AMERICA'S RECORD.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 29, 3 February 1916, Page 6

AMERICA'S RECORD.

NEW YORK NEWSPAPER SPEAKS OUT. MOST SHAMEFUL TEAR IN AMERICAN HISTORY. On December 29th the "New York Tribune," one of the leading newspapers in the United States, published wnat is, perhaps, the severest indictment of President Wilson's war policy that has yet appeared in America. In a leading article, entitled "Why Mr. Wilson Has Failed Us," it said:—i "At the close of a long, bitter and humiliating year many thousands of Americans, as they seek to balance the twelve months' account, are to-day confessing to themselves that their country has in a very real and unmistakable degree lost in nobility, in grandeur; has in some way diminished in its hold, not upon their affections, but upno their respect, in the twelve months that have passed. To them there is ■something less of pride, of enthusiasm, of pleasure, in the possession of American citizenship than ever before in their lives. "For these thousands of Americans there is a very bitter consciousness that in a time of world crisis, in a period when men and women of every other nation are making the sacrifice of all that they have or have hoped to have for principles and for ideals, their own country and their own countrymen have fled duty, avoided obligation, shrunk from honour, have deliberately and in some degree brazenly chosen the easy path of prosperity, the untrou'oled road of profit and monetary interest; have pursued the dollar and let the thing that Americanism has been through all the years, of our national life disappear from national and international affairs. ''For seventeen months, while the whole planet has been shaken by a tremendous convulsion, America, officially, has sought by every conceivable device to profit at the expense of the misery in the world about it to turn into dollars the human agony of other races, and in order to take no risk of profit the Government has declined to defend the lives of Americans upon the high seas, or go beyond the limits of words to bring to justice and to punishment those who have boldly murdered American citizens. We have sacrificed our honour and our fellow citizens that there might be no interruption in prosperity and that there might be no disturbance to the stream of dollars flowing into our coffers from the rest of the world. "We have done this, and the world knows that we have done it. We have done it, and the facts stand forth beyond denial and beyond palliation. This is the thing that men of all nations say of us, and in 6aying it they tell the truth. It is the fact that they do tell the truth that makes every American who loves his country mourn at this holiday time, makes him look backward with humiliation and forward without confidence. It is the realisation of this which makes it hard to go out and see along the hillsides the little flags that mark the graves of those who fought at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, in the Wilderness and before Richmond, that our nation might endure. They did not fight, they did not dare all and give all that thdir country might endure as a factory or mine, as a place for the making of money or the multiplication of profits;they fought that it might endure as a power and a force for liberty and for civilisation. Their labour would have seemed to them in vain, their hardships jand their sacrifices useless, if they had believed that the fruits of their labour were to be cowardice and selfishness. "Yet in the midst of all the bitter thoughts that must come now there is one that hurts most. After all, "there is no reason to believe that this country of ours is essentially different irom the country that sacrificed 60 much half a century ago. Americans are not weaker, more cowardly, more avaricious than of old. One strong, clear voice in the early months would have awakened the response that greeted the words of Abraham Lincoln when on the morning of Sumter lie called for volunteers to save the nation. "But what would have teen the result if on that morning when the first Confederate guns were trained upon our flag Abraham Lincoln had announced that he was 'too proud to fight'; if he had then addressed to Jefferson Davis a letter filled with words he did not mean, directed to a statesman who knew that they were not sincere? How long would it have been before such a course and such an example would have stifled every patriotic emotion, every patriotic spirit t How long would it have been before the selfish and the base would have obtained the upper hand and the men of the North would have consented to see the Union broken? "The year that is ending is the most shameful in American history. Our children and our children's children will turn from its ipage "with scorn and humiliation. But out of the shame and the humiliation there may yet come a new strength, a new patriotism, a new unselfishness. It is for all Americans who Tealise what has happened and to what a level their national life has "been brought to resolve to dedicate themselves and their resources to the work of cleansing the temple and sweeping forth the money changers who have occupied the most sacred place in our national life and turned it to their huckster ends. "The America that is real, the America that has come to us from our fathers, was an America in which there were patriotism and idealism. Ignoble leaders and selfish politicians "have betrayed it to the world and to ourselves. There can be no hope for the .New Year, no duty and no desire more controlling, imore compelling, than to take our country's honour from the mire into which Mr. Wilson has cast it and restore it to the place it once held in the hearts and the minds of Americans and of men of all nations in the honourable years that have gone before."