Why America Is In The War Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from America at War The long moral struggle is over. The extremists have prevailed in Germany, while in America righteousness has become another name for wrath. All the just, righteous, and kindly endeavors of our government to maintain the code of international rights and human safeguards have been made the object of scorn, and the instruments by which royal arrogance sought to fulfill its schemes. Our record is clean. We have leaned backward to maintain the cause of peace. In the pursuit of this cause we have been called cowards and selfish people. So did we yearn for peace, that the world mistook this longing for selfishness, and we ourselves began to doubt and grow a little discouraged and ashamed. It seemed as if perhaps we did not realize the full meaning in this crisis of the world, as if we neither rose to its full apprehension nor did our share. We seemed unable to adjust our lives to the tremendous condition abroad, or to compress our loose-jointed thoughts and our luxurious and voluptuous tastes into the compass in which a century reduced itself to months. We had grown so petty and partisan that the great struggle seemed to have no meaning for us, or if it did we had become indifferent to its most vital and lasting issues. We could not unite upon a single great enterprise. But America has awakened and now she is finding her soul. We have been trying to ward off this moment for a long time. At last it has come and our duty is clear. The thought and purpose of our nation should have full, immediate expression, and unqualified support. All partisanship should disappear, all selfish interests should be laid aside, and the unity of the nation should be proved by our patriotic allegiance to duty, our devoted loyalty to any plan marked by the hand of God, and our united effort to make effective our Christian ideals. In my lecture on "The Great War," October, 1914, I made the statement that America would eventually be drawn into the conflict. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.