The Defenders of Democracy

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"Things which cannot be shaken!" What is there which cannot be
shaken? THE PASSION OF FREEDOM is one of the rarest of spiritual
flames, and it can not be quenched. Make your appeal to history.
Again and again militarism has sought to crush it, but it has
seemed to share the very life of God. Brutal inspirations have
tried to smother it, but it has breathed an indestructible life.
Study its energy in the historical records of the Book or in annals
of a wider field. Study the passion of freedom amid the oppressions
of Egypt, or in the captivity of Babylon, or in the servitude of
Rome. How does the passion express itself? "If I forget thee, O
Jerusalem, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and may
my right hand forget her cunning!" Study it in the glowing pages
of the history of this country, that breath of free aspiration which
no power of armament, and no menace of material strength was ever
able to destroy. The mightiest force in all those days was not
the power of threat, and powder, and sword, but that breath of
invincible aspiration which was the very breath of God. And when
we gaze upon stricken Belgium to-day, and look upon her sorrows,
and her smitten fields, and her ruined cities, and her desolate
homes, we can firmly and confidently proclaim that the breath
of that divinely planted aspiration, her passion of freedom, will
prove to be mightier than all the materialistic strength and all
the prodigious armaments which seem to have laid her low. It is
a reality which cannot be shaken.

There are other spiritual forces which we might have named, and which
would have manifested the same incontestable supremacy: there is
the energy of meekness, that spirit of docility which communes with
the Almighty in hallowed and receptive awe: there is the boundless
vitality of love which lives on through midnight after midnight,
unfainting and unspent: there is the inexhaustible energy of faith
which hold on and out amid the massed hostilities of all its foes.
You cannot defeat spirits like these, you cannot crush and destroy
them. You cannot hold them under, for their supremacy shares the
holy sovereignty of the eternal God. "Not by might, nor by power,
but by my Spirit, saith the Lord;" and these spirits, the spirit
of truth, the spirit of freedom, the spirit of meekness and love,
are in fellowship with the divine Spirit, and therefore shall they
remain unshaken.

[signed]J.H. Jowett

Somewhere in France

"Somewhere in France"--the day is tranquil, the sky unvexed, the
green earth without a wound as I write; yet "somewhere in France"
the day is torn with clamors, the sky is soiled with man's mounting
hatred of man, and long, open wounds lie cruelly across the disputed
earth. "Somewhere in France"--my mind goes back to remembered
scenes: the crowd blocking the approach to a depot; white faces
and staring eyes, eyes that alternately fear and hope, and in the
crush a tickling gray line of returning PERMISSIONAIRES. "Somewhere
in France"--on such a perfect day as this I see a little village
street nestled among the trees, and hear the sound of the postman's
reluctant feet tapping over the cobblestones--the postman that comes
with the relentlessness of Fate--and at every house the horror of
the black envelope. "Somewhere in France" the great immemorial
cathedrals and the dotted, cool, moss-covered churches are filled
with supplicating women and the black-framed, golden locks of
children lifting their eyes before the Great Consoler as the sun
breaks through the paling candle-flames. "Somewhere in France"--in
its crowded stations I remember a proud womanhood, gray in
the knowledge of sorrow, speeding its young sons and speaking the
Spartan words. "Somewhere in France," in its thousand hospitals,
the ministering white-clad angels are moving in their long vigils,
calm, smiling, inspired. "Somewhere in France"--I see again
imperishable fragments of remembered emotions; the women working
in the vineyards of Champagne, careless of fate or the passing
shells; the orphan children playing in the ruins of Rheims; a laughing
child in bombarded Arras running out to pick up an exploded shell,
a child in whom daily habits has brought fear into contempt; a
skeleton of a church in far-flung Bethany, that still lives in a
sea of fire, where a black-coated priest of the unflinching faith
was holding his mass among kneeling men before an altar hidden in
the last standing corner from which the shredded ruins had been
swept.

"Somewhere in France"--I remember the volcanic earth, the strewn
ruin of all things, the prostrate handiwork of man mingled with
the indignant bowels of the earth, and from a burrowed hole a POILU
laughing out at us in impertinent greeting, with a gaiety which is
more difficult than courage.

"Somewhere in France"--in bombarded Arras, was it not?--I remember
an old woman, a very old woman, leaning on her cane as she peered
from her cellar door within a hundred yards of the smoldering cathedral.
I wonder if she still lives, for Arras will be struggling back to
life now.

"Somewhere in France"--what thronged memories troop at these liberating
words! And yet, through all the passing drama of remembered little
things, what I see always before my eyes is the spiritual rise of
Verdun. Verdun, heroic sister of the Marne; Verdun, the battling
heart of France--whose stained slopes are anointed by the blood
of a million men. Verdun! The very name has the upward fury and
descending shock of an attacking wave dying against an immemorial
shore. To have seen it as I was privileged to see it in that
historic first week of August, 1915, at the turning of the tide,
at the moment of the retaking of Fleury and Thiaumont, was to have
stood between two great spectacles: the written page of a defense
such as history has never seen, and the future, glowing with the
unquenchable fire of undying France. When I think of the flaming
courage of that heroic race, my imagination returns always to the
vision of that defense--not the patient fortitude before famine of
Paris, Sebastopol or Mafeking, but that miracle of patience and
calm in the face of torrential rains of steel which for months
swept the human earth in such a deluge as never before had been
sent in punishment upon the world. This was no adventure such as
that gambling with fate which in all times and in all forms has
stirred the spirit of man. Regiment after regiment marched down into
the maw of hell, into the certainty of death. They went forward,
not to dare, but to die, in that sublimest spirit of exultation
and sacrifice of which humanity is capable, that the children of
France might live free and unafraid, Frenchmen in a French land.
They went in regiment after regiment, division after division--living
armies to replace the ghostly armies that had held until they died.
Days without nights, weeks without a breathing spell--five months
and more. They lie there now, the human wall of France, that no
artillery has ever mastered or ever will, to prove that greater
than all the imagined horror of man's instinct of destruction,
undaunted before the new death that rocks the earth beneath him
and pollutes the fair vision of the sky above, the spirit of man
abides superior. Death is but a material horror; the will to live
free is the immortal thing.

[signed] Owen Johnson

The Associated Press

It is worth while to explain how the world's news is gathered and
furnished in a newspaper issued at one cent a copy. First, as
to the foreign news, which is, of course, the most difficult to
obtain and the most expensive. In normal times there are the four
great agencies which, with many smaller and tributary agencies,
are covering the whole world. These four agencies are, as above
noted, the Reuter Telegram Company, Ltd., of London, which assumes
responsibility for the news of the great British Empire, including
the home land, every colony except Canada, and the Suzerain,
or allied countries, as Egypt, Turkey, and even China and Japan;
and the Agency Havas of Paris, taking care of the Latin countries,
France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland and South
America as well as Northern Africa; and the Wolff Agency of Berlin,
reporting the happening in the Teutonic, Scandinavian, and Slav
nations. These three organizations are allied with The Associated
Press in an exclusive exchange arrangement. Subordinate to these
agencies is a smaller one in almost every nation, having like
exchange agreements with the larger companies.

Thus it happens that there is not a place of moment in the habitable
globe that is not provided for. Moreover, there is scarcely a
reporter on any paper in the world who does not, in a sense, become
a representative of all these four agencies. Not only are there
these alliances, but in every important capital of every country, and
in a great many of the other larger cities abroad there are "A.P."
men, trained by long experience in its offices in this country.
This is done because, first, the organization is naturally anxious
to view every country with American eyes; and, second, because a
number of the agencies spoken of are under the influence of their
Governments and, therefore, not always trustworthy. They are relied
upon for a certain class of news, as for instance, accidents by
flood and field, where there is no reason for any misrepresentation
on their part. But where it is a question which may involve national
pride or interest, or where there is a possibility of partisanship
or untruthfulness, the "A.P." men are trusted.

Now, assume that a fire has broken out in Benares, the sacred
city of the Hindus, on the banks of the Ganges, and a hundred or a
thousand people have lost their lives. Not far away, at Allahabad
or at Calcutta, is a daily paper, having a correspondent at Benares,
who reports the disaster fully. Some one on this paper sends the
story, or as much of it as is of general rather than local interest,
to the agent of the Reuter Company at Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras;
and thence it is cabled to London and Hongkong, and Sydney and
Tokio. At each of these places there are Associated Press men,
one of whom picks it up and forwards it to New York.

The wide world is combed for news, and an incredibly short time
is delivered and printed everywhere. When Pope [Leo] XIII died in
Rome the fact was announced by an Associated Press dispatch in the
columns of a San Francisco paper in nine minutes from the instant
when he breathed his last. And this message was repeated back to
London, Paris, and Rome, and gave those cities the first information
of the event. When Port Arthur was taken by the Japanese in the
war of 1896 it came to us in New York in fifty minutes, although
it passed through twenty-seven relay offices. Few of the operators
transmitting it knew what the dispatch meant. But they understood
the Latin letters, and sent it on from station to station, letter
by letter.

When Peary came back from his great discovery in the Arctic Sea
he reached Winter Harbor, on the coast of Labrador, and from there
sent me a wireless message that he had nailed the Stars and Stripes
to the North Pole. This went to Sydney, on Cape Breton Island,
and was forwarded thence by cable and telegraph to New York.

The organization is cooperative in its character. As a condition
of membership, each one belonging agrees to furnish to his
fellow-members, either directly or through the Association, and
to them exclusively, the news of his vicinage, as gathered by him
for his own paper. This constitutes the large fountain from which
our American news supply is drawn. But, as in the case of the
foreign official agencies, if there be danger that an individual
member is biased, or if the matter be one of high importance, our
own trained and salaried staff men do the reporting. For this
purpose, as well as for administrative work, there is a bureau in
every leading city.

For the collection and interchange of this information we lease
from the various telephone and telegraph companies, and operate with
our own employees, something like fifty thousand miles of wires,
stretching out in every direction through the country and touching
every important center. To reach smaller cities, the telephone
is employed. Everywhere in every land, and every moment of every
day, there is ceaseless vigil for news.

People frequently ask what it costs thus to collect the news of the
world. And we cannot answer. Our annual budget is between three
and four million dollars. But this makes no account of the work
done by the individual papers all over the world in reporting the
matters and handling the news over to the agencies. Neither can
we estimate the number of men and women engaged in this fashion.
It is easy to measure the cost of certain specific events; as, for
instance, we expended twenty-eight thousand dollars to report the
Martinique disaster. And the Russo-Japanese war cost us over three
hundred thousand dollars.

Such is an outline of our activities in what we call normal times.
But these are not normal times. When the great European war broke
on us, eighteen months ago, all of the processes of civilization
seemed to go down in an hour. And we suffered in common with
others. Our international relations for the exchange of news were
instantly dislocated. We had been able to impress the governments
abroad with the value of an impartial and unpurchasable news service,
as opposed to the venal type of journalism, which was too common
on the European continent. And in our behalf they had abolished
their censorships. They had accorded us rules assuring us great
rapidity in the transmission of our messages over their government
telegraph lines. They had opened the doors of their chancelleries
to our correspondents, and told them freely the news as it developed.

All the advantages ceased. The German news agency was prohibited
from holding any intercourse with the English, French, or Russian
organizations. Simultaneously, like commerce was interdicted in
the other countries. The virtue of impartial news-gathering at
once ceased to be quoted at par. Everywhere, in all of the warring
lands the Biblical rule that "he that is not with me is against me,"
became the controlling view. Government telegrams were obviously
very important and there was no time to consider anywhere any of
the promised speed in sending our dispatches. Finally, censorships
were imposed. This was quite proper in principle. Censorships are
always necessary in time of war. But it is desirable, from every
point of view, that they be intelligent, and that is not always
the case.

Nevertheless, we have fared pretty well in the business of reporting
this war. We have made distinct progress in teaching the belligerents
that we hold no brief for any one of them, and, while each would
much rather have us plead his cause, they are coming to see why we
cannot and ought not do so. And our men are everywhere respected
and accorded as large privileges as, perhaps, in the light of the
tension of the hour, could be reasonably asked.

[signed] Melville E. Stone

Pan and the Pot-Hunter

They are not many who are privileged to learn that the forces of the
Wilderness are as gods, distributing benefits, and, from such as
have earned them, taking even handed reprisals. Only the Greeks of
all peoples realized this in its entirety, and them the gods repaid
with the pure joy of creation which is the special prerogative of
gods.

But Greenhow had heard nothing of the Greeks save as a symbol of
all unintelligibility, and of the gods not at all. His stock was
out of England by way of the Tennessee mountains, drifting Pacific
coastward after the war of the Rebellion, and he was a Pot Hunter
by occasion and inclination. The occasion he owned to being born
in one of the bays of the southerly Sierras where the plentitude
of wild life reduced pot hunting to the degree of easy murder.

A Pot Hunter, you understand, is a business man. He is out for
what he can get, and regards game laws as an interference with the
healthful interactions of competition. Greenhow potted quail in
the Temblors where by simply rolling out of his blanket he could
bag two score at a shot as they flocked, sleek and stately blue,
down the runways to the drinking places. He took pronghorn at
Castac with a repeating rifle and a lure of his red necktie held
aloft on a cleaning rod, and packed them four to a mule-back down
the Tejon to Summerfield. He shot farrow does and fished out of
season, and had never heard of the sportsmanly obligation to throw
back the fingerlings. Anything that made gunning worth while to
the man who came after you was, by Greenhow's reckoning, a menace
to pot hunting.

There were Indians in those parts who could have told him
better--notable hunters who never shot swimming deer nor does with
fawn nor any game unaware; who prayed permission of the Wuld before
they went to hunt, and left offal for their little brothers of the
Wilderness. Indians know. But Greenhow, being a business man,
opined that Indians were improvident, and not being even good at
his business, fouled the waters where he camped, left man traces
in his trails and neglected to put out his fires properly.

Whole hillsides where the deer had browsed were burnt off bare as
your hand in the wake of the pot hunter. Thus in due course, though
Greenhow laid it to the increasing severity of game laws framed in
the interests of city sportsmen, who preferred working hard for
their venison to buying it comfortably in the open market, pot
hunting grew so little profitable that he determined to leave it
off altogether an become a Settler. Not however until he had earned
the reprisal of the gods, of whom in a dozen years he had not even
become aware.

In the Spring of the year the Tonkawanda irrigation district was
opened, he settled himself on a spur of San Jacinto where it plunges
like a great dolphin in the green swell of the camissal, and throws
up a lacy foam of chaparral along its sides. Below him, dotted
over the flat reach of the mesa, the four square clearings of the
Homesteaders showed along the line of the great canal, keen and
blue as the cutting edge of civilization. There was a deep-soil
level under the nose of San Jacinto--rabbits used to play there
until Greenhow took to potting them for his breakfast--and a stream
bubbled from under the hill to waste in the meadow.

Greenhow built a shack under a live oak there and fancied himself
in the character of a proprietor. He reckoned that in the three
years before his vineyard came into bearing, he could pot-hunt in
the hills behind his clearing for the benefit of the Homesteaders.

It was altogether a lovely habitation. Camise grew flush with the
meadow and the flanks of San Jacinto shivered and sparkled with
the wind that turned the thousand leaves of the chaparral. Under
the wind one caught at times the slow deep chuckle of the water.
Greenhow should have been warned by that. In just such tones the
ancient Greeks had heard the great god Pan laughing in the woods
under Parnassus,--which was Greek indeed to the Pot Hunter.

Greenhow was thirty-four when he took out his preemption papers
and planted his first acre of vines. For reasons best known to
the gods, the deer kept well away from that side of the San Jacinto
that year. Greenhow enlarged the meadow and turned up ground for
a garden; he became acquainted with his neighbors and learned that
they had prejudices in favor of game regulations, also that one of
them had a daughter. She had white, even teeth that flashed when
she laughed; the whole effect of her was as sound and as appetizing
as a piece of ripe fruit. Greenhow told her that the prospect of
having a home of his own was an incentive such as pot-hunting held
out to no man. He looked as he said it, a very brother to Nimrod,
for as yet the Pot had not marked him.

He stood straight; his eyes had the deep, varying blueness of lake
water. Little wisps and burrs, odors of the forest clung about
his clothing; a beard covered his slack, formless mouth. When he
told the Homesteader's daughter how the stars went by on heather
planted headlands and how the bucks belled the does at the bottom
of deep canons in October, she heard in it the call of the trail
and young Adventure. Times when she would see from the level of
her father's quarter section the smoke of the Pot Hunter's cabin
rising blue against the glistening green of the live oak, she thought
that life might have a wilder, sweeter tang there about the roots
of the mountain.

In his second Spring when the camissal foamed all white with bloom
and the welter of yellow violets ran in the grass under it like
fire, Greenhow built a lean-to to his house and made the discovery
that the oak which jutted out from the barranca behind it was of
just the right height from the ground to make a swing for a child,
which caused him a strange pleasant embarrassment.

"Look kind o' nice to see a little feller playin' round," he
admitted to himself, and the same evening went down to call on the
Homesteader's daughter.

That night the watchful guardians of the Wild sent the mule-deer
to Harry the man who had been a pot-hunter. A buck of three years
came down the draw by the watercourse and nibbled the young shoots
of the vines where he could reach them across the rabbit proof
fencing that the settler had drawn about his planted acres. Not
that the wire netting would have stopped him; this was merely the
opening of the game. Three days later he spent the night in the
kitchen garden and cropped the tips of the newly planted orchard.
After that the two of them put in nearly the whole of the growing
season dodging one another through the close twigged manzanita,
lilac, laurel and mahogany that broke upward along the shining
bouldered coasts of San Jacinto. the chaparral at this season took
all the changes of the incoming surf, blue in the shadows, darkling
green about the heads of the gulches, or riffling with the white
under side of wind-lifted leaves. Once its murmurous swell had
closed over them, the mule-deer would have his own way with the
Pot Hunter. Often after laborious hours spent in repairing the
garden, the man would hear his enemy coughing in the gully behind
the house, and take up his rifle to put in the rest of the day
snaking through the breathless fifteen foot cover, only to have
a glimpse of the buck at last dashing back the late light from
glittering antlers as he bounded up inaccessible rocky stairs. This
was the more exasperating since Greenhow had promised the antlers
to the Homesteader's daughter.

When the surface of the camissal had taken on the brown tones
of weed under sea water and the young clusters of the grapes were
set--for this was the year the vineyard was expected to come into
bearing--the mule-deer disappeared altogether from that district,
and Greenhow went back hopefully to rooting the joint grass out
of the garden. But about the time he should have been rubbing the
velvet off his horns among the junipers of the high ridges, the
mule-deer came back with two of his companions and fattened on
the fruit of the vineyard. They went up and down the rows ruining
with selective bites the finest clusters. During the day they
lay up like cattle under the quaking aspens beyond the highest,
wind-whitened spay of the chaparral, and came down to feast day by
day as the sun ripened the swelling amber globules. They slipped
between the barbs of the fine wired fence without so much as changing
a leg or altering their long, loping stride; and what they left
the quail took.

In pattering droves of hundreds they trekked in from the camise
before there was light enough to shoot by, and nipped once and
with precision at the ripest in every bunch. Afterward they dusted
themselves in the chaparral and twitted the proprietor with soft
contented noises. At the end of the October rut the deer came
back plentifully to the Tonkawanda District, and Greenhow gave up
the greater part of the rainy season to auditing his account with
them. He spent whole days scanning the winter colored slope for
the flicker and slide of light on a hairy flank that betrayed his
enemy, or, rifle in hand, stalking a patch of choke cherry and
manzanita within which the mule-deer could snake and crawl for
hours by intricacies of doubling and back tracking that yielded
not a square inch of target and no more than the dust of his final
disappearance. Wood gatherers heard at times above their heads
the discontented whine of deflected bullets. Windy mornings the
quarry would signal from the high barrens by slow stiff legged
bounds that seemed to invite the Pot Hunter's fire, and at the end
of a day's tracking among the punishing stubs of the burnt district,
Greenhow returning would hear the whistling cough of the mule-deer
in the ravine not a rifle shot from the house.

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