WOMEN AND THE WAR
April 12, 1918
A Kansas woman has just written me in part as follows: “I have given my all, my two sons, gladly and proudly, as volunteers to my country, for they enlisted last August. But my heart grows sick at the confusion and blunders and apathy. I thank The Star for printing that poem of the Minnesota mother. It appeals to all of us mothers who stay at home and pray and work as we can.”
I think more continually of such mothers of soldiers as this Kansas woman, than I do even of the soldiers themselves. They have high and gallant souls. They are the spiritual heirs of the mothers and wives of Washington’s Continentals and of the mothers and wives of the soldiers of Grant and Lee. I am proud beyond measure that I am their fellow countryman. In everything that I do or say, I seek to make and to keep this land a land in which their daughters can dwell in honorable safety and to make our common citizenship such that both their sons and daughters shall hold their heads high because they are Americans.
But exactly as I revere such women, so I condemn the women whose short-sightedness or frivolous love of ease and vapid pleasure or whose timid fear of danger and labor makes them fit companions for those unworthy men whose lives represent merely the shirking of duty. The mother who, by perpetualcomplaint and lamentation about unavoidable hardships and risks, seeks to weaken the heart of her soldier son stands no higher than the money-getting or ease-loving man who dodges the draft. The woman who cares so little for the honor of America and the interests of civilization as now to wish a peace without victory is no better than the men in uniform who seek soft positions of safety among the slickers and slackers.
The things that are best worth having in life must be paid for whether by forethought or by toil or by downright facing of danger. This is true in peace. It is even more true in war. It is just as true of women as of men.
All wise and good women and all wise and good men abhor war. Washington and Lincoln abhorred war. But no man or woman is either wise or good unless he or she abhors some things even more than war, exactly as Washington and Lincoln abhorred them. We are none of us fit to be free men in a republic if we are not willing to fight when the Republic is wronged as Germany has wronged this country. We are none of us entitled to say that we love mankind if we are not willing to do battle against the Turk and the German in order to right such wrongs as have been perpetrated on Belgium and Armenia. And we deserve to be brayed in a mortar if we are ever again guilty of such folly as that of which we have been guilty by our foolish failure to prepare our strength in efficient fashion during the last three and a half years.
The women of this country who love their husbands and sons should realize now that only by thorough preparedness in advance can war be avoided, if possible, or successfully waged if it has to come. Recently men in high position whose own bodies are safe have stated that they are glad that we were not prepared in advance to do our duty when this war came. These men have purchased their own safety and advantage by the blood of our sons at the front. Let the women who do not wish to see their men go up against the cannon see that hereafter all our sons are well trained in advance. If America’s strength is fully prepared in advance, she will in all probability never have to go to war and will be a potent factor in preserving the peace of justice throughout the world, and the first step in securing such a peace is to devote all our energies to speeding up the war until it is ended by the complete triumph of our allies and ourselves.