The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1914. WHERE STANDS AMERICA?

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXX, Issue 67, 14 November 1914, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1914. WHERE STANDS AMERICA?

In the course of a special article appearing in Nash’s and the Pall Mall Magazine (temporarily amalgamated owing to the publishers’ inability to secure a quantity and supply of paper needed for the printing of delicate half-tone blocks) Hall ■ Caine makes an appeal to America as an earnest man and a true patriot. "Where stands America, in the present conflict, he asks, and replies to the query as follows-:- “I think there can be only one answer, to that question, and it is provided by the baldest statement of what America is and must be. America is a State built on the fundamental theory that all men are free, and in the political sense all men are equal; that its, government shall lie of tiro people, for the people, and the servant of the people. America stands for the Christian principle of tho supremacy of tho individual soul, and it has carried the other Christian principle of the brotherhood of mankind farther than any nation has ever carried it. It is the outstanding - representative of |he federated races. British, German, French, Italian, and Russian pebple have been so combined under and absorbed by its constitution that they are no longer British or German, or yet Brit-ish-Aracrican, or German-American, but solely and purely American. Thus it has. within its own borders, realised one great aspect of tho 'Christian ideal. And here comes tho first and perhaps the greatest of America’s immediate problems. Standing for the sacred rights of humanity as it does, America cannot possibly 1)0 a passive spectator of the outrages which have already been committed by Germany in this war. If there is anything in what I have been saying about ,tho obligations of tho moral law, on America now rests the chief responsibility for the suppression of these outrages. Only one other neutral country, Italy, is powerful enough to protest, and 1 believe she will do so. Humanity cries out against the iniquities being porpetrat-

cd on helpless and innocent people who lie in the wake of Germany’s army . What is being done to womop and children is being done in obedi'-| once to the Kaiser’s command. Let there be no mistake about it. 'tffs words to his soldiers wore; “Whoever fails into your hands is into your hands delivered.” If England were 1 not already in this war it would be her duty to enter it now on the grounds of humanity alone. America is master of its own destinies and sovereign of its own soul. It is for any foreigner, however closely: related by blood, to tell what it ought to do in the great hour , of humanity's need. It is not foxj any Christian man to say a word that will enlarge the area of, the conflict that is' deluging Europe in blood. But it may be forgiven to a friend of America, who .loves it and its people, and lias long been under a deep debt to. both, to ask it if its neutrality is possible or right while humanity is being outraged, while civilisaton- -s----beng trodden upon, and while religion is being defied.”