Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1917-09-12

Address by Chief Justice John B.
Winslow of Wisconsin supreme court,
at the conference of the Wisconsin
Press association in Plankinton hotel,
Milwaukee, on Tuesday, September 4:
There come great crises in the life
Of a nation as in the life Of a man;
times when the national character
meets a supreme test; times when the
old, old question, first asked by the
Man of Galilee nineteen hundred years
ago confronts the national conscience
with an imperative challenge which
admits neither evasion nor delay
What shall it profit a man if he gain
the whole world and lose his own
soul?" There is far too much reason
to believe that America, during the
last quarter Of a century, came peri
lousy near losing her own soul. We
have been very prosperous and very
comfortable; blessed with natural re-
sources infinite in their variety and
completeness, our material prosperity
has been bewildering and almost in
tOxicating. Wealth SURPRISING the
dreams Of avarice flowed daily into
our Golfers; material blessings came
to be considered the supreme good;
and wealth, luxury and frivolous pleas
ures the sacred trinity at whose shrine
we daily worshipped. Nor did the out
break of the great European conflict
materially lessen the emphasis which
we placed upon wealth, luxury and
creature comforts. Very remote it
seemed, too far away to affect us and
furthermore it brought us an added
though unnatural prosperity which
made us richer than ever before; in
fact it made America the creditor ma
ton of the world, at whose counter
every other nation must humbly ask
for financial aid. And so we contin-
ued our merchandising and our gain
getting, easily persuading ourselves
that the great conflict was not our
conflict and that we might with honor
stand aloOf
But there came time when it be-
came plain that America could not
have peace with honor. [ do not refer
SO much to the rape of Belgium, to the
sinking of the Lusitania with it's hun
ldreds of innocent American lives, nor
to the unrestricted submarine warfare,
unspeakable and dastardly as it was
and is, but l refer to the time when it
became plain that the military Oligar-
chy of Prussia q do not refer to the
German people at large, for I regard
them as grievously misled) had pre-
cipitated this war not only for world
| conquest but for the destruction of
democracy and the overthrow of the
right Of small nations to govern them
selves. Gradually it became clearer
and clearer that the war was in fact
war between the autocrat and the
democrat, war between the spirit of
medieval feudalism on the one hand
and the spirit of twentieth century
democracy on the other; accommodating
evidence made it certain that it was
the fruit of deep-laid and long medi-
tated plot to take the democracies OF
the world captive and lead them in
triumph chained to the chariot wheels
Of mail-clad and world ruling mill
tary autOcracy.
But, thank God! America found her
soul at last. Prosperity had not ener-
waited her manhood nor dimmed he1
vision. There came to her anxious
ear the vibrant voices of the almost
forgotten past. From Thermoplylae
and Marathon, from Concord and Lex
ington, from every blood-stained bat