Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 104, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 May 1918 — OPENING MASS MEETING. [ARTICLE]

OPENING MASS MEETING.

Congressman Medlll McCormick and Bishop Williams from Battle Front. Governor James P. Goodrich presided at the opening session of the conference, a mass meeting in Tomlinson Hall at 2 o’clock, Thursday afternoon. Governor Goodrich stated the purpose of the conference and called upon the Reverend John Cavanaugh, President of Notre Dame University, to invoke Divine blessing. Medill McCormick, congressman-at-large of Illinois, who has just returned from the French battle front, spoke at the opening mass meeting in part as follows: ■ r ' “There is a great deal which you must want to know that I cannot tell you.: There are many things important, of intense human interest of which I am ignorant, because I traveled from capital! to capital, and from front to front: because I went from statesman to General and from General to statesman with one pre-occupatlon: ‘What must we do to win; this war In the shortest possible time., and with the smallest possible loss of. life?’ There are not many men. even In Europe, I found, who have thought of this, to me the whole problem, in terms at once general and definite. But among the few most responsible statesmen, among the few Generals of real distinction, which the war has produced, I found a general agreement that CANNON AND COALITION are essential to success; that time is the essence of victory. “Heavy guns in this war are what the steam shovel was to Panama. When the French company under DeLesseps sought to pierce the Isthmus with picks, shovels and petty machinery, men died by thousands beside the scratched tropic hillsides. So died the men who fought at Verdun add on the Marne, because they had no weapons equal to the task before them. Now we know advances can be made and victories can be won with little toss, when the armies advancing have their ways biased for them by the fire of thousands of cannon.

“Lloyd George has spoken of the cavalry of the air. I would not underestimate the significance of air craft, but they are only the servants of the great guns, guns, which are the masters of modern battles, and the Germans are unable to summon reserves to hold the French or the British. As, yet they have been able to bring from the front only enough to drive into Italy. They prefer-' red that use of their forces to an effort to atop the resistless advance of the British and French armies. “The tide has turned. By ever so little, perhaps, but the tide has turned. There may be back washes, when the Germans hrtng still more divisions and more guns from the Russian front when they add to their batteries In France and Flanders, the cannon which they bought from Russian traitors during the period of fraternlsation. The tide has turned, it rests with us to see that It does not ebb again, but flows resistlessly to the full flood of victory. “Men we must send, but still more urgently must we send suns, weapons to our frjends, that they may defend them selves; that they may win victories, white they await our ‘coming. . - •a - ■ ’