The Farmington times. (Farmington, St. Francois County, Mo.) 1905-1926, 1918-11-15
KILL THE MONSTER NOW
(Los Angeles Times)

(LoS Angeles Times)
If this war is allowed to end with
out an end being put to war tltogether
aid forever, it will mean that so much
powder and steel have been shot from
the Threats of the guns simply in fu-
tile clamor, and that untold treasure
has been expended without result.
Far more than that it will mean
that millions of men, who have right
to live, have been hurried into the
abysm of death in vain.
1t will mean that the world has been
rent and broken and blackened again,
as it has been countless times before,
merely to makea barbarian holiday.
1t shall be of no avail that we shall
say the war was fought to make the
world safe for democracy unless we
shall be able also to say that it was
fought to make the word safe against
war itself.
Otherwise it is for nothing that a
million British lie now in Flanders
field; that France and Belgium and
Italy and all the free people have sac
rificed the blood of their heart; that
America has given her sons, who were
the flower of all the world, to sleep IN
alien graves.
Democracy cannot be safe, and moth
ing can ever be safe, so long as war
besets with sinister tread the foot
steps of the sons of men.
Unless it shall be made impossible
for this hideous thing to lift its muir
derous hand again, we shall but build
| II har hui lal hAf
We shall make temples and songs only
to have the one crumble above our
heads and the other die upon our lips.
Shall we now lay the corner stones
of another Rheims and another Lou
| vain, and in new dreams fashion
their naves and arches with no sure
knowledge that the guns shall not make
shreds of them? .n. e..
Of what use will it be that the SOL
der returns to the walks of peace from
which he was taken, that he bend his
back in the seedtime with the old fear
of bloody harvest reddening toward
the autumn sun?
What use has it been that the for
ests and the orchards of Flanders
were planted by the beautiful rough
grown hands of the long ago? The
forests that grew in sun and rain
drought generations of men, the or
chards that bloomed and blossomed,
and bore their purple and golden bur-
dens of fruit, where are they now?
Ask the guns. Ask the ghosts of
dead armies that have trampled Flan-
ders and all the fair fields of the world
since time began.
Never before has this question a
risen at any peace table. Always in
the past the question at peace tables
was the question of the distribution of
spoils, the weight of the yoke that the
conqueror could place upon the neck
of the conquered, the blood indemni-
ties that should make the dead lie easy
in their graves.
y; Think of the puerility of all that.
think of the unspeakable impertinence
of tits very blasphemy in the face
of God.
When the military ENJOYS of the
European Allies went to Paris to es-.
cort Napoleon to exile in Elba, the lit
tie Corsican butcher invited the en-
voys to dinner and laughed with them
over the wine at his tactical error in
crossing the Alps.
Where. at that hour, were the hun
dreds of thousands of the sons of 4
France who had followed Napoleon's
bloody eagles through wintry SHOWS
and under desert suns? ~ ~
They were lying in reeking graves
and their bones are long since Hdust;
their very names are forgotten n99V'
They were not even remembered
when Napoleon dined the nevoys who
had come to put gives upon his wrists.
So soon as that--while yet their poor,
torn bodies were not cold-they were
forgotten like the pawns on chess
board that had been put away for the
night.
This is the way it has been at the
end of every war that was ever fought
on the bruised and blackened fields of
Gods green earth.
But is shall not be that way now.
Whatever idea any other nation may
have as to what shall be said and done
at the peace table, which is now to be
set up, America must be reckoned with
before even the first wrod shall be
spoken there.
These, our sons, beloved of !, us be-
yond all else that this world can give,
who died so gladly and who sleep to-
day in graves that we haeNneved seen