It is indeed a question whether any single war act on the part of the people of Pennsylvania redounds so highly to their credit as this marvellous evidence of patriotic generosity.It was one form of patriotism to subscribe so huge a sum while the war was on and the guns were firing; it was quite another and a higher patriotism to subscribe and pay such a sum after the war was over!
Bok's position as State chairman of the United War Work Campaign made it necessary for him to follow authoritatively and closely the work of each of the eight different organizations represented in the fund.Because he felt he had to know what the Knights of Columbus, the Salvation Army, the Y.W.C.A., and the others were doing with the money he had been instrumental in collecting, and for which he felt, as chairman, responsible to the people of Pennsylvania, he learned to know their work just as thoroughly as he knew what the Y.M.C.A.was doing.
He had now seen and come into personal knowledge of the work of the Y.
M.C.A.from his Philadelphia point of vantage, with his official connection with it at New York headquarters; he had seen the work as it was done in the London and Paris headquarters; and he had seen the actual work in the American camps, the English rest-camps, back of the French lines, in the trenches, and as near the firing-line as he had been permitted to go.
He had, in short, seen the Y.M.C.A.function from every angle, but he had also seen the work of the other organizations in England and France, back of the lines and in the trenches.He found them all faulty--necessarily so.Each had endeavored to create an organization within an incredibly short space of time and in the face of adverse circumstances.Bok saw at once that the charge that the Y.M.C.A.was "falling down" in its work was as false as that the Salvation Army was doing "a marvellous work" and that the K.of C.was "efficient where others were incompetent," and that the Y.W.C.A.was "nowhere to be seen."The Salvation Army was unquestionably doing an excellent piece of work within a most limited area; it could not be on a wider scale, when one considered the limited personnel it had at its command.The work of the K.of C.was not a particle more or less efficient than the work of the other organizations.What it did, it strove to do well, but so did the others.The Y.W.C.A.made little claim about its work in France, since the United States Government would not, until nearly at the close of the war, allow women to be sent over in the uniforms of any of the war-work organizations.But no one can gainsay for a single moment the efficient service rendered by the Y.W.C.A.in its hostess-house work in the American camps; that work alone would have entitled it to the support of the American people.That of the Y.M.C.A.was on so large a scale that naturally its inefficiency was often in proportion to its magnitude.
Bok was in France when the storm of criticism against the Y.M.C.A.
broke out, and, as State chairman for Pennsylvania, it was his duty to meet the outcry when it came over to the United States.That the work of the Y.M.C.A.was faulty no one can deny.Bok saw the "holes" long before they were called to the attention of the public, but he also saw the almost impossible task, in face of prevailing difficulties, of caulking them up.No one who was not in France can form any conception of the practically insurmountable obstacles against which all the war-work organizations worked; and the larger the work the greater were the obstacles, naturally.That the Y.M.C.A.and the other similar agencies made mistakes is not the wonder so much as that they did not make more.The real marvel is that they did so much efficient work.For after we get a little farther away from the details and see the work of these agencies in its broader aspects, when we forget the lapses--which, after all, though irritating and regrettable, were not major--the record as a whole will stand as a most signal piece of volunteer service.
What was actually accomplished was nothing short of marvellous; and it is this fact that must be borne in mind; not the omissions, but the commissions.And when the American public gets that point of view--as it will, and, for that matter, is already beginning to do--the work of the American Y.M.C.A.will no longer suffer for its omissions, but will amaze and gladden by its accomplishments.As an American officer of high rank said to Bok at Chaumont headquarters: "The mind cannot take in what the war would have been without the 'Y.'" And that, in time, will be the universal American opinion, extended, in proportion to their work, to all the war-work agencies and the men and women who endured, suffered, and were killed in their service.
