New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1917-08-15

It is a mistake, it seems to The Tribune,
to denounce a man like Henderson, as it
would be little less than crime to attack
a man like Albert Thomas, because he has
listened, unwisely perhaps, to Russian
voices which have awakened unmistakable
echoes in his own constituency. 1t will be
fatal error now if the governments of the
countries at war should permit the develop
nent of a schism between the mass Of the
people and the government.
We in America went all through this
precise crisis at the time of the Civil War;
1864 saw a WEAKNESS in the North fully
comparable to that now to be seen in
France, or England, or Russia. In that
bitter and difficult period the great service
of Lincoln to his country was that he kept
constantly before the eyes of the mass Of
the plain people the eternal truth that
there could be no compromise which sacri-
feed any of the principles essential to the
maintenance of the integrity of the United
States, and even in the midst of the bitter
disappointment of the campaign from the
Kapidan to Cold Harbor the mass of the
American people perceived the truth under
Lincoln's guidance, and at the hour when
disappointment was greatest they re-
elected him President by vote so over
whelming that it was itself the doom of the
Confederacy.
The business of those of US in and out Of
government who believe that the defeat Of
Germany is a condition antecedent to any
real peace in this world Is not to attack
those who honestly seek some solution short
of that to be had on the battlefield, or to
be had within Germany when the strain Of
the struggle at last brings the German
people to a remuneration of the aims and
policies which assailed the liberties and the
rights of all mankind. Where the people
of France, or of England, or of the United
States have been able to or permitted to
see the facts as they are their response
has been as splendid as anything in human
history. 1t will not be the fault Of the
mass of the people of the nations at war
with Germany if the war is lost, because
national unity is destroyed and disnte-
grafton like that of Russia comes to win a
victory for German principles that Ger
man arms have failed to achieve.
We are in the last phase of the war.
German defeat is inevitable-it would
have been achieved already but for the
Russian collapse-unless in these closing
hours the moral disintegration in the ma
tons fighting Germany deprives the victor
of the strength to enforce decision as
Enthusiastically in sight as was Appomattox
in 1864.
There are knaves, there are fools and
there are traitors at work, but all their
work will amount to nothing if the govern
ments and the leaders of the Allied nations,
recognizing the facts as they are, seeing
in the war WEAKNESS something of what
che sees in the physical system which has
led long, gallant fight against disease,
seek to stimulate and to strengthen. Hun
dreds and thousands and millions of men
who have suffered in this war have, by the
very fact of their suffering, their sacrifice
and their endurance, come to the point
where exhaustion is in sight and where
the physical weakness begins to impair
moral vision and moral strength 1t is not
the knave or the fool that one need care
about, but it is the millions who have
fought the war, who have responded Loyalty
to every call made upon them, and who
may be depended upon to fight on to the
end if only they have that leadership to
which they are entitled.
OF all things in the world, the worst that
could possibly happen now to the Allied
cause would be the interjection of passion
at home, of reckless and violent denuncia-
ton of the honest but ill-trained and i'll
Informed who have stood in the workshop
and in the trench for three years and only
falter now because they believe there is
some shorter, surer way to the attainment
of the thing we all long fora peace that
shall be a real and an enduring peace
They do their country and their cause an
i'll turn who denounce the mass of people