)AWN 
 
CopightN". 
 
 COPXRIGHT DEPOSm 
 
THROUGH DARKNESS 
 TO DAWN 
 
^■7u^ 
 
THROUGH DARKNESS 
 TO DAWN 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM NORTH RICE, PH.D.,LL.D. 
 
 Professor of Geology, Wesleyan University 
 
 WITH A FOREWORD BY 
 
 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 President of the United States 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 FRANK D. BEATTYS & CO. 
 
 1917 
 

 Copyright, 1917, by 
 Frank D. Beattys & Co. 
 
 fl 
 
 00^ 
 
 
 AUG 
 
 16 
 
 1917 
 
 ©GLA4 
 
 73J21 
 
 
 •>lx> 
 
 . f .. 
 
TO THE BOYS OF WESLEYAN 
 YOUNG AND OLD 
 
THE WHITE HOUSE 
 
 WASHINGTON 
 
 3 M'y> ^9^7 
 
 I want to give myself the pleasure of 
 prefacing this modest but very significant little 
 book with an expression of my affectionate admira- 
 tion for an old friend, Professor Rice, its author. 
 The fine spirit of the man everyone who reads it 
 will feel and will take refreshment and stimula- 
 tion from. It speaks in authentic tones the charac- 
 ter of the man I learned to admire in years now too 
 long gone by when I had the privilege of being his 
 colleague; and I have written this in order that I 
 may have an opportunity to avow publicly a very 
 earnestly cherished friendship. 
 
THROUGH DARKNESS 
 TO DAWN 
 
NOTE 
 
 /f Patriotic Rally of students and 
 y^^yji cilumni of Wesleyan University 
 was held in Memorial Chapel, on Sat- 
 urday, June 16th, 1917, as a part of 
 the exercises of Commencement Week, 
 One of the addresses delivered on that 
 occasion is offered to a larger audience 
 in this little volume. 
 
THROUGH DARKNESS 
 TO DAWN 
 
 AR is bad, and the great- 
 est war is the worst war. 
 One mangled corpse, one 
 woman sitting in dumb despair, 
 one child di^opping its playthings 
 to cry for the father who will never 
 return, is a tragedy. When that 
 tragedy is multiplied by milhons, 
 its horror is unspeakable. Tens of 
 millions of men in arms, millions 
 killed or wounded or languishing in 
 prison camps, battle lines hundreds 
 of miles in length, tens of thousands 
 of square miles of rich farms with 
 
Through Darkness to Dawn 
 
 smiling villages and prosperous towns 
 converted into desert — ^these things 
 make a picture of horror such as the 
 world has never seen before. And to 
 the agony of the present is added 
 foreboding for the future. How will 
 the industries of peace rally beneath 
 the burden of billions of debt ? What 
 will become of the family, the foun- 
 dation of civilization, when the po- 
 tential husbands and fathers are 
 slain? 
 
 For two years and a half we looked 
 at these scenes of woe beyond the 
 Atlantic with compassion, and sent 
 some gifts to bring a little relief ; but 
 we were neutral. We rejoiced in the 
 geographical isolation which seemed 
 to justify us in enjoying the blessings 
 
 1:43 
 
An Address 
 
 of peace. In the preliminary stages 
 of the war, we were not greatly inter- 
 ested in the rights or wrongs of Ser- 
 bia. If the Kaiser wanted to fight the 
 Czar, we were a little regretful that 
 both could not be beaten. When 
 France and heroic little Belgium rose 
 to repel the invader from their land, 
 they had our cordial sympathy. 
 When England sadly and sternly 
 took up arms in defense of a violated 
 treaty, we heartily applauded. But 
 as neutrals we felt bound to be just 
 to both sides. We said, what was 
 true, that the guilt of this war be- 
 longed not alone to the men of this 
 generation, that the war was largely 
 due to evil traditions in European 
 international relations which had 
 1:53 
 
Through Darkness to Dawn 
 
 come down from a former age, and 
 that for the shaping of those evil tra- 
 ditions no one nation alone was re- 
 sponsible. 
 
 But, as time passed on, it became 
 more and more obvious that, though 
 no nation was free from blame for the 
 evil heritage from the past, there was 
 yet relatively a right and a wrong 
 side in the present war. The poly- 
 chrome literature in which the various 
 nations told their story left no doubt. 
 The German "White Book" was 
 black with damnation, alike in what 
 it contained and in what was sup- 
 pressed. The World War is a Ger- 
 man war, or rather a Hohenzollern 
 war. Its motive was military ambi- 
 tion. It began with the shameless 
 
An Address 
 
 violation of a solemn treaty. It has 
 been prosecuted from the beginning 
 with a brutal disregard of the rights 
 of non-combatants and neutrals, 
 which the world has never seen since 
 the Dark Ages. The atrocities in 
 Belgium have not been sporadic 
 crimes of individuals but an organ- 
 ized poHcy of crime. If anything was 
 needed for the condemnation of Ger- 
 many, it was furnished by the idiotic 
 logic of her philosophers and scien- 
 tists and the barbarous ethics of her 
 theologians and pastors who ventured 
 to write in her behalf. There is no 
 escape from the conclusion that the 
 Hohenzollern dynasty has become 
 the enemy of the human race. 
 
 And still we remained neutral. 
 
Through Darkness to Dawn 
 
 Rightly, I believe, our government 
 declined to accept the role of a knight 
 errant. But at last the supreme crime 
 of the submarine warfare forced into 
 the war the most pacific of all nations. 
 We could not keep out of the war any- 
 longer without the absolute surrender 
 of the rights of our citizens. And, 
 now that we are in the war, our aims 
 are larger than the occasion which 
 brought us into it. We were com- 
 pelled to declare war in defense of 
 our own rights, but in entering the 
 war we became the defenders of the 
 rights of mankind. In our first war 
 for liberty, we fought for the freedom 
 of the little colonies on the Atlantic 
 coast which were destined to become a 
 great nation. In our second war for 
 
An Address 
 
 liberty we fought for the freedom of 
 an enslaved race and for the preser- 
 vation of national unity. In our 
 third and greatest war for liberty we 
 are fighting for the freedom of man- 
 kind. 
 
 The thoughts of our allies, like our 
 own, have widened as the war has de- 
 veloped. France and Belgium en- 
 tered the war in self-defense; Eng- 
 land, to maintain the neutrahty of 
 Belgium; Italy, to redeem "Itaha Ir- 
 redenta"; but we are all fighting now 
 for world freedom, for the supremacy 
 of democracy throughout the world. 
 The new Russia, who has dethroned 
 her czar and called back her exiles 
 from Siberia, is striving to be worthy 
 of the great fellowship of the cham- 
 
 1^1 
 
Through Darkness to Dawn 
 
 pions of human freedom. Poor Rus- 
 sia, indeed, coming suddenly out of 
 the dungeon gloom in which she has 
 lain for centuries into the Ught of 
 freedom, gropes and stumbles a lit- 
 tle, dazed by the unaccustomed 
 brightness; but soon, we trust, her 
 eyes will become accustomed to the 
 light, and her steps will grow firm 
 and steady. It is well that among the 
 counselors whom we have sent to her 
 is our greatest master of the prin- 
 ciples of constitutional democracy. 
 
 We must, as President Wilson has 
 said, "make the world safe for de- 
 mocracy." The world will soon be 
 safe for nothing else. The day of the 
 kings is ending: the day of the peo- 
 
 CIO] 
 
'An Address 
 
 pies is dawning. The Czar has gone : 
 the Kaisers must go. The only mon- 
 archs that the new age can tolerate 
 are those whose crowns are only sym- 
 bols of national unity and whose de- 
 crees but register a nation's will. 
 
 How long before the dawn? That 
 depends on the German people. The 
 mental attitude of the German nation 
 is a fearful illustration of the power 
 of universal education conducted un- 
 der bureaucratic control to pervert 
 human intelligence. Yet there are 
 not wanting symptoms that the Ger- 
 man people may recover from the 
 delusion in which they have been edu- 
 cated and may learn the truth that 
 will make them free. The new col- 
 
Through Darkness to Dawn 
 
 portage of the allied aviators, who are 
 dropping from the skies President 
 Wilson's address to Congress, may- 
 help to spread the new gospel. The 
 lofty principles of national morality, 
 so nobly expressed in the words of 
 our President, may well prove a high 
 explosive beneath the Hohenzollern 
 throne. The English artillery, which 
 is smashing to flinders the steel and 
 concrete foundations of the Hinden- 
 burg line, may awaken in the mind of 
 the German people a suspicion that 
 their "Gott mit Uns," their tutelary 
 Thor, is thundering on the other side. 
 It is our hope and prayer that they 
 may recover from their madness be- 
 fore they are reduced to starvation. 
 Our foe is not the German people. 
 
 1:123 
 
An Address 
 
 We chant no "hymn of hate." We 
 love the land of Luther and Kant and 
 Goethe and Hehnholtz. To us who 
 studied in Germany and who are 
 grateful for the privileges which we 
 enjoyed and for the friendships 
 which we formed, one of the saddest 
 experiences of the war has been to see 
 the splendid educational, commercial, 
 and industrial life of that country 
 crushed beneath the Juggernaut car 
 of war. We are fighting for the free- 
 dom of Germany. In the words of 
 that great peace-lover and peace- 
 maker, ex-President Taft, "We are 
 in this war to stay ; we are in this war 
 to win ; we are in this war to wipe the 
 Hohenzollern philosophy from off 
 D33 
 
Through Darkness to Dawn 
 
 the face of the whole wide earth, for- 
 ever and forever."* 
 
 We are fighting for world freedom. 
 No less are we fighting for world 
 peace. A democratic Europe will be 
 a peaceful Europe. A century ago 
 the nations banished to St. Helena a 
 war lord who, in the arrogance of his 
 power, had defied God and man. 
 And then they reconstructed the map 
 of Europe. The men who made the 
 new map believed in the divine right 
 of kings. When the war lord of to- 
 day is sent to some peaceful seclusion, 
 the men who will reconstruct the map 
 of Europe will be men who believe in 
 
 * "One of the prerequisite conditions of peace is the 
 democratization of every country." Count Michael 
 Karolyi, in the Hungarian House of Deputies, as re- 
 ported in telegram from Budapest to Amsterdam, pub- 
 lished in American papers July 14th. 
 
 D43 
 
An Address 
 
 the divine right of peoples. In that 
 new reconstruction the problem will 
 be to recognize and, so far as possible, 
 to fulfill the aspirations of nations 
 and races. Never again will terri- 
 tories be bartered between the mon- 
 archs as if their populations were 
 only herds of cattle to be bought and 
 sold. The arbitrary partition of ter- 
 ritory a century ago left bitter in- 
 heritances of hate. The peace of 
 Europe has been only an armed 
 truce, and the armaments growing 
 year by year have been a growing 
 menace. Balanced alhances have 
 kept the peace of Europe in unstable 
 equilibrium, ready at any moment to 
 totter into war. The end of this war 
 will not be a "Holy AUiance" of 
 
 [153 
 
Through Darkness to Dawn 
 
 despots, but a league of peace among 
 nations that respect each other's 
 rights. 
 
 At the beginning of this war, 
 Lieutenant- General Miles declared 
 that it would be the greatest war 
 in history and the last great war. 
 Strangely prophetic, in these days of 
 Zeppelins and aeroplanes, seem those 
 lines of Tennyson: 
 
 "For I dipt into the future, far as 
 human eye could see. 
 Saw the Vision of the world, and 
 all the wonder that would be ; 
 
 Heard the heavens fill with shout- 
 ing, and there rained a ghastly 
 dew 
 
 From the nations' airy navies 
 grappling in the central blue; 
 • t t • t • 
 
An Address 
 
 Till the war-drum throbb'd no 
 longer, and the battle-flags were 
 furl'd, 
 
 In the Parliament of man, the 
 Federation of the world." 
 
 In the vision of the Seer of Patmos 
 the slaughter of Armageddon ushers 
 in the new heaven and the new earth. 
 
 What this war will cost us, how 
 much of our material wealth will burn 
 to ashes, how many of our homes will 
 be shrouded in mourning, how many 
 of the dear boys of Wesleyan who 
 are or soon will be in France will 
 never return, God knows. But with 
 solemn joy we accept our share, 
 whatever that share may be, in the 
 great agony which will work the so- 
 cial and political redemption of man- 
 kind.