New Britain herald., 1917-08-09

eVeryWhere--tO awake to the greatness of this cause or the pressing needs of
 the situation. Heaven knows it took us | long enough, and we were only a hun
 dred miles from the very heart of
 things! An ounce of experiences
 Zeppelin here, a torpedoed liner there
 can awake moro national spirit in
 five minutes than ton of imagination can achieve in five years. So it is only natural that America, removed from
 all risk of actual invasion, should re-
 ouire a little time to adjust herself to
 new conditions, and to re-awaken that
 martial and ndomitable spirit which
 has made her such a formidable fight
 ing power in the past. The landing of
 General Pershing's troops has already done much. The first casualty list, alas! will do ten times more."
 That is a good summing up of the situation as 1t was and is "America's 1 imagination is not yet fred" It will 1 be, however, just as it was fired some nineteen years ago by the blowing up of the battleship Maine in Havana ha.r- Dor. Not that tragedy will have to 1 be enacted to awaken the American people; but there must be a grim real ization that we are in the war. The heroic death of one American soldier may swing the people overnight into new channel of thought And when the imagination of America and it's people is fired, watch out Ian Hay recalls an observation made the other day by Lloyd George to the effect that America has never yet gone into a war except for the cause of freedom. We have known that all along; but the supplemented thoughts might not have occurred to us so strikingly. The British observer says: Her people are not military people, but they are warlike people, which means that they do not make war without good reason. Their reluctance to en- ter the present struggle sooner has been largely founded upon suspicion that this war was not a war for free dom. The Russian revolution has cleared away many doubts on that score; so has the gradual exposure of German atrocity and intrigue. Finally. the president, striking as usual at ex- actly the right moment, has clinched the matter with slogan that has gone straight to the American heart: Help to make the world safe for democ- racy!'" 50, finding America in the war, the outsiders speculate to the ultimate influence America will bear. For in- stance, it is recalled that Germany, 1 with her infallible instinct for divining l the mental processes of other nations, 1 has assumed and announced that America will do nothing. To this day, Germany has not acknowledged being at war. with America. The House of Hohenzollern takes the entry of Amer lea in the list of enemies with benign contempt. On the other hand, MT. Hay cites that the attitude of the allies is naturally one of confident expectation, 1 coupled with extreme vagueness as to what America Is really capable of doing. The fact is, America herself l hardly knows what she is capable of doing. So vast are her resources, so great her population, so remarkable the individual capacity of her people, that her future as a military power is limited only by one thing-her will ingness to submit to discipline. To make a nation efficient in a military sense a certain amount of individual liberty-liberty to go ones own way, to be ones own master, and, above
 all, liberty to ask Why?-must be sacrificed; and the average American
 to whom the word liberty Is sacred
 obsession, may prove difficult in that
 respect When all Is said and done
 MT. Hay, nor any other man from over
 the seas, need not worry about Ameri-
 ca and the part she will play in the
 great war. Her people will learn, for the moment at least, the necessity of sacrificing personal liberty to the end
 that mankind in general may improve. Distasteful as many things connected
 with war are, the Americans will put up with them once their imagination is fired and they enter seriously upon the great work of making the world
 a safe place for democracy.
 CAN WHAT YOU CAN.
 There has been lot of talk of