became overwhelming, but. still President Wilson was silent. Considerations of policy, doubts as to expediency, flitted between him and his conscience. Perhaps the reported abominations were not true; it was the duty of the President of the United States to suspend judgment until he had heard all the evidence from every side; if he protested against the German acts, he would be accused of denying the neutrality which he had officially set up to guide this country throughout the War; the etiquette of diplomacy would regard such a protest as not only out of order, but as unmannerly; worse still, a moral protest not backed up by physical force would be futile, as if a moral act could ever be futile, — and the Germans, who had announced that they took no heed of anything except physical force, would laugh at us.

And so President Wilson was silent.

The days slipped by and grew into weeks. Thousands of non-combatants, men, women, and children, died in agony. Even the inani

mate objects of beauty, created by generations of men to whom the very name Prussian was happily unknown, and spared by the ravages of countless earlier wars, were wantonly destroyed.

The University of Louvain, with its gemlike Library, was demolished; the Cathedral at Malines sank in ruins; the masterpieces at Ypres, at Arras, and at a score of other cities went down; and when the devastators spread into France, they made the Cathedral of Rheims- the national shrine of French wor

ship for seven hundred years- the target of their artillery.

Still President Wilson was silent.

But while time brings opportunity it does not take away remorse for opportunity neglected. We sin in time, but our guilt cannot be measured in terms of years: for sin and remorse are moral not temporal.

Wherein lay our guilt? It lay in our failure as a nation through the silence of the President to bear witness to the deepest truth

which civilized men have felt or can feel. A horde of military barbarians violated the neutrality of little Belgium, which we, with other governments, had pledged ourselves to uphold, and we said nothing. And then that horde sped on, its gray-clad regiments sifting over Belgium, as the showers of ashes from Vesuvius once fell upon Pompeii with irremediable havoc. In this outrage on Humanity also, the Huns flung their challenge at us, and we said nothing.

But we of all the nations of the earth were bound by the strongest obligations to speak up for the sacred principles of humanity. We were the most powerful free people in the world, and to possess power imposes the obligation to use it in behalf of the weak. The little countries looked to us for leadership, looked and listened and waited, and we gave them neither sign nor sound. They would have joined us in protest even at the risk of bringing on themselves the fury of the Germans, within whose reach they dwelt. Our

silence the silence of President Wilson "Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would""brought to them the desolating conviction that the United States would officially utter no declaration in behalf either of neutrality or of humanity. We tacitly admitted that a small nation has no rights, that neutral nations may be overrun and destroyed at the pleasure of a powerful aggressor. The President's silence was tantamount to acquiescing in the German doctrine that might is right, that matter and not spirit rules the universe, including the conduct and the affairs of men. This is the primal infidelity.

So to our shame we let it be implied that the Government of the United States was not officially concerned in protesting against the subversion of neutral rights, or the swallowing up of a small nation by a large, or by crimes against common humanity. It was as if President Wilson, clothed with the moral strength of the United States, had been walking on the bank of a stream, and had seen on

the other bank a colossal brute beating a little girl; and the President had said to himself: "There is no boat for me to cross by, and if I shout, the ruffian will only laugh. After all, my eyesight is not very good; perhaps I don't see clearly what he is doing. I ought not to protest unless I could verify the fact for myself; that is impossible; so I will look the other way and walk on."

Into such an abyss does consideration for the etiquette of diplomacy plunge those who set it above morals. In this aspect, diplomacy is indeed a code distilled from the immemorial experience of the guile and cruelty of rulers, which sanctions them in committing, as officials, crimes which all but the wickedest of them would shrink from as individuals. If plain Professor Woodrow Wilson had witnessed such an assault, we may be sure that he would not have doubted the veracity of his eyes, and that, though he had been unable to rescue the little girl from her assailant, he would have protested in loudest tones.