Читать книгу Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights - Kelly Miller - Страница 148

What that militarism is and what it has done to America, and to the whole world, is best summed up in the words of Secretary Lane, of the Department of the Interior, at Washington, who in an address before the Home Club of the Department on June 4, 1917, just when America was beginning to send forces to Europe, said:

"America is at war in self-defense and because she could not keep out; she is at war to save herself with the rest of the world from the nation that has linked itself with the Turk and adopted the methods of Mahomet, setting itself to make the world bow before policies backed by the organized and scientific military system.

"Why are we fighting Germany? The brief answer is that ours is a war of self-defense. We did not wish to fight Germany. She made the attack upon us; not on our shores, but on our ships, our lives, our rights, our future. For two years and more we held to a neutrality that made us apologists for things which outraged man's common sense of fair play and humanity.

"At each new offense—the invasion of Belgium, the killing of civilian Belgians, the attacks on Scarborough and other defenseless towns, the laying of mines in neutral waters, the fencing off of the seas—and on and on through the months, we said:

"'This is war—archaic, uncivilized war, but war. All rules have been thrown away; all nobility; man has come down to the primitive brute. And while we cannot justify, we cannot intervene. It is not our war.'