Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1918-07-26

ClNCEhE liberals In every parV VI saio
- world-those men and women who
have based a desire for progressive
social reorganization upon sound ana
scientific estimate of human needs-must
look with amazement and despair upon
the prostitution of their theories in Rus
sia and, at the moment, in England.
They see their high hopes threatened
with the dust. The sUeeping threat OF
operatives to tie up the English mun'-
tions industry cannot but bring most dis
may to those who heretofore have been
most ardently on the side Of the ,oorkers.
The savage self-interest of the groups
now most conspicuously active every
where under the label of liberalism rep
resents but mad caricature and
malignant perversion of all that the
enlightened propagandists hoped and
wished for. The faring ego of the mob
seems at this instant to involve menace
to civilization far subtler than anything
that has emanated from Germany. 1t
threatens, by inriting the hatred of all
people, to arrest the progress in the
future of those ideals of liberalism that
hare been conceived in justice, in cont
passion and in real love of humanity.
The tragedy involved for those who
have given themselves endlessly to
liberal causes is overwhelming They
were a various band. There were the
ragged saints who grew old and gray
crying out to a needless society of the
sorrows of the Travelling poor. There
were scholars who fought the fight of
the unrewarded and made of human con-
Germs sort of religion. They wished
alike merely to free their kind from
slums and hunger-for the good of pos
terity. They wished to liberate the
human spirit-to let it shine. They were
assured of the essential decency of all
men.
And now leadership has been whipped
away from them by cliques of energetic
fanatics, by opportunists and tinhorns
moved by an elemental greed and the
isolated consciousness of the Jungle
The whole cause of liberalism has not
only been desecrated. It is imperiled
The force that menaces England now
through the munition strikes is not lib
eralism. But the world will remember
vaguely that it was somehow allied with
the rise of liberalism. And the Huns
at home who have sought opportunity to
discredit every progressive human aspi-
ration will revert to it in the future for
their own ends.
The war, because of the sacrifices it
has required and because of the poig-
nant concerns it has laid upon all man.
kind, will be remembered vividly for
generations. Every force and reaction
involved in it will be burned and cut into
the minds of the races. The labor
strikes that now threaten to sweep Eng
land are likely to make liberalism a
word hated and despised by every soldier
on the battlefront. 1t is a term asso-
ciated with an enemy in the rear. 1t
will be difficult to convince the people of
the future that the crowd of radicals
who ruined Russia and prolonged the
war and inflicted added horror and blood
shed on millions were not liberals of
any previously recognized class. And
these men will be remembered as traitors
who betrayed not merely nation, but a
whole world.
In England the doctrine of radical
liberalism is hopelessly entangled in a
movement that menaces the country in
the most trying hours of its history.
The men involved in that movement are
not illiterate. They are not cropping
blindly like the mass of Russians. And
yet they have turned upon their own
Government at moment when England
is in an attitude of defense that is so
ennobled by heroism and sacrifice as to
compel the endless reverence of men.
These isolated groups of free thinkers
are disposed to consider themselves more
important than the State. And the piti-
ful part of it is that everywhere in
Europe Where liberals haze been most
militant they haze been characterized By
a similar point Of vieav.
Such men are the great enemies of
the race and of the future. If the war
by the reaction from such processes as
they have originated should halt the
movement of progressive social ideals of
the conservative liberals here and in
Europe or diminish intelligent and gen.
eral cooperation in sane revision of
many social and industrial theories
humanity will suffer disaster as great
as that which might come with a Ger
man conquest.
The really great liberals who did most
to stir human society to recognition of
its errors in the past-Wells, Angel,
Shaw, Henderson and the lesser men in
the ranks, whose devotion was quite as