The Twentieth Century

Crusade

FIRST LETTER

PERPLEXITIES

So your son has sailed from some port in the United States to some port in France. The last farewells have been given though the last tears have not been shed. There are some homesick hours before him. There are many anxious hours before you. And whether he will come back to be your companion and perhaps your guardian and support, or come back a perpetual invalid to be the object of your nursing solicitude, or never come back, accounted for only among "the missing," you cannot know. Believe me that I am fully conscious of what this sacrifice means to you and to him. And yet I am writing this letter not to condole with you but to congratulate you.

I remember that

you

have hanging in your

3

hall a sword of which you are the proud possessor. It was worn by your great-grandfather as a captain, if I recall aright, at the battle of Bunker Hill. It entitles you to the honorable title of Daughter of the Revolution or is it Daughter of the American Revolution? I am afraid I have not a clear idea of the difference between these sister societies.

I think you are much more to be congratulated on being the mother of your son than on being the great-grand-daughter of your great-grandfather; on being one of the mothers of the present war to make the world safe for democracy, than on being one of the daughters of the American Revolution. you could not avoid being a daughter of the American Revolution, but it is your clear vision and your womanly courage which has made you a mother of the war to make the world safe from the Hun.

For

If you could only be sure that you have decided rightly and that your son has acted rightly! But there is no perplexity so hard to bear as that of a perplexed conscience. And in the tangle of contradictory reports and conflicting opinions respecting this present war you are not always sure. You would accept my congratulations with a better heart you could only be as clear respecting the is

if

sues of 1918 as you are of the issues of 1776. Edwin Austin Abbey 2nd in the letters of "A Gentleman Unafraid," published in the Atlantic Monthly of April, 1918, puts this perplexity with admirable clearness: "Honor demands that we enter the war, humanity that we stay out.' I think this perplexity has assailed the mothers more than the sons. For the maternal solicitude of the mother reenforces the claims of humanity, and the glory of achievement in the son reënforces the claims of honor.

But you are mistaken if you imagine that the issue was clearer to the men and women of 1776 than it is to the men and women of 1918. It is always easy to determine the path of duty when history has interpreted the enigmatical events, but always difficult while we are in the midst of these events; as it was difficult for the early explorers to decide whether the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico or into the Pacific Ocean, while now we wonder at their doubts.

In 1776 there were conscientious objectors who believed that all war is wrong and who affirmed their conviction that "the setting up and putting down kings and governments is God's peculiar prerogative for causes best known to himself, and it is not our business to have any hand or contrivance therein."

There were English-Americans then as there are German-Americans now: and they had an excuse if not a justification for adhering to the cause of their mother country then, while German-Americans have neither justification nor excuse for violating the oath abjuring their loyalty to their Fatherland which they took at the time of their naturalization as American citizens. Other Americans, who had no doubt that their allegiance was due to the Colonies rather than to the Mother country, opposed the war for independence as a foolish and fanatical venture sure to end in disastrous failure. And Samuel Johnson, the foremost Anglo-Saxon moralist of his time, wrote a long and able paper to prove that taxation without representation is not tyranny and that the only remedy for the springing revolt in the Colonies would be found when the Americans were "reduced to obedience," an obedience "secured by stricter laws and stronger obligations."

I honor your son as I honor your greatgrandfather, not merely because he had the courage to offer his life in the service of a world-wide liberty, but no less because in a time of great perplexity he had the clearness of vision to perceive in which direction the path of duty lies.

Your father, I remember, was wounded at