QUOTES FROM ALUMNI

Aldrich '17 UrgesMobilization for America

A STATEMENT BY THE Rev. Dr. Donald B. Aldrich '17, D.D., rector of the Church of the Ascension, New York, was read to his congregation December 29, asking the parish to cooperate in efforts to resist the "positive evil of the German conquest."

"Because each passing hour determines what America should be, because our democratic processes stem from a spiritual source," Dr. Aldrich said in his statement, "the time has come for us in the Church of the Ascension to speak plainly and to act promptly."

Recalling his enlistment in the Navy in April. 1917. and his questions as to the justice of the war, Dr. Aldrich said he had concluded that the World War was not wasted.

"Forces which are bent on domination are not put down within one generation," he said. "I believe that what Britain is fighting for today is but a continuation of the reason we fought in the last war made necessary, in large measure, by post-war blunders. Through these, the German way of life found a new reason to make a third try.

"Since then, a succession of neutral countries has been invaded and robbed, their inhabitants deported, their universities closed, their means of communication destroyed, their hospitals emptied to become military hospitals for the invader, their essentials to living—honestly acquired -shipped to Germany.

"No possible interpretation of Christianity in terms of non-resistant idealism can call this right No nation is blameless less in the efforts at economic expansion, our own included, but such selfishness can be reasonably adjusted. Death, pestilence, poverty, slavery—each of these, however, takes a final toll."

After detailing the years of armament building, high taxes and constant threat from abroad that America would face if Britain fell, Dr. Aldrich added:

"It is not a question of whether we shall have war or not. It is a question of whether we shall resist the positive evil of German conquest in the hope to preserve what is right To live under the economic or military domination of the present German retrograde and barbarous philosophy of life and to let others so live is not conceivably right.

"Every person must play his part. This is not war hysteria. I would call it consecrated realism. It is to combine conscience with intelligence, to maintain what is right as God gives us to see it."