191 4ll Addresses in New York 



session in the parlors of the Hotel Astor. At the 

 Economic Club, Congressman Augustus P. Gardner 

 and Dr. Bernhard Dernburg were on the program. 

 Gardner's speech was a scarcely disguised plea for 

 the immediate entrance of the United States into 

 the war on the side of the Allies. Dernburg, to whom 

 had been assigned the impossible task of winning 

 over American opinion to the side of Germany, 

 spoke in a quiet and guarded fashion. Indeed, he iiaij- 

 made the impression of a reasonable, competent man ^'T^'^ 



J • • .1 I , , ^ , advocacy 



engaged m an impossible and unwelcome duty; 

 instead of voicing his own thought he seemed obliged 

 to utter phrases assigned him from Berlin. 



The notable feature at the Quill Club dinner was 

 a report by the secretary, Dr. Charles P. Fagnani, 

 professor in the Union Theological Seminary, of an 

 address given at a previous meeting by Dr. Hugh 

 Black, one of his colleagues. According to Fagnani, 

 the Scottish theologian's thesis could be summed 

 up in two sentences : " Damn your military neces- a vigorous 

 sity. What the hell are you doing in Belgium.?" '''^-^^ 

 The subject of my talk at the Astor was "Making 

 Wars Inevitable" as the result of overload of arma- 

 ment and the operations of saber rattlers, war 

 traders, and exploiters of backward nations.^ 



^ "The nations of Europe had piled up tinder so high that any man's match 

 could have set it off — the natural result of safeguarding peace by war prepara- 

 tion. It has been clearly enough shown that no war can bring profit to any 

 nation in these days and that war is utterly futile as a process for reaching any 

 definite end. ... To say that war is inevitable is finally to make it so. The 

 armed peace has come to its end and the wreck of Europe is complete. The 

 Europe we thought we knew and which we studied and loved is gone forever. 

 . . . When war becomes honorable, it will have gone a long way toward 

 becoming impossible. An old French proverb says that 'war without rapine is 

 like tripe without mustard,' too insipid for a man of spirit. The one ultimate 

 hope is that instead of a Concert of Powers, ever out of time and tune, we may 

 have a concert of peoples, a gathering not of soldiers, war agents, and diplomats 



c 653 ;] 



