"A RICH MAN'S WAR"***


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FRENZIED LIBERTY

The Myth of “A Rich Man’S War”

by

OTTO H. KAHN







Extracts from Address Given at the University of Wisconsin,
Jan. 14, 1918

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                                Part One
                            Frenzied Liberty

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                            FRENZIED LIBERTY


We are engaged in a war, an “irrepressible conflict,” a most just and
righteous war for a cause as high and noble as ever inspired a people to
put forth its utmost of sacrifice and valor. To attain the end for which
this peace-loving nation unsheathed its sword, to lay low and make
powerless the accursed spirit which brought all this unspeakable misery,
sorrow and ruin upon the world, is our one and supreme and unshakeable
purpose.

That is the purpose of the people of Wisconsin as it is the purpose of
the people of New York and of every other State in the Union. I give no
credence to and have no patience with those who would measure as with a
thermometer the loyalty temperature of our communities. Some dreamers
there may be, here as everywhere, so immersed in their dreams that the
trumpet call of the day has not yet awakened them.

Some politicians there may be, here and elsewhere, so obsessed by the
issues which heretofore were good election assets and so unable to shake
off the inveterate habits and the formulas and calculations of a
lifetime, that they are unable to recognize and to share in the sudden
flaming manifestations springing from the deep of the people’s soul—and
after a while, looking around for their usual followers, find themselves
in chilly loneliness.

Some there are, a small minority always and getting smaller every day,
among Americans of German birth or descent who lack the vision to see
their duty or the strength to follow it, and who stand irresolute,
hesitant and dazed.

The vast and overwhelming majority have acted like true men and loyal
Americans. They are entitled to claim your sympathetic understanding for
the heartache which is theirs and they are entitled to claim your trust.
It will not be misplaced. I am taking very little account of that
insignificant number of men of German origin who, misguided or corrupt,
dare by insidious and underground processes to attempt to weaken or
oppose the resolute will of the Nation. There are too few of them to
count and their manoeuvres are too clumsy to be effective. But let them
be warned. There is sweeping through the country a mighty wave of stern
and grim determination, which bodes ill for anyone standing in its way.


                                   II

One element only there is in our population which does deliberately
challenge our national unity. I mean the militant Bolsheviki in our
midst, the preachers and devotees of liberty run amuck, who would place
a visionary class interest above patriotism and who in ignorant
fanaticism would substitute for the tyranny of autocracy the still more
intolerable tyranny of mob-rule, as for the time being they have done in
Russia.

If it were not for the disablement of Russia, the battle against
autocracy would have been won by now. As so often before, liberty has
been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and
freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past,
proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin brother of
tyranny.

Out-czaring the czar, its votaries are filling the prisons with their
political opponents, are practising ruthless spoliation and savage
oppression, and are maintaining their self-constituted rule by the force
of bayonets. Riot, robbery, famine, fratricidal strife are stalking
through the land.

The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied.

Liberty is not fool-proof. For its beneficent working it demands
self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and
attainable and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are
beyond our power to change.

Liberty can, does and must limit the rights of the strong, it must
increasingly guard and promote the well-being of those endowed with
lesser gifts for the struggle for existence and success, it must strive
in every way consistent with sane recognition of the realities to make
life more worth living to those whose existence is cast in the mould of
the vast average of mankind; it must give political equality, equality
before the law; it must throw wide open to talent and worth the door of
opportunity.

But it must not attempt in fatuous recklessness to make over humanity on
the pattern of absolute equality. If and when it does so attempt, it
will fail as that attempt has always failed throughout history. For an
inscrutable Providence has made inequality of endowment a fundamental
law of nature, animate as well as inanimate, and from inequality of
physical strength, of brain power and of character, springs inevitably
the fact of inequality of results.

Envy, demagogism, utopianism, well-meaning uplift agitation may throw
themselves against that basic law of all being, but the clash will
create merely temporary confusion, destruction and anarchy, as in
Russia; and after a little while and much suffering, the supremacy of
sanely restrained individualism over frenzied collectivism will reassert
itself.


                                  III

Under the system of wisely ordered liberty, combined with incentive to
individual effort whereof the foundation was laid by the far-sighted and
enlightened men who created this nation and endowed it with the most
sagacious instrument of government that the wit of man has devised,
America has grown and prospered beyond all other nations.

It has stood as a republic for nearly a century and a half, which is far
longer than any other genuine republic has endured amongst the great
nations of the world since the beginning of the Christian era. Its past
has been glorious, the vista of its future is one of boundless
opportunity, of splendid fruitfulness for its own people and the world,
if it remains but true to its principles and traditions, adjusting their
expression and application to the changing needs of the times in a
spirit of progress, sympathetic understanding and enlightened justice,
but rejecting the teachings and temptations of false, though plausible
prophets.

More and more, of late, do we see the very foundations of that majestic
and beneficent structure clamorously assailed by some of those to whom
the great republic generously gave asylum and to whom she opened wide
the portals of her freedom and her opportunities.

These people with many hundreds of thousands of their countrymen came to
our free shores after centuries of oppression and persecution. America
gave them everything she had to give—the great gift of the rights and
liberties of citizenship, free education in our schools and
universities, free treatment in our clinics and hospitals, our boundless
opportunities for social and material advancement.

Most of them have proved themselves useful and valuable elements in our
many-rooted population. Some of them have accomplished eminent
achievements in science, industry and the arts. Certain of the qualities
and talents which they contribute to the common stock are of great worth
and promise.

But some of them there are who have shown themselves unworthy of the
trust of their fellow-citizens; ingrates, disturbers, ignorant of or
disloyal to the spirit of America, abusers of her hospitality.

_Some there are who have been blinded by the glare of liberty as a man
is blinded who after long confinement in darkness, comes suddenly into
the strong sunlight. Blinded, they dare to aspire to force their
guidance upon Americans who for generations have walked in the light of
liberty._

_They have become drunk with the strong wine of freedom, these men who
until they landed on America’s coasts had tasted nothing but the bitter
water of tyranny. Drunk, they presume to impose their reeling gait upon
Americans to whom