The Victor of the Marne Pronounced the West Point Corps One of the Finest Bodies of Young Officers

here, just to exchange experiences with men who have been through all the dreary, anxious crises of the last three

years.

America has helped us even to win the battle of Arras. Do you know that these guns which destroyed the German trenches, shattered the barbed wire-I remember, with some friends of mine whom I see here, arranging to order the machines to make those guns from America. Not all of them-you got your share, but only a share, a glorious share. So that America has also had her training. She has been making guns, making ammunition, giving us machinery to prepare both; she has supplied us with steel, and she has got all that organization and she has got that wonderful facility, adaptability, and resourcefulness of the great people which inhabits that great continent. Ah! It was a bad day for military autocracy in Prussia when it challenged the great Republic of the West. We know what America can do, and we also know that now she is in it she will do it. She will wage an effective and successful war.

Establishing a Real Peace

I

There is something more important. She will insure a beneficent peace. attach great importance-and I am the last man in the world, knowing for three years what our difficulties have been, what our anxieties have been, and what our fears have been-I am the last man to say that the succor which is given to us from America is not something in itself to rejoice in, and to rejoice in greatly. But I don't mind saying that I rejoice even more in the knowledge that America is going to win the right to be at the conference table when the terms of peace are being discussed. That conference will settle the destiny of nations-the course of human life-for God knows how many ages. It would have been tragic for mankind if America had not been there, and there with all the influence, all the power, and the right which she has now won by flinging herself into this great struggle.

I can see peace coming now-not a peace which will be the beginning of war; not a peace which will be an endless

preparation for strife and bloodshed; but

a real peace. The world is an old world. It has never had peace. It has been rocking and swaying like an ocean, and Europe-poor Europe!-has always lived under the menace of the sword. When this war began two-thirds of Europe were under autocratic rule. It is the other way about now, and democracy means peace. The democracy of France did not want war; the democracy of Italy hesitated long before they entered the war; the democracy of this country shrank from it-shrank and shudderedand never would have entered the caldron had it not been for the invasion of Belgium. The democracies sought peace; strove for peace. If Prussia had been a democracy there would have been no Strange things have happened in this war. There are stranger things to come, and they are coming rapidly.

war.

There are times in history when this world spins so leisurely along its destined course that it seems for centuries to be at a standstill; but there are also times when it rushes along at a giddy pace, covering the track of centuries in a year. Those are the times we are living in now. Six weeks ago Russia was an autocracy; she is now one of the most advanced democracies in the world. Today we are waging the most devastating war that the world has ever seen; tomorrow-perhaps not a distant tomorrow-war may be abolished forever from the category of human crimes. This may be something like the fierce outburst of Winter which we are now witnessing before the complete triumph of the sun. It is written of those gallant men who won that victory on Monday-men from Canada, from Australia, and from this old country, which has proved that in spite of its age it is not decrepit-it is written of those gallant men that they attacked with the dawn-fit work for the dawn!to drive out of forty miles of French soil those miscreants who had defiled it for three years. "They attacked with the dawn." Significant phrase!

The breaking up of the dark rule of the Turk, which for centuries has clouded the sunniest land in the world, the freeing of Russia from an oppression which

has covered it like a shroud for so long, the great declaration of President Wilson coming with the might of the great nation which he represents into the struggle for liberty are heralds of the dawn. "They attacked with the dawn," and

these men are marching forward in the full radiance of that dawn, and soon Frenchmen and Americans, British, Italians, Russians, yea, and Serbians, Belgians, Montenegrins, will march into the full light of a perfect day.

Both Houses of Parliament passed resolutions on April 18, 1917, expressing profound appreciation of the action of the United States in joining the allied powers and thus defending the high cause of freedom and the rights of humanity against the gravest menace by which they have ever been imperiled." Earl Curzon, in moving this resolution before the House of Lords, said:

INCE the beginning of the war one

SINCE the bei independent nations

of the earth have been drawn into its terrific and devastating orbit. The great powers who met the first shock of conflict on one side were France, Russia, and Great Britain, or, rather, I would prefer to substitute the phrase, British Empire, because from the first hour of war it was the whole of that empire that leaped to arms. It is the whole British Empire that on our side has been engaged, and will remain engaged to the end. Alongside of these allied powers were the minor but heroic and suffering States of Belgium, Serbia, and Montenegro. At the other end of the world we received, and we continue to receive, loyal and valuable assistance from Japan. At a later date Italy was driven by considerations partly of honor, partly of political necessity, to enter this struggle. Again, a little later Rumania followed suit. Portugal, the most ancient of our allies, could not stand aloof, and at the present moment her soldiers are fighting alongside of our own in France and Flanders. In Greece many of the most patriotic sons of that country, under the leadership of the brave M. Venizelos, are also engaged in conjunction with our own troops in the trenches out

side Saloniki. Elsewhere large parts of Arabia have arisen to throw off the detested yoke of the Turk.

Such has been the accumulation of

forces that have gathered since the beginning of the war on the side of the Allies. In the same period I cannot recall any accretion that has been made to the forces of the powers of the German and Austrian Empires, except the inglorious and unnatural partnership of the Bulgarian and the Turk. But in the last fortnight, in the short time that has elapsed since we last met in this House, another and graver portent has occurred. There has entered into the war the greatest democracy in the world, whose twice-elected President, representing 100,000,000 of the most liberty-loving, the most peace-loving, the least aggressive of the peoples of the earth, has summoned his people to arms with a trumpet call that will ring through the ages, and will always be accounted one of the historic declarations of mankind.

The case of America in entering the war is widely differentiated from that of any of the other allied countries. All the other States whom I have mentioned were drawn into the war either at the beginning or at no very long date afterward. The great majority of them certainly have been engaged now for two years, if not for longer. But the case of America was different. For nearly three years that nation and her official head scrupulously and sedulously abstained from entering the war, exhibiting a patience and a forbearance which were perhaps not always quite understood, and which did not even excite universal satisfaction among some sections of her own people. But there are other

differences between the position of America and that of the other allied powers. All of them have had a direct and personal interest. The interest of the United States is secondary and remote. The majority of them were either inured to war by previous experience, or were not indisposed to war by political ambition. America during the last half century has had little experience of war and has no ambitions to gratify in the present case. We know how it has been expressed over and over again by the foremost statesman of America that her people have a constitutional aversion to war, and that they have a rooted dislike to be in any degree involved in the secular ambitions or quarrels of the Government.

Some of the nations who were fighting are, like ourselves, fighting for their continued national existence. No one can say that the national existence of America has been imperiled. Others, again, have entered the struggle, alas! because their territories have been overrun by the brutal foe. Not a single enemy has set foot, or is likely to set foot, on the soil of America. Some of them are fighting either to extend their boundaries or to recover possessions which they have lost or to satisfy claims of nationality. America requires no territory. She has nothing to recover because there is nothing of which she has been deprived. She has no lost tribes to gather again into her fold. If a nation so placed with those hereditary instincts and others that I have described, and after this long period of hesitation to which I have referred, is yet compelled to join the Allies, there must be some great and overwhelming reason for that fact. Yes, my Lords, there is. America has tardily but definitely entered the struggle because she sees that there is at stake a cause greater than the rights or liberty or the honor of any individual people. It is the rights of humanity that have been and are being cruelly outraged from day to day. It is the liberty of the whole world that is threatened. It is the honor of civilization that is at stake.

My Lords, the best part of half a century ago an American poet in circum

Ere your heritage be wasted," said the quick alarming drum.

That is the call that has again sounded in the ears of Americans, and the call to which they have responded. It is the voice of freedom calling upon the freest people in the world. The entry of the United States into this war is a great event, not merely in the fortunes of the war or in the annals of the American people, but in the moral history of the human race. Not merely does this act invest the figure of America with a glory that will never fade, but it stamps the character of the struggle in which we are engaged as an uprising of the conscience of the world, as a combined effort to put an end to the rule of Satan on this earth, an effort which cannot be slackened or abated until that peril has been entirely and finally subdued. Each one of us may be proud to have lived in these times and to have witnessed this great landmark in the history of mankind.

As to the consequences of the entry of America into the war it is too early to speak. Its practical concrete effects may not be immediate, but that they must in the long run be tremendous and farreaching no man can doubt. We may rest assured that, having drawn the sword, America will put the whole of her strength into the struggle. She is a nation that does nothing by halves; there is nothing small about the character and purpose of America, any more than there is about her territories and population. We may rest confident that she will spare nothing, either the splendid resources with which she has been endowed by nature, and which she has developed with the genius of her own people, or the vigorous energies of that people. She will not pause or stay until the peace of the world has again been built up on secure foundations and guarantees have

been secured for its maintenance in future.

There is only one other reflection that must occur to every one of us who has British blood in his veins; it is a great thought to us that at length, whatever there has been of pain in the association of America with ourselves has been finally obliterated and the two great English-speaking nations of the world stand side by side in this historic struggle. We rejoice that America is at last at our side, or shall I put it the other way and say that we rejoice we are at the side of America? We rejoice that the three flags-the Stars and Stripes, the tricolor, and the union jack-will float side by side both on the seas and in the trenches on the Continent. I shall only be expressing the wishes of your Lordships' House if I ask you this afternoon to join the House of Commons in sending to the American Government and the American people this message of congratulation and pride that we are, together with them, united at last in the greatest cause for which nations have ever suffered or individual human beings have willingly laid down their lives.

Lord Crewe's Tribute

Lord Curzon was followed by Lord Crewe, Lord Bryce, and the Archbishop of Canterbury in speeches of similar quality. The most significant portion of Lord Crewe's address is here reproduced:

We ourselves have never doubted from the first the rightness of our cause. If I may be allowed to conceive for a moment what is inconceivable, if it had been the fact that an attack had been made upon the two Central Powers, I am quite certain that no Government here would have involved us against them in war, even though it might have been argued that the most deep-seated cause of such an attack was to be found in the military aims and the general ambitions of Germany. The case of France and of Russia is, as we know, clear. But the origin of the issues of the war could not be, and could not be expected to be, so visible across the Atlantic as they were at home. It must be remembered that there were millions in America whose original pre

possessions and sympathy were rather on the side of our enemies than of ourselves. It must be remembered, too, that unlimited money and some ingenuityalthough it was in effect sometimes clumsy ingenuity-were exercised in America to distort the facts by enemy agents against us and our cause.

It must be remembered, too, that from quite an early stage in the war much material loss and a great deal more inconvenience was necessarily inflicted upon innocent citizens of the United States by our necessary action in the stoppage of cargoes not only to Germany but also to some neutral countries contiguous to Germany, and I cannot help saying in passing that if at the earlier stages of the war the Government of the day had followed some of the advice which has been given here I am certain with the utmost feeling of patriotism-those measures that we took would have pressed harder still upon America and the other neutrals. The effect would have been not that America would have joined Germany, because that, I am convinced, she never would have done, but she might have been frozen, so to speak, into a position of permanent neutrality not too friendly to us from which she might never have parted until the close of the war. I say this as a tribute to the action of Lord Grey of Fallodon, Lord Robert Cecil, and Mr. Balfour in their conduct of the diplomatic relations with the United States which have now had so happy a result.

As the noble Earl pointed out, there was evidence both here and in the United States from time to time of some impatience that the merits of our cause were not more fully recognized there. It must be remembered that the right opinion had to permeate the vast masses of the population in no way directly interested; that in America the famous phrase is the government of the people by the people, and that it was necessary that President Wilson must remain silent so far as joining the Allies was concerned until he was able to speak, as he has now spoken, in the name of the whole Union. I question if there ever has been a com