Read Ebook: The Sword of Johnny Damokles by Parker Hugh Frazier Doolin Joseph Illustrator

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Ebook has 201 lines and 12149 words, and 5 pages

What this will involve is clear. It will involve the utmost practicable co-operation in counsel and action with the Governments now at war with Germany, and as incident to that the extension to those Governments of the most liberal financial credits in order that our resources may so far as possible be added to theirs.

It will involve the organization and mobilization of all the material resources of the country to supply the materials of war and serve the incidental needs of the nation in the most abundant and yet the most economical and efficient way possible.

It will involve the immediate full equipment of the navy in all respects, but particularly in supplying it with the best means of dealing with the enemy's submarines.

It will involve the immediate addition to the armed forces of the United States already provided for by law in case of war at least 500,000 men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability to service, and also the authorization of subsequent additional increments of equal force so soon as they may be needed and can be handled in training.

It will involve also, of course, the granting of adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by the present generation, by well-conceived taxation. I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation because it seems to me that it would be most unwise to base the credits which will now be necessary entirely on money borrowed.

It is our duty, I most respectfully urge, to protect our people so far as we may against the very serious hardships and evils which would be likely to arise out of the inflation which would be produced by vast loans.

In carrying out the measures by which these things are to be accomplished we should keep constantly in mind the wisdom of interfering as little as possible in our own preparation and in the equipment of our own military forces with the duty--for it will be a very practical duty--of supplying the nations already at war with Germany with the materials which they can obtain only from us or by our assistance. They are in the field and we should help them in every way to be effective there.

I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through the several executive departments of the Government, for the consideration of your committees measures for the accomplishment of the several objects I have mentioned. I hope that it will be your pleasure to deal with them as having been framed after very careful thought by the branch of the Government upon which the responsibility of conducting the war and safeguarding the nation will most directly fall.

OUR MOTIVES AND OBJECTS

While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let us be very clear and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our objects are. My own thought has not been driven from its habitual and normal course by the unhappy events of the last two months, and I do not believe that the thought of the nation has been altered or clouded by them.

I have exactly the same thing in mind now that I had in mind when I addressed the Senate on the 22d of January last; the same that I had in mind when I addressed the Congress on the 3d of February and on the 26th of February.

Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.

Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic Governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people. We have seen the last of neutrality in such circumstances.

We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their Governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.

We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their Government acted in entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval.

It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow-men as pawns and tools.

Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked only under cover and where no one has the right to ask questions.

Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or behind the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full information concerning all the nation's affairs.

PEACE THROUGH FREE PEOPLES

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic Government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away, the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and render account to no one would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia?

Russia was known by those who know it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude toward life.

Autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, in character or purpose; and now it has been shaken and the great, generous Russian people have been added, in all their native majesty and might, to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a league of honor.

One of the things that have served to convince us that the Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend is that from the very outset of the present war it has filled our unsuspecting communities and even our offices of Government with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our national unity of council, our peace within and without, our industries and our commerce.

Indeed, it is now evident that its spies were here even before the war began, and it is, unhappily, not a matter of conjecture, but a fact proved in our courts of justice, that the intrigues which have more than once come perilously near to disturbing the peace and dislocating the industries of the country have been carried on at the instigation, with the support, and even under the personal direction, of official agents of the Imperial German Government accredited to the Government of the United States.

Even in checking these things and trying to extirpate them we have sought to put the most generous interpretation possible upon them because we knew that their source lay, not in any hostile feeling or purpose of the German people toward us , but only in the selfish designs of a Government that did what it pleased and told its people nothing. But they have played their part in serving to convince us at last that that Government entertains no real friendship for us and means to act against our peace and security at its convenience. That it means to stir up enemies against us at our very doors the intercepted note to the German Minister at Mexico City is eloquent evidence.

A CHALLENGE OF HOSTILE PURPOSE

We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because spine arched, and he screamed again and again in a great crescendo. The pain eased.

"Could you stand that," said the grinning Neptunian, "for a lifetime?"

"Within limits."

"That's for me to judge. Give me the figures on how you managed to create that ship of yours."

"That's agreeable. You could take them anyhow." Timmy reached into a pocket of his space suit. He pulled out a bundle of papers and handed them to the Leader. "I warn you," he added, "they won't work." Then he swore at himself for saying that. If, by ingenuity, he could manage to convince the Neptunians that his ship would work, he might waste a lot of their time in research and give the Inner Worlds time to find out what was happening. "I might manage to make one work at that," he added swiftly.

The Neptunian cast one final look at the two captives, smiled, and walked away. Thurner jerked his head at an inner door. "Come on," he ordered. "Your quarters will be near the labs." He led them down a succession of corridors to a room where temperature and gravity stood at Earth-norm, and Callisto constant. "You can do without those suits," he said, and shut the door.

Timmy and Damokles looked around. The room was lighted quite brightly. A window gave onto the plain. Above them, Triton whirled its endless mad dance, speeding across the sky in the opposite direction of the planet's rotation. Timmy watched it. Here and there in the dark sky, synthetic power-moons hovered to steal energy from the cosmos.

"They gonna feed us, anyhows," said Johnny Damokles, and turned on the faucet of a food conveyor. Hot, spicy-scented edibles poured forth, but Timmy wasn't interested. Not far from them, half-lost in the gray light, two giant semi-globes towered heavenwards. Tim stared at them. Apparently the Neptunians were building another power-moon to add to that whirling band above. He watched as squat figures moved up and down its side, then walked from the window in a fog. Damokles tried to engage him in conversation, but Timmy was too defeated. He fell asleep.

"Come on," he ordered, "your job is ready." He looked at Johnny Damokles. "Might as well use you, too. Get into your space suit." The little Greek obeyed.

The next seven hours passed as a nightmare for Timmy. For Johnny, working outside as a slave on the power-moon, they must have been pure hell.

Timmy returned to their room that evening to find a tired little Greek sprawled on the couch. "Work you hard, chum?"

Damokles groaned. A livid weal ran down the side of his face, where a blow had slammed his head about in his helmet. "We get these Neptune bums ... Timmy," he said.

"Sure thing, pal. But how?"

The Greek shrugged his shoulders. "They guards you close?"

"No ... but we couldn't get away without the ship."

"Yeah." Damokles' chin dropped on his chest. "I guess we gives up." But despite the Greek's apparent despair, he had an idea of some sort. Timmy Gordon knew it, but he also knew that Johnny was afraid to talk about it in a room where sound detectors might pick up any hint of escape. "Let's go to sleep, Johnny," he said.

"Yeah ... you stay your side of bed, too. Last night you kick me blacks and blue in rib."

Which was distinctly untrue.

But if that was the way Johnny wanted things ... it was distinctly QX with Timmy Gordon. He stretched himself on the narrow couch beside Johnny. For twenty minutes he seemed to doze, then began kicking about fretfully, and muttering as though in the clutch of a nightmare.

"That's right, Timmy," the little Greek whispered. "Keep her going. You kicks hard ... yells ... them spies are too busy watching you. I can talks."

Timmy's reply was another boot to Johnny's shin. "Go on," he whispered, then kicked again.

"Remember what I say to you in ships?"

"About what?"

"About fool gods Neptune ... cataltickic agents ... Aristotle."

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