Page:Great Speeches of the War.djvu/223

 this War the Allied Powers are fighting for the gospel of Galilee and against the gospel of Corsica.

If I examine the issues from the social and political as well as from the spiritual point of view, again I find that we are fighting in this War for wisdom against insanity. Might is right, says the German. That is to say, that the weak have no rights, save such as the strong mercifully extend to them. Belgium, a little nation, stands in the way of the giant strength and fell purpose of Germany; sweep her away; burn her cities and monuments; kill not only her gallant soldiers, but her women and her babes; add the dishonour of violation to the mothers who have seen their children butchered before their eyes. It may be lamentable, replies the German philosophy; indeed, the Kaiser has wept over it all; but what I insist on is that violated women, butchered babes, just as much as the death in the open field of hundreds of thousands of men, is the inevitable, the logical, even, from the point of view of the Prussian soldier, the desirable, result of war. I take up a paper and I read that a German aeroplane has in Paris taken off the leg of a little baby girl of six years of age—a baby girl of six years of age walking with her grandfather to church, and in a second she is a bleeding mass; not, unhappily, killed, but saved to limp for life till death brings merciful relief. Just think of it!

To every human heart, however callous, childhood retains its imperishable and indestructible appeal. Our great poet Wordsworth spoke of children as coming into this world not naked, "but trailing clouds of glory from heaven, which is their home." And heaven is in the eyes of every child. If it were not so, the world would have perished long ago. It is to re-shape what we have failed to shape properly; to bring light where we have known darkness; to save the pure young soul from the sins that have soiled our own in life's bitter struggle with the world outside, and the more perilous world of passions, weaknesses, and appetites within ourselves; it is to re-make in our little way the world for this new being that has come through us on to its chequered life—this is the impulse that keeps the millions of the world, white or black, Western or Eastern, civilized or savage, storing yearly their little meed of wheat, or wine, or oil. And this German areoplane [sic] is the welcome which war, after German methods, gives to this angelic visitant to our earth—to this little baby girl six years old!