Lloyd George

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APPENDIX

MR. LLOYD GEORGE ON AMERICA AND THE EUROPEAN WAR

On the anniversary of President Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1916,
Mr. Lloyd George sent a remarkable message to the American people
comparing the American Civil War with the European conflict. By the
courtesy of the New York _Times_ this message is presented here.

A LINCOLN DAY MESSAGE

I am very glad to respond to your request for a message for publication
on Lincoln Day. I am glad because to my mind Abraham Lincoln has
always been one of the very first of the world's statesmen, because I
believe that the battle which we have been fighting is at bottom the
same battle which your countrymen fought under Lincoln's leadership
more than fifty years ago, and most of all, perhaps, because I desire
to say how much I welcome the proof which the last few days have
afforded that the American people are coming to realize this, too.

Lincoln's life was devoted to the cause of human freedom. From the day
when he first recognized what slavery meant he bent all his energies to
its eradication from American soil. Yet after years of patient effort
he was driven to realize that it was not a mere question of abolishing
slavery in the Southern States, but that bound up with it was a larger
issue: That unless the Union abolished slavery, slavery would break up
the Union.

Faced by this alternative, he did not shrink, after every other method
had failed, from vindicating both Union and freedom by the terrible
instrument of war. Nor after the die for war had been cast did he
hesitate to call upon his countrymen to make sacrifice upon sacrifice,
to submit to limitation upon limitation of their personal freedom,
until, in his own words, there was a new birth of freedom in your land.

Is there not a strange similarity between this battle, which we are
fighting here in Europe, and that which Lincoln fought? Has there not
grown up in this continent a new form of slavery, a militarist slavery,
which has not only been crushing out the freedom of the people under
its control, but which in recent years has also been moving toward
crushing out freedom and fraternity in all Europe as well?

Is it not true that it is to the militarist system of government which
centers in Berlin that every open-minded man who is familiar with past
history would point as being the ultimate source of all the expansion
of armaments, of all the international unrest, and of the failure of
all movements toward co-operation and harmony among nations during the
last twenty years?

We were reluctant, and many of us refused to believe that any sane
rulers would deliberately drench Europe in its own blood, so we did not
face the facts until it was almost too late. It was not until August,
1914, that it became clear to us, as it became clear to Lincoln in
1861, that the issue was not to be settled by pacific means, and that
either the machine which controlled the destinies of Germany would
destroy the liberty of Europe or the people of Europe must defeat its
purpose and its prestige by the supreme sacrifice of war. It was the
ultimatum to Serbia and the ruthless attack upon Belgium and France
which followed because the nations of Europe would not tolerate the
obliteration of the independence of a free people without conference
and by the sword, which revealed to us all the implacable nature of the
struggle which lay before us.

It has been difficult for a nation separated from Europe by three
thousand miles of sea and without political connections with its
peoples, to appreciate fully what was at stake in the war. In your
Civil War many of our ancestors were blind. Lord Russell hinted at an
early peace. Even Gladstone declared "we have no faith in the
propagation of free institutions at the point of the sword." It was
left for John Bright, that man of all others who most loved peace and
hated war, to testify that when our statesmen "were hostile or coldly
neutral the British people clung to freedom with an unfaltering trust."
But I think that America now sees that it is human unity and freedom
which are again being fought for in this war.

The American people under Lincoln fought not a war of conquest, but a
war of liberation. We to-day are fighting not a war of conquest, but a
war of liberation--a liberation not of ourselves alone, but of all the
world, from that body of barbarous doctrine and inhuman practice which
has estranged nations, has held back the unity and progress of the
world, and which has stood revealed in all its deadly iniquity in the
course of this war.

In such wars for liberty there can be no compromise. They are either
won or lost. In your case it was freedom and unity or slavery and
separation, in our case military power, tyrannously used, will have
succeeded in tearing up treaties and trampling on the rights of others,
or liberty and public right will have prevailed. Therefore, we believe
that the war must be fought out to a finish, for on such an issue there
can be no such thing as a drawn war.

In holding this conviction, we have been inspired and strengthened
beyond measure by the example and the words of your great President.
Once the conflict had been joined, he did not shrink from bloodshed. I
have often been struck at the growth of both tenderness and stern
determination in the face of Lincoln, as shown in his photographs, as
the war went on.

Despite his abhorrence of all that was entailed, he persisted in it
because he knew that he was sparing life by losing it, that if he
agreed to compromise, the blood that had been shed on a hundred fields
would have been shed in vain, that the task of creating a united nation
of free men would only have to be undertaken at even greater cost at
some later day. It would, indeed, be impossible to state our faith
more clearly than Lincoln stated it himself at the end of 1864.

"On careful consideration," he said, "of all the evidence it seems to
me that no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader could
result in any good. He would accept nothing short of severance of the
Union, precisely what we will not and cannot give. His declarations to
this effect are explicit and oft repeated. He does not deceive us. He
affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves; . . . between him and us the
issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can
only be tried by war and decided by victory."

That was the judgment of the greatest statesman of the nineteenth
century during the last great war for human liberty. It is the
judgment of this nation and of its fellow-nations overseas to-day.

"Our armies," said Lincoln, "are ministers of good, not evil." So do
we believe. And through all the carnage and suffering and conflicting
motives of the Civil War, Lincoln held steadfastly to the belief that
it was the freedom of the people to govern themselves which was the
fundamental issue at stake. So do we to-day. For when the people of
central Europe accept the peace which is offered them by the Allies,
not only will the allied peoples be free, as they have never been free
before, but the German people, too, will find that in losing their
dream of an empire over others, they have found self-government for
themselves.

D. LLOYD GEORGE.

THE END

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