellectual power, in industrial achievement, in scientific research, aye and in infamous brutality! Germany, the might modern Hun, the highly scienced barbarian of this twentieth Century, more bloody than Attila, more ruthless than his savage hordes. ”

“ Of course the new man's a city product, and he drew him to the life: rushed and tortured by ambition, tired out at the end of the day, too tired to be possibly amusing, his nerves excited till anything quieter than lower Broadway hurts his ears, all passion and brilliance spent on business, dinners here and there, with people who all have their ax to grind, too, and are keyed up to it by rows and rows of cocktails. He drew him without mercy, and he had every wife there either wincing or laughing, with the truth of what he said. ”

“ When this threat against mankind came we also saw instinctively that it was even more of a peril to us than to Europe. We saw that civilization was not a thing of continents, or nations, or races, but of mankind, that in the evolution of human forces, men were one in purpose and need. If Europe was to be crushed, it was only a question of time until all that Europe had done for the world in America, or the Antipodes, or in the islands of the sea, would follow it. ”

“ With the beginning of the distribution the band, for which I had longed that it might give a glow to the war, swung into a blare of triumph. It was the first note of music we had heard in France. And as we all expressed our emotion with abandonment throughout the enlivening strains of "The Washington Post," I appreciated the infinite wisdom of marching drumless through the streets—of the divine lack of the bugles' song. For music, no matter its theme, makes happy only those who are already happy. To those who suffer it urges an unloosening of their grief—and grief must not go abroad in France. ”

“ It is not a relieving thought to such of us as still can play, that spirit, whether in the bosom of the boulevardier or his country cousin playing bowls in the cool of the evening, is the same that projects itself brilliantly across the battlefield; that the flash of a woman's eye as she invites a conquest is the flame upon the alter when sacrifice is needed; that the very gaiety which makes one laugh is a force to endure the deepest pits that have been dug for mankind. ”

“ It may be that some of them loved France more than England. No matter; they had good cause to love her, since France stands for Freedom; and it was Freedom that they fought for, soldiers in the greatest War of Independence that has ever been.
The coming in of America has not placed upon England a greater or more sacred obligation than was hers before:—to see to it that this War accomplishes the freedom, not only of Belgium and Russia and Poland and Serbia and Roumania, but of Ireland also, and of Hungary, and, if Germany so wills it, of Germany herself. It is inconceivable that we should fail ”

“ FRENCHMEN, love one another with brotherly love, and, in order that you may prevail against the enemy, put into common use your possessions and your ideas. Let the greatest and strongest among you serve the weak. Be as willing to give your money as your blood for your country. Be willing that perfect equality shall exist amongst you. You owe this to your dead. Because of our example, you owe us the assurance that by your self-sacrifice ours will be the triumph in this holiest of all causes. ”

“ Four days after their parting had come the astounding news of the sinking of the liner, followed, by Sherston, by a period of strange, painful suspense, filled with the eager scanning of lists, cables to and from America, finally terminated by an official intimation that poor Kitty had gone down in, and with, the ship.
Sherston's imagination was inconveniently vivid, and for a few poignant weeks his wife's horrible end haunted him. But after a while he forced himself to take a long holiday in Greece, and from there he came back with his nerves in better order than they had ever been. ”

“ On the other side the stretch of chestnuts, the taxicabs, returned to their original mission, were already weaving about in their effort to exterminate each other. Battling at the Marne had been but a slight deviation in their mode of procedure, yet when a cab recently ran down and killed a bewildered soldier impeded by a crutch strange to him, Paris raised its voice in a new cry of rage. Beyond the Champs Élysées, far beyond, rose the Eiffel tower. Capable, immune so far from the attacks of the enemy, its very outlines seem to have taken on a great importance. ”

“ Democracy is the outward and visible sign that a nation recognizes its own needs and aspirations. Democracy wells up from the very pit of things. Its value is its foundation in actuality, its concordance with the slow unending process of man's evolution from the animal he was. Democracy, for one with any comic and cosmic animal sense, is the only natural form of government, because alone it recognizes States as organisms, with spontaneous growth, and a free will of their own. Democracy is final ”

“ It has been our duty not to reason why, but to help in saving the world without bargains, or dickerings, or suggestions, thus bearing our part in the rescue of civilization from its perils.
As we see our duty, and the duty of the world, only one thing is left to do. It is to fight out this war which neither we nor any other people or nation, other than the aggressors, have sought. It must be fought to the end without wavering, without thought of national or individual advantages. ”

“ We were more than mere participators in this civilization. We had grafted upon our own life, old, balanced, remote, isolated, the creator of great traditions, the newer and different ideas of Europe, assimilating the best of them without losing these that were strong and potent among our own. They had been fused into our life and, in the process, had enabled us to make an enlarged contribution to human progress. We had become so much a part of the world that nothing in it was alien to us. ”

“ I have always preached and continue to do so in the future, that Russia and the United States should join hands, know and love each other, the sooner the better. Russia needs the active spirit, the practical grasp of the things, which the people of the United States possess. Nothing will help and inspire an average Russian more than the sincere democratic hand of an American. A dose of American optimism and active spirit is the best toxin for free Russia. ”

“ It was impossible also for Italy, the ancient home of Civilization, the mother of arts and refinement, to accept the standard of the Huns which the Germans embraced and imposed upon their allies. The conflict between the Germans and the Italians was instinctive, temperamental. For a thousand years it took the form of a struggle between the German Emperors and the Italian Popes for mastery. The Germans strove for political domination, for temporal power; the Italians strove, at least in ideal, in order that the spiritual should not be the vassal of the physical. ”

“ On every continent, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and both the Americas, recognition of this great fact was instinctive. It was obvious everywhere that, if Germany with its sinister aims, shamelessly avowed, and its terrible methods, relentlessly carried out, was to prevail, all the progress that had been made out of her barbarism and savagery would not only be imperiled but lost.
It was clear that humanity would have to begin anew its weary struggle out of the difficulties it had slowly overcome. ”

“ In such an hour as that with which we are now confronted, when so much depends upon the individual efforts, our hearts swell with pride as we learn of the thousands of America's best, staunch and true men who are so willingly forgetting their own personal welfare and linking their lives and all that they are with the cause of liberty and justice, which is so dear to the hears of the American people. ”

“ How does the passion express itself? "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and may my right hand forget her cunning!" Study it in the glowing pages of the history of this country, that breath of free aspiration which no power of armament, and no menace of material strength was ever able to destroy. The mightiest force in all those days was not the power of threat, and powder, and sword, but that breath of invincible aspiration which was the very breath of God. ”

“ The fundamental purpose of the pathfinders of Russian art, music, literature and poetry was to create beauties that emanated, not from a certain class or school, but directly from the souls of the people. Their ideal was to create life from life. Though profound melancholy seems to be the dominant note in Russian music and art, yet along with the dramatic gloom go also reckless hilarity and boisterous humor, which often whirl one off one's feet. ”

“ We did not care much about Spain's or Scandinavia's or Holland's neutrality, though the Dutch and Scandinavian navies might have helped enormously to tighten the blockade; but we felt America's neutrality as a wrong done to our own soul. We were vulnerable where her honor was concerned. And this, though we knew that she was justified in holding back; for her course was not a straight and simple one like ours. No Government on earth has any right to throw prudence to the winds, and force war on a country that is both divided and unprepared. ”