New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1916-05-07
The Anniversary.

the Lusitania it is natural and fitting that
Americans should review all that has hap
pened since a wanton murder first brought
to this side Of the Atlantic nascent reali-
zstion of the issue that was being de-
cided on a world battlefield.
There will be no anger and no passion
in American minds. We have never asked,
never desired, that the slaughter should be
avenged. No portion of the American peo-
pie or of the American press has clamored
for vengeance, no man or political party
has demanded that there should be German
lives taken because American lives had
been ended.
1t is not too difficult TO reconstitute our
own minds as we stood in the presence of
that supreme atrocity. The horror that
seized a whole nation in that moment has
no counterpart in our history. We have
known war, we have fought Great Britain
twice, we have fought Spain and Mexico
within our own boundaries we have con-
Quoted the most desperate civil war in
human history.
But it was not the emotion provoked by
war or the acts Of war which moved Ameri-
cans. It was not even the emotion stirred
by the sinking of the Maine nearly two
decades ago. It was certainly something
utterly remote from the feelings Of our
fathers and grandfathers on the morrow
of the firing on Fort Sumter.
The Lustania Massacre was not an act
of WI. The victims were not soldiers, only
D.. portion of them were men. Essentially
the thing was new phenomenon to the
American people. 1t was at first incompre-
hensible, unbelievable. Despite the solid
and unacceptable evidences of death, mems
intelligence doubted what their senses told
them.
So for days and weeks the American
people stood doubtful and puzzled. They
waited for that evidence they expected,
they believed would come; that there had
been an accident mistake, the blunder Of
a subordinate which would be repudiated
by government, the crime Of navy which
would be disavowed by people. But in
stead far borne across the seas they heard
the songs of triumph of thousands of Ger
man men and women, who hailed the crime
as a victory, the eternal disgrace as an
everlasting honor.
Day by day, week by week, we Ameri-l
cans have since then been learning what
Europe has known for nearly two years
We have been learning that we are not in
the presence of a war between nations, al
conflict between rival powers; that we are
not the agonized witnesses Of one more
conAagration provoked by conflicting am
billions of hereditary enemies. We have
been learning that what is going forward
remorselessly, steadily, is a war between
civilization and barbarism, between hui
mainly and savagery; between the light of
modern times and the darkness of the
years that followed the collapse of Rome
Time and again Americans have been
murdered, time and again our government, |
our people, have had recourse to the ordi-
nary machinery and the ordinary concep-
\ tions of civilized life. But each time we
have beheld the utter collapse of every
appeal based upon reason, justice, common
humanity. The Germans who slew our
women and our children flung US back the
challenge that they and not we possessed
the true civilization, and that their civili-
zation, their Kultur, was expressed in
their works, which were altogether good
and right.
Slowly, steadily, we have been learn
ing. We still have much to learn, but the
primary truth is coming home TO many
DAY by day. This German phenomenon
which fills the world is a new thing and
an old thing; it is new in our generation, 1t
il new in recent centuries; but it is as old
as that other barbarism which, descending
upon the Roman civilization, beat upon il
and spread destruction until it was con-
ouered and tanned amidst the ruins and
the desert it had created.
The French, who see things as they are,
have beheld and appraised the German
phenomenon Justly. The British. like our
selves, have partially and temporarily