The Alaska Daily Empire

AMERICAN BLOOD SPILLED

American blood has sanctified America's cause in Europe. American lives have been given up on the altar of their country which has been set up in far away France.
Willingly they died and bravely, fighting and dying as fought and died the Puritans at Bunker Hill, the frontiersmen under Marion, the Cavaliers at Yorktown.
Their blood adds lustre to the red, white and blue of the Stars and Stripes which have stood for freedom and democracy since the birth of our Nation.
Their names will henceforth augment the glory of American history. The memory of them and their supreme sacrifice will make fuller the experiences of future generations of Americans.
The killing of these men brings with it a realization of the fact that America is at war. It was expected. None but knew that war means death, and that sooner or later the first American blood would be spilled. All had steeled themselves for the news, yet when it came it brought the inevitable shock.
But there will be many more such messages. The dispatches of yesterday are but the forerunners of more tales of death. As war progresses every community will be called upon for its sacrifices. Much of the best blood that has builded the world's greatest democracy and greatest nation will enrich Old World soil before peace shall come. Europe is to be baptized with crimson corpuscles such as have made America prolific in the growth of humanism and liberty.
Why these sacrifices? It is because the struggle that was begun at Lexington in 1775 against the militarism and absolutism of monarchy has not been ended.
The freedom that Americans sought when they established firesides at Jamestown, Plymouth, Baltimore, Philadelphia and elsewhere on America's shores is again attacked.
The difference between the time when King George sent hired Huns to America and the present is that science and enterprise have made the world smaller.
The liberty-seeking people of three centuries ago could flee from the iron heel of militarism.
They did so, and when militarism followed them to their havens of refuge, a century and a half later, they united and hurled it back across the Atlantic.
The lesson from America's experience carried the geographical border of democracy back to Europe.
There a mad monarch, dreaming of the conquests of former world-conquering monarchs and seeking to satiate ambition for place in history among them, attacked democracy's new borders.
It is but a span, as distance is now measured, from the trenches in France across the Atlantic to our own land.
When the perpetuity of European democracy was jeopardized, American democracy was imperiled.
All that the fathers who crossed the Atlantic in small craft to American shores sought, all that those who followed Washington fought for, all that those who learned at the knee of Jefferson to apply democracy accomplished, all that those who fought to preserve the Union died for, was again in the balance.
Therefore the war, its sacrifices on European battlefronts and its privations at home.
The lesson our dead would teach us is that we make this the last war for democracy; that monarchy and militarism be removed root and branch from the face of the earth.