Life — July 20, 1916 — page 23: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

DURING THE MANOEUVRES Officer: WHAT TIE DEUCE ARE YOU LOAFIN: “MY ORDERS IS I'M SUPPOSED TO BE WOU ABOUT HERE FOR? , CAP'N,” “WELL, YOU CAN JUST MOVE ALONG AND WAIT FOR THE STRETCHER IN A MORE UNCOMFORTABLE PLACE. For a fact, he is a perplexing person, remarkable in his talents, abilities and characteristics, and yet for other rea- sons hard to measure. A single-track mind was his, he once said, and that, in a way, corresponds to Dr. Rock- II's complaint about him. His repu- tation will by no means stand or fall hy the issue of this campaign; and in- deed he may be a gainer in the end by being beaten next November. We know what he has done as President and what the present consequences are. The future consequences it is too soon to estimate. What another man might have done we do not know, and still less can we appraise the results of ac- tion that was not taken, The tardy mind that Dr. Rockwell discovers in the President may, after all, have been the kind of mind most valuable to the United States in the years now pro- ceeding. As to that, who can really tell? For our part the upbraiders who with such confident exasperation assail the President for omissions, dela: belated changes of policy, and predict or point to direful consequences, leave us very imperfectly convinced. In everything that concerns the adminis- ration, the mental propensity of an rabitual Democrat is, just now, to con- sider that whatever is, is right, and of an habitual Republican to consider that whatever is, is wrong. Mr. Wilson now is estimated and judged very much according to this bias of the mind; as indeed must always happen in the campai season to a candidate for election. "THERE are great doings just now in the Great War, and, so far cs one can judge from the news in our papers, a decisive result is possible this summer. It takes a student of the war to put together the fragments of news we read from day to day and fit them into their proper places in the picture, but all the big items nowadays seem to count for the Allies—the huge Rus- sian success, the stubborn refusal of the French to yield Verdun, and, so far as it has gone, the French and British drive on the Western front. If we are getting true reports at all, the Germans have their hands full. Theiz hands, indeed, seem fuller now- adays than their stomachs, for their MW food-shortage seems uncontestable. One notices a change of mental atti- tude; a change from speculation as to what may happen to France, to specu- lation as to what is in store for Ger- many. Assuredly, it has come the turn of Germans and their friends to be anxious, and that seems a change of great significance. The great marvel is the more than recovery of Russia, and her immense gain in military equipment. It has come true, as was anticipated, that Germany has forced efficiency on all her neigh- bors. No country that has fought either with her or against her will ever be the same again. Nor will she be the same again, but one prognosticates the changes that will come to her with even more hesitation now than when the war began. She will have left to her a great trained population and, per- haps, her whole industrial plant unim- paired, though as to that there is in- formation still to come. She will have Jost two or three million men—perhaps more. But there are still too many perhapses in the problem of Germany's future, and, indeed, of the future of all Europe and the rest of the world. It is safer and much easier to wait till the war is done and then survey the remnants. The Russian arrangement with Japan looks forward to a continuance of human affairs and transaction of future business, and gives food for thought, both in London and in Wash- ington. It gives an opportunity to demonstrate that Dr. Rockwell of Worcester is mistaken in supposing that Mr. Wilson has a tardy mind. And yet again it may verify that diag- nosis. place as warden of Sing Sing is very acceptable. His trials have been very severe. The worst of them, by very much, seem to be over, though some driblets of tribulation may still be left to him. A less courageous man, backed less efficiently by friends and money, would probably have succumbed to the mach- inations that were contrived for his ruin, comicbooks.com