published by the National Geographic Society

“ German troops are lined across her border, ready to walk over her prostrate body as they walked over the body of Belgium; to shoot her civilians if they express sympathy for themselves against the German enemy; to burn down her schools, her libraries, and her cathedrals, as the Germans burned down those in Belgium. Holland is cowed.
A brave race are the Dutch. They faced Spain in its pride and power, with the help of England. They fought and died for liberty to speak and to worship. ”

“ At once and unhesitatingly, for whatever they may happen to need, the Allies with one accord come to us; and it is our proud privilege to satisfy, as far as we can, every one of their demands.
A nation rewrought industrially I am not sure that in this country there is much more than a very hazy conception of the industrial revolution that has been wrought by the war in Great Britain. It is not merely that we have scrapped old machinery with a more than American ruthlessness. ”

“ Duke's son and cook's son are fighting shoulder to shoulder; great ladies do the waiting in the soldiers' refreshment buffets; work like sewing maids in the Red Cross arsenals; like factory hands in the munition works; a shop walker and a grocer's assistant wear the Victoria Cross—the new patent of nobility; for the convalescent wounded there is a boundless outpouring of hospitality and affection, free from the remotest tinge of condescension; the impulse to succor, to link hands, to know and understand one another, is universal. ”

“ Nor is it merely that questions of industrial welfare and efficiency and the whole economy of production are being studied with incomparable zeal, and that nothing since the introduction of the steam-engine has so renovated, sent such a stir through all branches of British industry, as this war.
These are not the things that matter. What matters is that Britain is working; has taken off her coat; has ceased to be a land of leisure, and has become a land of infinite labor. ”

“ Our debt to England I have a hearty contempt for the man who does not know his environment and his kindred and his friends and his country. It may be narrow, but I love my plantation better than any other plantation, my county better than any other county, my State better than any other State in the Union, and my country better than any other country in the world, and my race—the English-speaking race—better than any other race. ”

“ If we had even one-tenth of the German genius for self-advertisement, the world would long ago have understood that without British power the Allies could never have withstood the Prussian onset, and that with British power an Allied victory—complete, smashing, and final—is as certain as the rising of tomorrow's sun. ”

“ For it must be admitted that in this country one of the strongest reasons for not entering the war, either actively or passively, on the side of the Allies has been the thought that in so doing we were backing Russian absolutism, the antithesis of everything for which our own form of government stands, the symbol of absolutism and terrorism, of autocracy against democracy, of darkness against light. ”

“ The leaders of thought in Russia today have not evolved a novelty, nor are they experimenting with a novelty; they have simply brought back to life the centuries old popular saying of the people in Russia: “If the prince is bad, into the mud with him.”
We must admit, of course, that it has not been exactly the custom in the past few hundred years to act upon this saying in the case of rulers who had made themselves disliked by their subjects, but the underlying spirit was always there, waiting with infinite Russian patience for the men and the hour. ”

“ But our men who are thus helping to wear down the most formidable foe that has ever assaulted the freedom of Europe, who have captured Bagdad, and are contributing to end Turkish rule in Asia Minor; who have mopped up the German colonies, while preserving intact the integrity of all British possessions, and who are holding up their end in the difficult warfare of the Balkans—these men are something more than the backbone of Britain during the struggle. ”

“ Peter the Great could not have done what he did in bringing his country into the ranks of modern States if he had not had an autocratic form of government. He realized fully the influence of the army in establishing him firmly in the new absolutism, and in 1716, in his military statutes, he declared: “His Majesty is sovereign and autocrat. He is accountable to no one in the world.”
From the time of Ivan the Terrible it was autocracy which, more than anything else, contributed to the long history of territorial extensions of Russia and her prestige, such as it was, abroad. ”

“ As if America should raise 11,500,000 troops Meanwhile to make the rounds of any of the British fronts at any of the theaters of war is to view a microcosm of the Empire. It is, indeed, the climax to all our other services and achievements that we should have turned ourselves into a military power of the first order. People talk of Great Britain being slow to wake up to the realities of the war. ”

“ As it is, Americans in general seem even now to have but an imperfect idea of what Great Britain has accomplished in this war. It is not, in my judgment, that they do not wish to know. It is mainly, I think, that they have been deluded by our old and deceptive trick of taking what we do well for granted and saying nothing about it, while we shriek our blunders from the housetops.
We are by all odds the worst advertisers in the world. We are the most inveterate self-detractors in the world. We are the most persistent grumblers in the world. ”

“ Even our press censorship, for all its stupidities in the opening months of the war, has triumphantly fulfilled its main purpose, that of preventing the publication of any news which might be of use to the enemy; and if Americans will quietly sit down and imagine the entire American press muzzled into a similar innocuousness they will begin to appreciate at least one of the many hundred problems that the British Government has had to solve. ”

“ There is nothing new under the sun. Recent events in Russia have not introduced an entirely new system of government into that great empire, but the revolution of the past few weeks, as we hastily but inaccurately call it, is in truth a reversal to an earlier form of democratic government in which the Russian people centuries ago had made progress and in which they stood in the forefront of the European nations. ”

“ We have got to go into this war now, and we are going into it for all we are worth, for all our capital is worth, for all our bodies are worth, for all that we have and all that we are; and I, for one, hope that we will never make peace until the universal decree of the civilized world has gone forth to the effect that the Hapsburgers and the Hohenzollerns have ceased to reign. ”

“ George Washington warned against entangling alliances and warned against another thing—an infuriate and insensate hatred of some particular people—because a man with that poison in his blood is incapable of being a real, good American citizen in a country where the melting pot will finally operate.
I do not like the arraignment which the Senator made of the English people or the English Government, even more democratic than our own. ”

“ And as for the unstinted outpouring of private generosity, let this one fact suffice: that a single London newspaper, acting on behalf of a single fund, has raised nearly as much money as all the American people, the whole hundred millions of them—and they most certainly have not been behindhand in their generosity—have given to all the war charities combined. I should judge that by now the British people must have subscribed for their own sufferers by the war and for their Allies at least $500,000,000. ”

“ They are trusting her rugged strength and great resources more and more. She is to them like a great tower in the deep. She is becoming more and more the hope of the oppressed and the despair of the oppressor, and I feel confident that we shall not fail the people who have put their trust in us.”
It would be singularly unbecoming on the part of any British subject to seek to exalt the contribution that his own country is making to the common cause above that of any of the Allies. ”

“ All the people unlikely to go wrong at the same time The strength of republicanism lies in the fact that all the people are not likely to go wrong at the same time. A monarchy or an oligarchy is liable to that calamity. Men may, however, go wrong in a republic also, and even a majority may sometimes do so.
There is for that reason need of constitutional limitations in a democracy as well as in other forms of government. Liberty can be secured only by restrictions upon the power of government, no matter what its form may be. ”

“ Freedom has always proved a delicate flower to keep alive. Oligarchy has tended to narrow the depositories of power until it became the possession of a single master; while democracy, on the other hand, recognizing in emergencies the weakness of divided counsels, has tended to confide its power to the hands of a dictator.
Republics that have failed In no form of government is equilibrium so unstable as in a republic, which is essentially a balance of forces, any one of which, if exaggerated, is capable of consummating its destruction. ”

“ Now, Great Britain can, by sea-power, defend herself almost indefinitely—defend herself long enough for us to get ready to help her defend us. You can put it in your pipe and smoke it—this fact: whether you are going to fight Prussia now, with assistance, or whether you are going to fight her later, when we have no assistance, you have got to fight her. ”

“ President, almost any people in the world, no matter how brave, now and then can be cowed and for a time act like whipped slaves. It is the most tragic and pathetic thing in all history when that happens either to a man or to a nation. ”

“ But how many Americans, I wonder, stop to ask themselves how it is that this vast volume of merchandise has crossed the Atlantic in the midst of the greatest war in all history almost as swiftly and securely as in the days of profoundest peace? ”

“ Alexander Guchkoff, President of the Third Duma, and a small group of far-seeing men, has had to contend, on the one hand, with the old regime, the dynasty, and the bureaucracy, and on the other with that far larger number of men and women who in their desire for a new and free government have not stopped at any means to attain their ends, and whose preaching and carrying out of the doctrines of anarchy and terrorism have retarded by so many years the establishment of free and representative government throughout the length and breadth of the great Russian Empire. ”

“ That is why we have gladly surrendered our most cherished liberties, turned our parliamentary system inside out, and submitted to a multitude of restrictions and inconveniences any one of which in the little days of peace would have started a rebellion.
Great Britain, that seemed so fixed, is now in transition; the foundations of its whole scheme of life are shifting, even if they are not breaking; habits and prejudices and old instinctive attitudes of mind are in process of dissolution; economic conditions that one thought were rooted in the deeps are made plastic and adjustable ”

“ The reasons for the collapse of the first French Republic Unfortunately, however, it was not the guarantees of the American constitutions, but the unrestrained democracy advocated by Rousseau that took possession of the French mind. The Constitution of the United States, as finally adopted, unlike any other that had ever existed, while securing the rights of the citizens, placed limits on the powers of government. The French Constitution, on the contrary, simply transferred absolute power from one government to another. ”

“ It has been impossible to make people realize what Russia was fighting—two foes at once, more than any of the other nations engaged in the war has had to contend against. We shall probably not know for long, if ever, what a struggle has been carried on within Russia against the forces which sought to deliver her helpless and bound to her enemies abroad. ”

“ Some six or seven million men, as I have said, have mingled with one another; have learned to understand and sympathize with one another in the new armies; have been trained into an equal brotherhood in the severest school of courage, efficiency, and discipline; have had most of the nonsense of social distinctions knocked out of them.
Gone is the vicious consideration that wealth has always claimed and received in the plump security of the British Isles. ”

“ That is how all self-governing peoples who are used to free speech and who are not used to the discipline of universal military service must inevitably act when caught in a great crisis and obliged to shift the whole basis of public and private life in order to strip themselves for a fight for existence. ”

“ How we have worked up our output of high explosive shells to a point where it leaves the German factories far behind—and less than two years ago Germany was turning out a hundred times as many of these shells as we were; how we have grappled with and solved pretty nearly every one of the technical problems that the war has sprung upon us, and how in doing so we have had to turn all our industrial arrangements upside down and to create what is nothing less than a new industrial order—all this it would need a volume, and a very fascinating one, to describe. ”