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Page 46
Undoubtedly, there is a very warm and wide-spread feeling among us that in
this war the women of the nation have done uncommonly well! You will
remember a similar stir of grateful recognition in America after your War
of Secession, connected with the part played in the nursing and sanitation
of the war by the women of the Northern States. The feeling here may well
have an important social and political influence when the war is over;
especially among the middle and upper classes. It may be counter-balanced
to some extent in the industrial class, by the disturbance and anxiety
caused in many trades, but especially in the engineering trades, by that
great invasion of women I have tried to describe. But that the war will
leave _some_ deep mark on that long evolution of the share of women in our
public life, which began in the teeming middle years of the last century,
is, I think, certain.
_May 2nd._--So I come to the end of the task you set me!--with what gaps
and omissions to look back upon, no one knows so well as myself. This
letter starts on its way to you at a critical moment for your great
country, when the issue between the United States and Germany is still
unsettled. What will happen? Will Germany give way? If not, what sort of
relations will shape themselves, and how quickly, between the Central
Empires and America? To express myself on this great matter is no part of
my task; although no English man or woman but will watch its development
with a deep and passionate interest. What may be best for you, we cannot
tell; the military and political bearings of a breach between the United
States and Germany on our own fortunes are by no means clear to us. But
what we _do_ want, in any case, is the sympathy, the moral support and
co-operation of your people. We have to thank you for a thousand
generosities to our wounded; we bless you--as comrades with you in that
old Christendom which even this war shall not destroy--for what you have
done in Belgium--but we want you to understand the heart of England in
this war, and not to be led away by the superficial difficulties and
disputes that no great and free nation escapes in time of crisis. Sympathy
with France--France, the invaded, the heroic--is easy for America--for us
all. She is the great tragic figure of the war--the whole world does her
homage. We are not invaded--and so less tragic, less appealing. But we are
fighting the fight which is the fight of all freemen everywhere--against
the wantonness of military power, against the spirit that tears up
treaties and makes peaceful agreement between nations impossible--against
a cruelty and barbarism in war which brings our civilisation to shame. We
have a right to your sympathy--you who are the heirs of Washington and
Lincoln, the trustees of liberty in the New World as we, with France, are
in the Old. You are concerned--you must be concerned--in the triumph of
the ideals of ordered freedom and humane justice over the ideals of
unbridled force and ruthless cruelty, as they have been revealed in this
war, to the horror of mankind. The nation that can never, to all time,
wash from its hands the guilt of the Belgium crime, the blood of the
_Lusitania_ victims, of the massacres of Louvain and Dinant, of Aerschot
and Termonde, may some day deserve our pity. To-day it has to be met and
conquered by a will stronger than its own, in the interests of
civilisation itself.
This last week, at the close of which I am despatching this final letter,
has been a sombre week for England. It has seen the squalid Irish rising,
with its seven days' orgy of fire and bloodshed in Dublin; it has seen the
surrender at Kut of General Townshend and his starving men; it has seen
also a strong demonstration in Parliament of discontent with certain
phases of the conduct of the war. And yet, how shall I convey to you the
paradox that we in England--our soldiers at the front, and instructed
opinion at home--have never been so certain of ultimate victory as we now
are? It is the big facts that matter: the steady growth of British
resources, in men and munitions, toward a maximum which we--and
Russia--are only approaching, while that of the Central Empires is past;
the deepening unity of an Empire which is being forged anew by danger and
trial, and by the spirit of its sons all over the world--a unity against
which the Irish outrage, paid for by German money, disavowed by all that
is truly Ireland, Unionist or Nationalist, and instantly effaced, as a
mere demonstration, by the gallantry at the same moment of Irish soldiers
in the battle-line--lifts its treacherous hand in vain; the increasing and
terrible pressure of the British blockade of Germany, equivalent, as some
one has lately said, every twenty-four hours that it is maintained, to a
successful action in the field; the magnificent resistance of an
indomitable France; the mounting strength of a reorganised Russia. This
island-state--let me repeat it with emphasis--was not prepared for, and
had no expectation of a Continental war, such as we are now fighting. The
fact cries aloud from the records of the struggle; it will command the ear
of history; and it acquits us for ever from the guilt of the vast
catastrophe. But Great Britain has no choice now but to fight to the
end--and win. She knows it, and those who disparage her are living in a
blind world. As to the difficulty of the task--as to our own failures and
mistakes in learning how to achieve it--we have probably fewer illusions
than those who criticise us. _But we shall do it--or perish_.
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