The Mena weekly star., 1917-09-27
ROOSEVELT TALKED
 ON WAR PROBLEMS

WdfFlHS AdllOn De0dNtu WiSli oOt many's cynical bad faith and brutal ity; and never before has any, na- tion shown such calculated ruthless, scientific, carefully organized cru city. Yet, horrible altho her con- duet is, it is a degree less base than the conduct of the Americans who actually do show themselves to be both towards and traitors by advo- eating that we yield to her, that we kiss the hands that are red with the blood of our murdered women and children, and take the position of whipped slaves before the scientific butchers of the Hohenzollerns.
 If a man will not fight for his wife and children. he is too base a creature for association with any man or woman of honor. If a na- tion will not protect it's women and children. if it will not at once go to war rather than submit to their murder, it occupies position of lunspeakable degradation.
 "The sinking of the Lusitania was the blackest infamy any civilized nation has committed in war since the end of the Seventeenth Century. After it scores of American women, American mothers, lay dead with their dead babies in their arms in the Queenstown morgue Not fighting man among them had been killed But over 1000 helpless and innocent people, including hundreds of women and little children, had been foully murdered. And Ger many went into ecstacies of delight, the German people backing the Ger man government with fantastic en- thusiasm
 They struck medals and sang hymns to commemorate the murder of the innocent, and they rewarded the man who had done the deed. In lmy judgment, we should have acted at that time as we did act two years later. But we endeavored by moral suasion to get Germany to abandon her campaign of murder; cam paign, remember, not waged against property, but against human life; for in this war we are not striving for property rights. but for the ele- mentary of human rights: and any man who balances a question of merchandise against the life blood of women and children is a wretched creature.
 Germany continued, regardless of our protests, to sink ship after ship, with the habitual accompaniment of slaughter: and we made protest aft CT protest: and threat after threat. Finally, on January 3i last, she an- nounced as her settled policy the continuance of this campaign of
 wholesale murder. This was a de- elaration of war, pure and simple.
 No man worth calling man could refuse to vote for war on such Drovocation.
 Now we are in the war: and Ger many has already included us in her official campaign of ruthless brutal ty, waged in defiance of all the rules of civilized warfare Her airmen have singled out American hospitals for attacks. her airmen bomb these hospitals exactly as has long been Inc custom with the allied hospitals, killing or wounding doctors, nurses, patients with indiscriminating fero- city
 This has heen her regular system. 1t does not represent sporadic and unauthorized outrages. It repre- sents the methodically and scientif- eally organized campaign of horror and ferocity- ACKNOWLEDGMENT which Germany has used in order to terrorize her foes. She has revived from the Dark Ages the poisoning of wells and the use of poison gas and fire in order to put her foes to death by torture. She has habitually as sailed and destroyed hospitals and hospital ships, murdering surgeons, nurses and wounded men
 They have conducted in Belgium and Poland huge slave drives. gath ering hundreds of thousands of working men and peasants and forc- ing them Go work in Germany SO as to set free multitudes of German sol diers to assure the conquest of the lands from which these working men came. Germany's cynical and treacherouS bad faith has been as marked as her ruthless brutality She has contemptuously disregared every treaty obligation as well as every rule to which she was pledged for he humane conduct of war.
 And for no nation does Germany feel and express such bitter and con- tempiuous hostility as for the Unit ed States. There is no nation on the face of the globe which they would be more delighted to ruin and plunder
 One of our officers, Major. Eric Fisher Wood, recently told me that while serving with a British regi- ment last spring they took some hundreds of prisoners. The cap tured German officers. especially a certain count, talked freely to their capturers. not knowing that one of them was an American. These Ger mans announced that Germany was going to win and that they were go- ing to smash the United States, bleed if white with an enormous indem- nity. and make it pay the whole ex- pense of the war. They had no thought of peace, and no man in his senses doubts that this would he the policy adopted as a matter of course by Germany.
 'If at this moment, while we are still helpless, France and England
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