Agnes Repplier

“ Christianity and war have walked together down the centuries. How could it be otherwise? We have to reckon with humanity, and humanity is not made over every hundred years. Science has multiplied instruments of destruction, but the heart of the soldier is the same. It is an anachronism, this human heart, just as war is an anachronism, but it still beats. Nothing sacred and dear could have survived upon the earth had men not fought for their women, their homes, their individual honour, and their national life. And while men stay men, they must give up their lives when the hour strikes. ”

“ Americanism has done with trivialities, patriotism with matters of taste. Love for one's country is not a shallow sentiment, based upon self-esteem. It is a profound and primitive passion. It may lie dormant in our souls when all goes well. It may be thwarted and frustrated by the exigencies of party government. It may be dissevered from pride or pleasure. But it is part of ourselves, wholly beyond analysis, fed upon hope and fear, joy and sorrow, glory and shame. If, after the fashion of the world, we drowsed in our day of security, we have been rudely and permanently awakened. ”

“ Only an American can understand the cumulative anger in his countryman’s heart as affront is added to affront, and the slow lapse of time brings us neither redress nor redemption. However sanguine and however peace-loving we may be, we cannot well base our hopes of future security on the tenderness shown us in the past. If long months of painful suspense, of hope alternating with despondency, and pride with shame, have wrought no other good, they have at least revealed to us where our danger lies. They have bared disloyalty, and have put good citizens on their guard. ”

“ We do wrong when we release the worker from any incentive to good work. We do wrong when we release her from a sense of personal responsibility. We do wrong when we give her a plausible excuse for following the line of least resistance, when we blight her courage by permitting her to think that her moral welfare lies in any hands but her own. The choice between poverty and dishonesty, the choice between poverty and prostitution is not an "open question." It is closed, if human reason and human experience can speak authoritatively upon any subject in the world. ”

“ Yet we are bidden to protest against the wickedness of all war, not because men die, but because wives are widowed; not because men slay, but because mothers are childless; not because men do evil, or suffer wrong, but because, in either case, women share the consequences. For the sake of these women, war must cease, is the cry; as though the vast majority of men would not be glad enough to be rid of war for their own sake. They do not covet loss of income and destruction of property. They do not gladly aspire to an armless or legless future. ”

“ To prate about the wickedness of war without drawing a clear line of demarcation between aggressive and defensive warfare, between violating a treaty and upholding it, is to lose our mental balance, to substitute sentiment for truth. The very wrongness of the one implies logically the rightness of the other. And whatever is morally right is in accord with Christianity. To speak loosely of war as unchristian is to ignore not only the Christian right, but the Christian duty, which rests with every nation and with every man to protect that of which nation and man are lawful protectors. ”

“ The wave of religious emotion which sweeps over a nation warring for its life is not the mere expression of that nation's sharpened needs; it is not only a cry for help where help is sorely needed. It is part of man's responsiveness to the call of duty, his sense of self-sacrifice in giving his body to death in order that his country may live. "Religion," says Mr. Stephen Graham, "is never shaken down by war. The intellectual dominance is shaken and falls; the spiritual powers are allowed to take possession of men's beings." ”

“ Heroism is good for the soul, and it bears as much practical fruit as lawmaking. It goes further in moulding and developing the stuff of which a great nation is made. “There is a flower of honour, there is a flower of chivalry, there is a flower of religion.” So Sainte-Beuve equips the spirit of man; and the soldier, no less than the civilian, cherishes this threefold bloom. Because he “lives dangerously,” he feels the need of God. Because his life is forfeit, there is about him the dignity of sacrifice. ”

“ Allegiance to a foreign government was forever disowned; fealty to the government of the United States was vowed. He who uses his vote to further the interests of a European state is a perjured man, and that he should dare to threaten us with the power of his perjury is the height of arrogant ill-doing. That such a question as "What is the proportion of votes which the Germans of your section control?" should be asked by German agents, and answered by German newspapers, affronts our nation's honour, soils a sacred trust by ill-usage, and tears our neutrality to rags. ”

“ But how far does he understand the responsibilities he assumes with the franchise, how far does he realize that he has become part of the machinery of the state, and how far can we depend upon him in our hour of need? He knows, or at least he has been told, that he may not return home to fight for his own country, if he seeks American citizenship. He must resist a natural and a noble impulse as the price of his coveted “papers.” But will there spring in his heart a noble, though not very natural, impulse to fight for us if we call our sons to arms? ”

“ Just as inevitable is the reaction from a ravenous war to non-resistance. Because Germany’s armaments are powerful enough to terrorize Europe, we are bidden to weaken our defences. Because France and Belgium have been attacked and devastated, we are implored to take no steps for self-protection. The appeal sent out by Quaker citizens of Philadelphia—good men, ready, no doubt, to die as honourably as they have lived—was at once a confession of faith and a denial of duty. ”

“ France knows the cost of war, and is ill prepared to pay it; but her alternative is yielding her soil, and all she holds sacred and dear, to a ruthless invader. Even a nation of Quakers, or, we hope, a nation with women in "the seat of judgment," would reject submission on such terms. England knows the cost of war, but she also knows the cost of German supremacy. She is at last aware that her national life is at stake. ”

“ Why, after all, should two thousand people assemble in New York to hear Miss Helen Keller say that, in the event of invasion, the American workman "has nothing to lose but his chains"? He has his manhood to lose, and it should mean as much to him as to any millionaire in the land. What new and debilitating doctrine is this which holds that personal honour is the exclusive at tribute of wealth, and that a labourer has no more business with it than has a dog! ”

“ To no one ignorant of history can the right of citizenship assume any real significance. In our country the ballot is so carelessly guarded, so shamefully misused, that it has become to some men a subject of derision; to many, an unconsidered trifle; to all, or almost all, an expression of personal opinion, which, at its best, reflects a popular newspaper, and, at its worst, stands for nothing less hurtful than stupidity. ”

“ If the Germans, well aware of our unpreparedness and of our internal dissensions, have flouted us unsparingly, it is because they are, as they have always been, densely incapable of reading the souls of men. Let us not add to our own peril by misreading the soul of Germany. We lack her discipline, we lack her unity, we lack her efficiency, the splendid result of thirty years’ devotion to a single purpose. ”

“ If Germany conquers, and stands unassailable, a great military world-power, fired with a sense of her exalted destiny, rich with the spoils of Europe, and holding in her mailed hands the power to enforce her will, is it at all likely that our excellent arguments will prevail upon her to reverse her policy, and enfeeble herself for our safety? A successful aggressive warfare does not pave the way to a lasting and honourable peace. ”

“ The things of the spirit are for us, even as for heroic and suffering France, of vital worth and import. If we could say with certainty, “All is gained but honour,” there are still some of us who would feel our blessings incomplete; but, as it chances, the contempt meted out to us has taken the palpable form of encroachment upon our common rights. Until we can protect our industries from assault and our citizens from butchery, until we can couple disavowal of past injuries with real assurance of safety in the future, peace limps, and prosperity is shadowed. ”

“ And worse than worthless in a world which is called upon for heroism and high resolve. A cruel lesson taught by the war is the degeneracy of the British workman, who, in the hour of his country's need, has clung basely to his ease and his sottishness. What does it avail that English gentlemen fling away their lives with unshrinking courage, when the common people, from whose sturdy spirit England was wont to draw her strength, have shrivelled into a craven apathy. The contempt of the British soldier for the British artisan is not the contempt of the fighting man for the man of peace. ”

“ It is not a light thing to give up life,—"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends;"—yet death is the least of the horrors which soldiers daily face.
The third and most vital thing asked of women in these dread days is self-sacrifice. They must give their share of help, they must bear their share of sorrow. They cannot dignify their reluctance to do this by calling it moral revolt, or moral courage, or any other high-sounding name. They cannot claim for themselves a loftier virtue on the score of their lower hardihood. ”

“ Aggression and defence, brutality and heroism, the might of conquest and the right of resistance, have for him no separate significance. He is one who cannot master—as every sane man must learn to master—the deadly sickness of his soul.
To call the pacifist a coward is simple, but not enlightening. Cowardice is a natural and pervasive attribute of humanity. Few of us can flatly disavow it. There are women opposed to all war because their sons might be shot. ”

“ Germany is none the less terrible because she is obsessed, and we are not a whit safer because we recognize her obsession. The German war-maps of Paris, cut into sections and directing which sections were to be burned, are grim warnings to the world. It is disturbing to think how insensitive Paris was to her peril when those maps were prepared. It is disturbing to think that a fool's paradise is always the most popular playground of humanity. ”

“ It was the older and simpler story of a land swept by invasion, and of men fighting and dying for all that belonged to them on earth. Do the American women who prate about the wrong done to womanhood by war ever reflect that it is for wife and child, as well as for home and country, that men are bound to die? What history do they read which does not teach them this truth, which does not tell it over and over again, to interpret the story of the nations? ”

“ Under the menace of disloyalty, Americanism has taken new form and substance; and our just resentment, like the potter’s wheel, has moulded this force into lines of strength and resistance. We have seen all we want to see of “frightfulness” in Europe, all we want to see of injustice, supported by violence. We are not prepared to welcome any scheme of terrorization in the interests of a foreign power, or any interference of a foreign power with our legitimate fields of industry. Such schemes and such interference constitute an inconceivable affront to the nation. ”

“ To-day it is for men to stand down, and for the women whom they have belittled to take the seat of judgment. No picture, however overdrawn, of woman’s ignorance, error, or folly could exceed in fantastic yet tragic horror the spectacle which male governments are furnishing history to-day. The foundation of the structure of civilization which they have erected in Europe has proved rotten. ”

“ Is it worth our while to fill the air with clamour over eugenics and birth-control, to build barriers around a marriage license, and to dramatize impassioned pleas for sterility, when the birthrate of the Republic is nobody's concern? If the survival of the fittest means as much to the commonwealth as to the family, why should we fiddle over pathology while the nation burns?
Miss Kellor is not the only kindhearted American who holds her countrymen to blame for the deficiencies of the immigrant. ”

“ If every man—alien or native-born—who casts his ballot could be made to know and to feel that “all the political forces of his country were mainly occupied for a hundred years in making that act possible,” and that the United States is, and has always been, the nation of those “who willed to be Americans,” citizenship might become for us what it was to Rome, what it is to France,—the exponent of honour, the symbol of self-sacrifice.
A knowledge of history might also prove serviceable in enabling us to recognize our place and our responsibility among the nations of the world. ”

“ This growing contempt for paltry but not unuseful restrictions, this excess of sentiment, combined with paucity of humour and a melodramatic attitude toward crime, has had some discouraging results. It is ill putting the strong man, or the avenging angel, or the sinned-against woman above the law, which is a sacred trust for the preservation of life and liberty. It is ill so to soften our hearts with a psychological interest in the lawbreaker that no criminal is safe from popularity. ”