by Richard van Pelt, WWI Correspondent

Commenting editorially, the Oregon Statesman takes umbrage at British and German disparagement of our neutrality as showing a feckless disregard of our loyalties and obligations:

KILLING UNCLE SAM

Those belligerents will get us good and mad yet if they’re not careful. We are a kindly, tolerant and long suffering people, but there are limits to our national patience.

We used to pardon Germany’s bland assumption that we didn’t know anything about the war, and had no means of judging its origin and conduct. But as our German friends persist in their attitude of superior knowledge, and continue to criticize us for not admitting all their claims, we begin to grow restive.

We wish that the German government and nation would begin to understand that the war news is printed all over the United States and more completely and truthfully than it is in Germany or anywhere else; that there is here no blanket censorship to suppress or distort news of any sort from any source; that we have had a chance to read all the war evidence of all the powers; that this nation is therefore better qualified by adequate presentation of the facts to think impartially and judge accurately than any other nation in the world.

We shall feel more kindly toward Germany when she stops pitying us for our ignorance and when her prolific and well meaning but blundering press bureaus stop deluging our editors and statesmen with old news and ex parte statements.

Then there’s dear old England. We like her, in spite of the family quarrels we’ve had and in spite of temperamental differences, and most of us have a good deal of sympathy with her. But when English poets like William Watson write sonnets bawling us out because we don’t jump in and send over our army and navy to help lick Germany, it strikes us as a piece of poetic impudence. Let the English poets understand, once for all, that we do not consider Germany’s assumption of our own ignorance a legitimate cause for declaring war against her.

Now Christabel Pankhurst comes to America and tries to inflame the public with war speeches, and tells us honest, neutral folk that of course we’re with the allies heart and soul and pocketbook, and of course we’ll fight England’s battles if England says the word; and we feel like disciplining Christabel. It makes us hot under the collar, too, when the English playwrights and novelists who are fighting so valiantly for their country – in their best literary style – calmly tell the world that they intend to make an offensive and defensive alliance with us, “if it becomes necessary.”

We wish that all and several of the belligerent would recognize that we are not merely a neutral nation, but an intelligent and independent nation, steering our own course in time of war as in time of peace and that any foreign statesman or literary gentleman or militant land who undertakes to say what we’ll do in a given international contingency is likely to have another guess coming.

We don’t know, ourselves, what we’ll do in any given contingency of foreign politics. But we do know that, whatever it is, we’ll do it of our own accord, without wheedling or dictation or suggestion from any foreign power, and that it will be consistent with our own welfare, and in the interest of world peace.