THE FRUITS OF WATCHFUL WAITING
January 18, 1918
We have been at war nearly one year. We have failed to do any damage to Germany, but we have done a great deal of damage to ourselves. Recently the President’s Secretary of War announced that the war was three thousand miles away and so he had not prepared to meet it. Incidentally the feats of theGerman submarine off Newport in the fall of 1916 showed that if it had not been for the Allied fleets and armies the war would then have been on our own shores. But at the moment it is three thousand miles away, and yet this Nation is suffering the kind of grave economic derangement that we would suffer if a hostile army was on our own shores. We have accomplished very little. We have suffered very much. Both the failure in accomplishment and the amount of avoidable suffering are due to the resolute refusal of our Government to prepare in advance and to its fatuous persistence in the policy of watchful waiting.
Doubtless part of the present trouble in connection with coal is due to unwisdom in the price-fixing of bituminous coal. Doubtless part of it is due to the railway congestion, which in its turn is due to the complete lack of system and consequent chaos due to suddenly imposing on well-meaning, stodgy government officials of average capacity the duty of dealing in a tremendous hurry with a situation of unprecedented size, complexity, and importance, but the temporary causes are all secondary to the great cause of complete failure to prepare in advance.
Our economic unpreparedness is just as complete as our military unpreparedness and is one of the chief factors therein. We are now paying bitterly for the fact that two and three years ago it was deemed politically wise to shape our governmental policy along the lines of “Watchful waiting” and “He kept us out of war.”
If three years ago we had begun in good faith and earnestly to prepare, and if, when the Lusitania was sunk, we had acted as precisely as we did act with no more provocation in February, last, this war would now have been over. An immense amount of bloodshed would have been spared and the danger of German militarism would have been forever averted. In such case we would have greatly developed the trained administrators and the coherent system necessary to deal wisely with the economic no less than the military features of a great war. Our refusal to prepare in advance and our fatuous acceptance of rhetorical platitudes as a substitute for preparations have resulted in our present military impotence and profound and far-reaching economic derangement. The profound business distrust, the unrest of labor, the coal famine, the congestion of traffic, and the shutting down of industries at the time when it is most important that production should be speeded to the highest point, all are due primarily to the refusal to face facts during the first two years and a half of the World War and the seething welter of inefficiency and confusion in which the policy of watchful waiting finally plunged us. Nine tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. All far-sighted patriots most earnestly hope that this Nation will learn the bitter lesson and that never again will we be caught so shamefully unprepared, spiritually, economically, and from the military standpoint as has been the case in the year that is now passing.