‘FREEDOM’S BATTLE ONCE BEGUN’

New Zealand Tablet, 19 April 1917, Page 31

‘FREEDOM’S BATTLE ONCE BEGUN’

Ever since I can remember I have Believed in tile great liberating movement known as Democracy, or the ‘ Cause of the People ’ (writes William Canon Barry in the Catholic Times). No other appeals, or at any time did appeal, to my sense of right and justice. I am altogether incapable of putting faith in Royalism, as do the Legitimists with their 1 divine right of kings’; or in oligarchies, as the Whigs and Tories of the eighteenth century : or in plutocracies, as Americans appear to do now. All these forms of personal rule, classrule, money-rule, I reject and refuse with my whole heart. The first article of my creed in politics is Freedom. And by Freedom I understand a social order founded on the consent of its adult members, who determine the making of their own laws without constraint. That we have yet come to such a free and stable order lam far from thinking. But I watch the drift of things, and I praise it where it makes for self-govern-ment, for a just and reasonable system of property, labor, taxation, public service. Above all, I ask where are the roots of such possible freedom most firmly and deeply planted ? Where are they likely to grow and to flourish until the Tree of Liberty overshadows the nations ? That is the question I put to modern States. And a second springs out of it ; what Power is sure to be the deadly foe of freedom ? When all is said and done, the answers which even extreme partisans on both sides will give cannot be for a moment in doubt. British freedom is the nearest we have got to the thing we desire ; while the German Kaiser, supreme over seventy millions of a race ‘ born to servitude,’ is the enemy of whom we should be most in dread. What We are Fighting For.

Sharp as is the opposition I have pointed out, I hold it to be a fact—nay, the dominant central fact of • our time. Kaiser Wilhelm acts and speaks as if he were Napoleon re-incarnate in a Prussian Lord of War. But Napoleon, in his better days, called himself, or was called, 1 the armed soldier of democracy.’ The Kaiser is an autocrat ; the Hohenzollerns hate freedom in every shape ; their Reichstag is a sham ; their view of the people is well expressed in Bismarck’s scornful saying that ‘ the Germans are a nation of lackeys.” Whatever else these Teutons have managed to do since they •overran France in 1870, they cannot show one single yard of freedom to their credit. In every direction they are held and bound. While we in these Islands .are loosening our rusty chains, those seventy millions find their fetters turned to steel of the newest quality. What wonder if, at last, free Britain and slave Germany have rushed into a combat of life and death ? Rivalries in commerce, and all other quarrels, we shall see on looking close into the matter, were but symptoms or •effects of the great first cause of difference between Berlin and London. I am constantly reminded during the late battles in France of old Gettysburg, fought so far back as 1863, which in decisive consequence they resemble, and of Lincoln’s world-famous dedicationspeech on that field. The Union soldiers, he said, gave their lives in order that ‘ Government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the earth.’ Even so, the French, English, and Belgian armies have been fighting from the Meuse to the Somme, the Ancre, and the Yser, that liberty in Europe may be saved. Our valiant hosts on land, our incomparable Navy, are the weapons with which' a free Democracy defends itself against the most tremendous assault made upon it since the world was. Let there be no,mistake in the mind of any Liberal. Should the Kaiser win, farewell, a long farewell, to the acquisitions and the hopes of Liberalism. We might keep the forms of free institutions, the ghost of Parliament, the names to which in some degree beneficent realities have corresponded. But when the British Empire fell liberty would fall with it.. Do all who style themselves Liberals grasp that loric of the war ? I think not ; otherwise certain societies would be dissolved by acclamation. And President Wilson would never have dared to tell the Allies that Germany had the same object as themselves,

Then Let Us Fight For It. I believe in democracy; but I believe also in the duty laid upon it of measuring the forces with which it has to deal. ‘ Freedom’s battle once begun ’is a line from Byron which O’Connell was never tired of quoting because it led on to a comfortable rhyme., ‘though baffled oft is always won.’ Is it always won? Does not the winning depend on knowing how to win ? There is need of strategy in this campaign where we stand opposed to a mighty array of powers, visible and invisible, entrenched from of old in privilege, having wealth and science at command, with one plain object before it, to ruin the cause of the people by defeating the democratic West. And the head and front of the West is England. But until August, 1914, England refused to suspect Germany of an evil intent-; while, *s lor the 'Liberals, they resolved that it could not, should not, ever come to a state of war between nations t f ■kindred blood. That the quarrel was about principles embodied in living men; or that Democracy and Kaiserdom must, by force of nature, come to death-dealing blows, they might have learnt from the story of the French Revolution. No, they would do no such thing. They chose rather to look on the Britons as ‘ divided from the whole world,’ able, therefore, to fight out their domestic disputes in their island ring-fence—until the Kaiser challenged France, swept into Belgium, and raised the issue whether a British Empire should exist any longer.

Year of Hope, Perhaps of Glory.

We are put upon our mettle, * and this fell tempest shall not cease to rage ’ before one of the combatants is down. Europe, in the twentieth century, must be democratic or it will be Prussian. This war leaves no other alternative, though it may prove only the beginning of sorrows, and not their end. We have to fight for the freedom we have hitherto won. All conceivable tyrannies are summed up in the German Warbook, which is the last blood-bespotted code of Junkerdom. By its works in Belgium, France, Serbia; by its sanguinary pirate-deeds in all waters; by its indescribable foulness and infinite abominations in act, we may judge what this Prussian spirit means to do when it has triumphed over the Allies and invaded Britain. Have we not been warned as never a nation before ? The red colors of Kaiserism glare out unmistakably on its advancing cloud. There is no crime, no vice, no cruelty, no mean or dastardly thing inflicted on the innocent, which has not been commanded and justified in this man’s name. As the year 1917 opens, he rules from the North Sea to well-nigh the Persian Gulf. He reckons his armies by millions. His fleet, the second strongest in the world, lies safe at anchor in the Kiel Canal. His intrigues everywhere daunts the neutral Powers (see President Wilson’s dispatch), trusts in his kinship with all the royal houses of Europe, despises what seems to him the weltering chaos of popular governments ; and how will those governments break him unless their people act with unity, with sustained effort, with a steady understanding of the matter at stake? They should know that it is their all. Imagination cannot take in the frightful vastness of so widespread a death-scene. lam not calling on imagination therefore ; but I make my appeal to reason, calm, cool reason, which brings light upon confusion and shows us the one supreme issue. Shall we be free under British institutions, which an enlightened Democracy can mould to ever better forms, or shall we, with blind attachment to our local interests, our ease, our jealousies, our party-spirit, weaken the hands of Britain and stumble into ruin ? The Empire, thank God, has made up its mind. The people are resolved. They feel that Freedom’s battle once begun must never pause until it has overthrown the Kaiser and his Junkers. I agree with Byron and O’Connell, after all doubting, that this battle of humanity, * though baffled oft is always won.’ And I would fain be among those that win it. The year 1917 may well be, written in the calendar for ages to come as * the year of hope and glory,’ when the bounds of freedom were made wider yet. Freedom, in the language of brave men at all times, must now ‘ conquer or die,’