Newspaper Page Text
December, 1919
THE ATLANTIAN
3
The Atlantian
Box 118, Atlanta, Georgia
THE ATLANTIAN will alre free space to all Secret Societies and Labor
Organizations.
On the other hand, we pat everybody on notice when THE ATLANTIAN
makes a statement which we believe to be trae, and such statement goes
uncontroverted, we shall insist that it Is true.
tlCd* Published Monthly by The Atlantian Publishing Co.
Vol. XI DECEMBER, 1919 126
wholesale revival of religion, and Dr. Wilmer has written
much along the same line.
We may go farther than that and say that the world
needs and must have a wholesale acceptance of the teach
ings of Christ, and unless it comes to that there is no
hope for humanity. Christmas of 1919 finds us near the
bottom of the pit; therefore, there can be no better time
to start to climb the difficult mountain of righteousness
on the top of which lies the beautiful and illimitable
plateau of heavenly peace.
Let each join with others to start the upward move
ment.
Our Motto: “Pull for Atlanta or Pull Out/*
Christmas 1919
We come to the Christmas season of 1919 with the
whole world in a more unhappy state of mind, and with
more theatening conditions than any living man has ever
seen at any preceding Christmas season.
Statesmen, students, philosophers and economists
are all busy explaining the world wide unrest and seeking
remedies.
_A11 of them are failing in their efforts to show the
way out, and they are failing because they refuse to see
the obvious.
The simple explanation is that we are living in a
world where nations and individuals are trying-to get
ethical results from unethical practices. There are not
many impossibilities, but that is one of them.
The Christmas season celebrates the birth of the
Christ who gave to the world the only sound and simple
code of ethics it has ever had. The teachings embodied
in the Sermon on the Mount if applied in the daily lives
of the people would in six months revolutionize humanity,
and create such conditions that unrest would disappear,
and industry and contentment would reign. Why cannot
we do this?
Because o fthe beastly selfishness which is the domi
nant quality in our fives. We live in a world so completely
ruled by selfishness in our personal and national affairs
that we daily belie pur profession of being a Christian
nation and thus bring discredit upon the only faith which
has ever offered to humanity a way to the making of a
better world.
We know all this; if we persistently refuse to profit
by our knowledge we have no right to complain of the
evil conditions which are of our own creation. The trend
is obvious; if we persist in our unethical lives, and thus
repudiate the teachings of the Master, the end is certain,
and that end is destruction. That is the plain truth.
Bishop Candler has written -that the world must have a
Editorial Etchings
Ratify the League and Treaty
This Should Be Done At Once.
The world is not ready for a true Internationalism.
That is an obvious fact. The forward progress of hu
manity in things which are fundamental is as slow as the
march of a snail. It cannot at one stroke be speeded up
to railway swiftness.
The great mistake was made by the Peace Conference
of combining the League and Treaty into one document.
Each should have stood on its own merits. A second
error was made in undertaking to go too far with the
League in the present state of the world, and in promising
too much, By far the wiser plan would have been the
widening of the functions of the Hague Tribunal, and a
clear cut exposition of International Law.
The United States went into the war under the im
pulse of high and altruistic motives. The makers of the
League took advantage of this frame of mind to formu
late a doctrine which would leave the United States bur
dened with unreasonable obligations, and with the power
to care for our own sensibly lessened. Thus after doing
a notable part in the bringing about of the downfall of an
arrogant military autocracy, we awoke to find our allies
ready to lead us down with new and ill defined duties
which might piove of great injury to us.
The Senators who insisted on reservations, acted
the part of true Americans, and any man who doubts this,
has only to put into parallel columns the paragraphs of
the treaty to which the reservations apply, and the pro
posed reservations, then if he be of moderate intelligence,
he will see at a glance how much we stood to lose by the
Treaty as written, and how much we would gain by the
reservations. #
Many newspapers and individuals are shouting them
selves hoarse with charges of partisianship and insinua
tions of a yellow streak in the reservation Senators. No
one need be disturbed by the vaporings of these gentry
who either think wrong or do not think at all. The plain
American people, who have to do the fighting and the
paying, have, thanks to the reservation Senators, - been
given an opportunity to understand the League and Treaty
as it is written and the sober sense of a decided majority