Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 192, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 August 1917 — Feudalism Is Making Last Stand Against Democracy in Great War [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Feudalism Is Making Last Stand Against Democracy in Great War

By Franklin K. Lane,

Secretary of the Interior

We are fighting Germany because in this war feudalism is making its last stand against oncoming democracy. We see it now. This is a war against an old spirit, an ancient, outworn spirit. It is a war against feudalism —the right o?““the castle on the hill to rule the village below. It is a war for democracy — the right of all to be their own masters. Let Germany be feudal if she will. But she must not spread her system over a world that has outgrown it. Feudalism plus science, thirteenth century pita twentieth —this is the religion of the mistaken Ger-

many that has linked itself with the Turk—that has, too, adopted the method of Mahomet. “The state has no conscience,” “The state can do no wrong.” With the spirit of the fanatic she believes this gospel and that 1 it is her duty to spread it by force. With poison gas that makes living a hell, with submarines that sneak through the seas to slyly murder noncombatants, with dirigibles that bombard men and women while they deep, with a perfected system of terrorization that the modern world first heard of when German troops entered China—German feudalism is making war upon mankind. Let this old spirit of evil have its way and no man will live in America without paying toll to it, in manhood and in money. This spirit might demand Canada from a defeated, navyless England, and then our dream of peace on the north would be at an end. We would live, as France has lived for forty years—in haunting terror. America speaks for the world in fighting Germany. Mark on a map those countries which are Germany’s allies, and you will mark but four, running from the Baltic through Austria and Bulgaria to Turkey. Al the other nations, the whole globe around, are in arms against her or are •unable to move. There is deep meaning in this. We fight with the world for an honest world, .in which nations keep their word, for a world in which nations do not live by swagger or by threat, for a world in which men think of the ways in which they can conquer the common cruelties of nature instead of inventing more horrible cruelties to inflict upon the spirit and body of man, for a world in which the ambition of the philosophy of a few shall not make miserable all mankind, for a world in which the man is held more precious than the machine, the system or the state.