Life — August 23, 1917 — page 19: what you’re looking at

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

ublic, to be inless, seball badd 1a” 02" re to ut on 0 be- their Ww to -and- urry y in- ring | the that the 1 of uce= row for ould ence on a fol- peo- ould, ers, dis- wed will hey try= XUM THE HOUSE OF MONENZOLLERN terms of peace whenever they can rid themselves of their criminal war-lords. Until they do, or the Allies can do it for them, the war seems likely to drag along. verraus cites I HE plan for insuring our new armies and providing definitely be- forehand for care of damaged men and their dependents seems an excellent precaution against a recurrence of the pension system of which we have had such long and sad experience, Some of the details of the plan are said to be bad, but they can he corrected. The cost will be large, but all costs run to the large sizes just now. The cost of our pension calamity was the least of its evils. We know now that we could afford the money paid to pensioners, but we could not afford the corrupting influences of that system. We want some kind of provision for relief of war damage that can be kept out 299 of politics and out of Congress. The men who take part in this war will own the country presently and have the chief responsibility for run- ning it. There are no safer hands for the country to be in. They will fur- nish candidates for office and elect Presidents, and are now getting a new education to qualify them for these duties. Likely enough the new align- ment of voters that we have been pecting this long time will follow the war, Soldiering is not so active a job but that men engaged in it have time to think. Our new soldiers will think, and will exchange thoughts, and a good deal will come of it, xe GREAT deal will come out of all nd we this war activity, anyw have very little notion what it will be. For three years we have been constantly in the throcs of education, and are still hard at it. We may expect to be very different people when we emerge from our course. The Tribune thinks that “never before in history, not even in the Reformation, or in the revolutions of the eighteenth century, has there Leen such a general sifting ou: of the useless, the worn-out, the harmful as is now going on and must follow this general shaking up of present civiliza tion.” It specifies some things that are going into the scrap-heap along with kaiserism—the old policy of national expansion and colonial possession, the old diplomacy of sccrecy and intrigue, the old statecraft based on thirst for military power, the old-fashioned game of domestic politics, the old economic individualism, the traditional national isolation of America. True enough, the new broom is sweeping clean. We think so much about what is going to happen to Ger- many that we are in danger of over- looking what is happening to ourselves. We have not been forgotten in “the general house-cieaning of civilization.” We are getting ours; getting it good and plenty. comicbooks om