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Thus awakened and transfigured by Calamity do men and women rise in their full spiritual nature, efface themselves, and utter sacred words. Calamity, when the Lusitania went down, wrung from the lips of an awakened German, Kuno Francke, this noble burst of patriotism:

Ends Europe so? Then, in Thy mercy, God,

Out of the foundering planet’s gruesome night

Pluck Thou my people’s soul. From rage and craze

Of the staled Earth, O lift Thou it aloft,

Re-youthed, and through transfiguration cleansed;

So beaming shall it light the newer time,

And heavenly, on a world refreshed, unfold.

Soul of my race, thou sinkest not to dust.

If Germany’s tragedy be, as I think, the deepest of all, the hope is that she, too, will be touched by the Pentecost of Calamity, and pluck her soul from Prussia, to whom she gave it in 1870. Thus shall the curse be lifted.

XIV

And what of ourselves in this well-nigh world-wide cloud-burst?

Every man has walked at night through gloom where objects were dim and hard to see, when suddenly a flash of lightning has struck the landscape livid. Trees close by, fences far off, houses, fields, animals and the faces of people–all things stand transfixed by a piercing distinctness. So now, in this thunderstorm of war, each nation and every man and woman is searchingly revealed by the perpetual lightnings. Whatever this American nation is, whatever aspect, noble or ignoble, our Democracy shows in the glare of this cataclysm, is even already engraved on the page of History, will be the portrait of the United States in 1914-15 for all time.

I want no better photograph of any individual than his opinion of this war. If he has none, that is a photograph of him. Last autumn there were Americans who wished the papers would stop printing war news and give their readers a change. So we have their photographs, as well as those of other Americans who merely calculated the extra dollars they could squeeze out of Europe’s need and agony. But that–thank God!–is not what we look like as a whole. Our sympathy has poured out for Belgium a springtide of help and relief; it has flowed to the wounded and afflicted of Poland, Servia, France and England. A continuous publishing of books, magazine articles and editorials, full of justice and of anger at Prussia’s long-prepared and malignant assault, should prove to Europe that American hearts and heads by the thousand and hundred thousand are in the right place. Merely the stand taken by the New York Sun, New York Times, Outlook and Philadelphia Public Ledger –to name no more–saves us from the reproach of moral neutrality: saves us as individuals.

Yet, somehow, in Europe’s eyes we fall short. The Allies, in spite of their recognition of our material generosity, find us spiritually wanting. In the London Punch, on the sinking of the Lusitania, Britannia stands perplexed and indignant behind the bowed figure of America, and, with a hand on her shoulder, addresses her thus:

In silence you have looked on felon blows,

On butcher’s work of which the waste lands reek;

Now, in God’s name, from Whom your greatness flows,

Sister, will you not speak?

This is asked of us not as individuals but as a nation; and as a nation our only spokesman is our Government: “Sister, will you not speak?” Well–we did speak; but after nine months of silence. This silence, in the opinion of French and Belgian emissaries who have talked to me with courteous frankness, constitutes our moral failure.