QUIT TALKING PEACE
March 5, 1918
The experience of Trotzky, Lenine, and the other Bolshevist leaders in their peace negotiations with Germany ought to be illuminating to our own people. Germany encouraged them to enter peace negotiations, spoke fairly to them, got them committed to the abandonment of their allies, used them to demoralize Russia and make it impossible for her to organize effective resistance, and then threw them over, instantly invaded their land, and now holds a part of Russia.
Let our people take warning and insist that all peace talk cease forthwith. Germany is the enemy of humanity generally and in a special sense is the enemy of the United States. She has introduced into warfare horrors which not another civilized nation would have dreamed of using. Her conduct toward Belgium stands out on the high peak of infamy. She has murdered innocent women and children wholesale on the high seas and hundreds of Americans have thus been slain. She has organized murder, rape, robbery, and devastation on a gigantic scale in every conquered territory. Our own sons and brothers are at this moment facing death by the awful torture of the poison gas because Germany has invented methods of warfare more cruel than those of the Dark Ages. Peace on equal terms with such a foe would mean black shame in the present and the certainty of renewed and wholesale war in the future.
To talk peace means to puzzle the ignorant and to weaken the will of even the stout-hearted. It is hailed with evil joy by all the men in this country who have opposed war and have wished us to submit tamely to German brutality. When there comes from Washington an announcement about peace terms which the pacifists and pro-Germans are able to interpret as favorable to their views, the Hearst papers gleefully champion it as undoing the effect of previous declarations that we are in this war to the end, and Mr. Hillquit, the New York mayoralty candidate of the Germanized Socialists and the pacifists, expresses his hearty approval and says that the President has now taken his (Mr. Hillquit’s) position.
Let us quit talking peace with a foe who, if we entered into peace negotiations, would, according to his ability, trick us as he has already tricked the Bolsheviki of Russia. Let us not put ourselves on the moral and intellectual level of Trotzky and Lenine. Every peace utterance pleases the Germans, renders our allies uneasy, strengthens the pacifists, the pro-Germans, and the various seditious elements in our own country, and bewilders, disheartens, and weakens our honest citizens.
The time when words about peace were useful passed a very long time ago. Let us now merely announce that we are in this war to fight until Germany is beaten to her knees. Then let us bend our entire energy to building ships and more ships at the greatest possible speed and putting a couple of million men on the firing line at the earliest possible moment. That is the effective way to bring a just and lasting peace.