The Birmingham age-herald., 1919-02-25
A DELIGHTFUL REVENGE

'I told them that I had one of the de- l lightful revenges that sometimes comes l to man. All my life I had heard men | speak with a sort of condescension of | ideals and of idealists, and particularly | those separated, encloistered persons whom they choose to term academic, who l were in the habit of uttering ideals in the | free atmosphere when they clash with nobody in particular. And I said I have had this sweet revenge. Speaking with perfect frankness in the name of the 1 people of the United States, I have ut | tered on the objects of this great war 1 ideals, and nothing but ideals and the war has been won by that inspiration. {! Men were fighting with tense muscle and l lowered head until they came to realize l those things, feeling they were fighting 1 for their lives and their country, and vixen these accents of what it was all about reached them from America, they l lifted their heads, they raised their eyes | to heaven, when they saw men in khaki coming across the sea in the spirit of crusaders, and they found that these were | strange men, reckless of danger not only, 1 but reckless because they seemed to see something that made that danger worth while.
 | Men have testified to me in Europe 1 that cur men were possessed by something 1 that they could only call a religious fer vor. They were not like any of the other soldiers. They had a vision, they had | d dream, and they were fighting in the
 dream, and fighting in the dream they
 turned the whole tide of battle and it | never came back.
 "One ct our American humorists, meet l ing the criticism that American soldiers ] were not trained long enough, saio: "Tt takes only half as long to train l an American soldier any other. because l you only have to train him to go one way,
 and he did only go one way. and he never | came back until he could do it when he 1 pleased.
 | And do you realize that this confidence
 we have established throughout the world | imposes a burden upon us, if you choose | to call it burden? It is one of those 1 burdens which any nation ought to be proud to carry. Any man who ressts the present tides that run in the world will find himself thrown upon a shore so high 1 and barren that it will seem as if he had been separated from his human kind | forever.
 EUROPE FULL OF HOPE ''The Europe that I left the other day , was full of something that it had never l felt fill it's heart so full before. It was 1 full of hope. The Europe of the second year of the war. the Europe of the third year of the war, was sinking to sort 1 oe stubborn desperation.
 "They did not see any great thing to be achieved even when the war should be wcn They hoped there would be some salvage; they hoped that they could clear l their territories of invading armies; 1 they hoped they could set up their homes | and start their industries afresh. But | they thought it would simply be the re- l sumption of the old life that Europe had 1 led-led in fear. led in anxiety, led in | constant suspicious watchfulness. They ] never dreamed that it would be a Europe of settled peace and of justified hope. And now these ideals have wrought this new magic, that all the peoples of Europe are buoyed up and confident in the spirit of hope, because they believe that we are at the eve of new age in the world when nations will understand one another, when nations will support one another in every just cause, when nations will unite every moral and every physical strength to see that the right shall prevail.
 .If America were at this juncture to fail the world what would come of it? I do not mean any disrespect to any other great people when I say that America is the hope of the world. and | if she does not justify that hope the results are unthinkabe Men will be thrown back upon the bitterness of dis appointment not only. but the bitterness of despair All nations will be set up as hostile camps again; the men at the neace conference will go home with their
 heads upon their breasts, knowing that
 they have failed-for they were bidden
 not to come home from there until they