Victory out of Ruin

Excerpt: ...the tables and chairs and bed and pictures, and the books (duplicates mostly), just as they were a hundred and fifty years ago, there were dreamed dreams that have changed half the world. Out of this farm-house came the impulse and the power wherewith 'The embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard around the world.' There could be found few spots on earth in which one could better muse on the mutability of earthly affairs than in these rooms tenanted by ghosts. Here in the main hall is the key of the Bastille, sent by Lafayette from Paris as a gift to Washington after the capture of the prison in 1789. 'Give me leave, my dear General,' wrote Lafayette, 'to present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few days after I ordered its demolition, with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a gift which I owe as a son to my adopted country, as an aide-de-camp to my General, as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch.' No nation ever owed so great a debt for its liberty as the United States owed to France. George Washington won the War of Independence because half the people of Britain sympathised with him, knowing that he was fighting their battle for liberty as well as his own; but mainly because France espoused his cause on sea and land, and sent him money, and men, and leaders such as Lafayette. But in the realm of international politics gratitude has no place. When France in 1914 faced the menace of overwhelming and final destruction; when Belgium, to whose independence the United States was a signatory at the Hague Convention, was overrun, the Government at Washington did not even enter a protest, and the President still addressed the Kaiser as 'great and good friend.' While France that won her liberty for America was for three years in Gethsemane, the States were 'too proud to fight.' As late as 1917 there was the famous speech about 'peace without victory.' It was only when a Presidential Election was gained by...