The Washington herald., 1918-05-06
Such Leaders.

War is the final test of men. In the long run
the strongest of heart, the biggest OF brain, the
soundest of mettle alone survive. 1t has no place
for the weak 1t demands the best of blood, Drawn
and brain.
Therefore it behooves us of America to thank
God that the cause we are serving has such lead
,ers in this hour of destiny Woodrow Wilson,
David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, Fer
dinand Foch, Sir Douglas Hag and John J.
I Pershing.
Here we have in the front rank group OF men
whom we neither have to idealize or "retouch,
to use the camouflage word the photographers
use in order to make them what they, by rea-
son of their official place, ought to be. All OF them
have big jobs, but they just as big as the jobs
There is no place for little second-rate men in
this war Yet second-rate man might have been
President of the United States in this great hour,
and it would have been impossible to disodge him.
In Europe, of course leader of men can hold
an office when public confidence has forsaken him,
or when he proves unequal to his task But de-
mocracy always has a way of matching opportunity
with the man. The American Revolution found its
Washington and the civil found its Lincoln.
Destiny has proved traitor to the best inter-
ests of the American Republic she has always been
kind to us-sometimes kinder than we deserved.
4 The moral leadership of this belongs to
; President Wilson. Never that fact pat
ent than it is today when the wild beast of mill
s tarism is making its final lunge at the throat of
, civilization. The Presidents opportunity shortly
will arrive When the German onslaught fails,
fail it must civilian Germany will then be peerng
of its iron prison to what the outside world
. is saying. She will be thinking then as she is
thinking now, only in terms of war, but in
terms of the cruel days to come, when she must
if there is any truth in the Mosaic aw-reap she
has sown.
Not1y he preSideot'S Ir1ron 0riyi m
show these desperate victims of Moloch before
which they ignorantly prostrated themselves, in the
belief that it would make the world their oyster,
that they are not to be punished according to the
Mosaic law-that while neither the American peo-
pie, any other, them from the
quences OF their own folly, from the ashen trag
edy OF the war, them from peace in
which the wild, heather spirit of revenge is un-
loosed, in which the Napoleonic or Hohenzollern
conception of conquest rules In other words, de-
spite the best efforts of their rulers destroy it,
that Christian world remains.
Lloyd George we have assuredly the most
heroic figure of Brtain-the gallant Welshman
who, in day when most Liberal statesmen in
English life OF too refined and sophisticated
a character to plunge into the with the br1-
tality and intensity that it required saw the issue
from the first and stuck to it He was the Paul
Revere of Englishmen in those fateful days of 1914
when the tight little isle" after the violation
OF Belgium, had not yet fully comprehended what
the Prussian idea meant. He has never swerved
from that day to this; he has been uncompromising
in his demand for a strong military policy; and per-
haps it is not much say that the allied cause
to him than to any other man in the
world
As for France-what can we say about the
dauntess Clemenceau, who has always met the on
slaught OF the enemy with flaming words and glori-
GUS courage, and Foch perhaps the first of her
fighting men? As to own BLACK Jack" PERISH
ing, every word we get from abroad confirms the
original impression that he is the right man in the
right place, and that he measures up to the great
task to which he has been assigned.
There is not single of these men whom we
would dispace if we could 1t is not that single
= one OF them is Indispensable could not be re-
placed lost tomorrow, but they represent the best
that democracy has to offer, they fill the eye they
inspire confidence. AS "the moving finger" writes
history, there is pause when it reaches such
names and such characters these; their place in
the deathess chronicles of this war is assured