Advertisement

This Continent's Great Men.

COMMENT

The United States, late to enter the war, made her part more glorious by the gift to world necessities of no inconsiderable number of great men. Above all these stand out President Wilson and ex-President Roosevelt. Mr. Wilson's most notable work was his prompt crystallization in aresting phrases of the basic principles of the Allied cause, an accomplishment which came just in time to knit up loose ends of the national fabric in more Allied countries than one. He interpreted humanity's task in a way that solidified public opinion the world over and made it harder for every cynical doubter to do the Kaiser's work.

Mr. Roosevelt, ever vigorous and logical, threw the whole-weight of his passionate personality and far-reaching fame into the scale for righteousness. From the first, his fervid and uncompromising loyalty to Allied principles, finding expression in lucid eloquence, has been like a furnace keeping the nation in an heroic glow of patriotic exaltation.

The world must not deny a special recognition to Mr. Hoover, chairman of the Belgian Relief Commission, who saved the Belgians from starvation and subsequently organized the food supply for the European Allies to tide them over critical times.

The British Dominions contributed two outstanding figures in Hughes of Australia, and Borden of Canada. Premier Hughes, by means of his keen appreciation of the German menace in all its manifold phases, helped to sound more loudly everywhere the warning that civilization was in peril. Borden, grimly perservering in the single-minded purpose of winning the war, inspired the Empire with a deeper consecration to war duty. No statesman any where faced and mastered problems of greater complexity, and none held more consistently to the courage adopted in the very first moment of peril or caried through to more comprehensive realization the possibilities of his nation for utility in every line of war endeavor.  Boston Transcript.

Advertisement
Advertisement