The Anniversary of November 22

By Mrs. Najla Kfoury

This is the memory of heroism in the history of Lebanon — men, women, and children — and how splendid it is to celebrate this great anniversary while Lebanon today receives the messengers of free thought in the world and welcomes them to its soil, where the tree of freedom has begun to grow fertile and to ripen.

The anniversary of the twenty-second of November is the anniversary of a great event fit to change the face of the world — the anniversary of a struggle between right and falsehood in which victory was right's ally. For the first time a small people, stripped of iron and fire, won the day and put to shame a force armed with iron and fire, and came out upon the face of the world free.

On such a happy day as this the world's conscience awoke from its heedlessness, after lying stagnant in the depths of darkness a long time. What it saw appalled it: it saw a world ruled by evil and eaten away by greed, forsaking right and siding with force, worshipping matter and denying the spirit, exalting the strong and trampling the weak — man lording it over his brother man under a cover of names and colors, so that mankind, in consequence, was drowned in misery and pains and plunged into bloody slaughters that spare nothing and leave nothing.

On such a day as this, right marched in Lebanon's train; and Lebanon bade farewell to an era gone beyond recall, and welcomed an era hedged about with glory and escorted by honor and dignity, and set out in the procession of the free peoples, singing the songs of freedom and right.

Remembrance, on such feast days, has a great effect upon the soul of one who values it at its worth; enough that it wakens sleeping consciences and whets flagging wills. For the ruler it is an hour of dread reckoning, in which he examines his conscience and calls himself to account: has he done the duty laid upon him, and discharged in the fullest way the trust committed to him?

Was right his guide in what he says, and justice his leader in what he does?

Has he worked to build a good government that upholds right and casts down falsehood, that builds and keeps on building, as a great scholar of this age described it? "A government that builds up the individuals of the people by the facilities of life it organizes, by the advance it encourages along the road of progress, and by the freedom it grants to every individual and every group to perfect itself as seems best to it; that allows no class to extort from another and exploit it in a way social justice cannot accept; that sanctions neither the happiness of some at the misery of others, nor the surfeit of some while others go hungry — a government that sees its duty as building the whole people, not building one part of it to tear down another."

And if the people has a right over the government, it has in turn a duty toward the homeland.

O Lebanese!

Have you paid your share of your nation's mission? Have you helped to increase the homeland's moral and material wealth? Have you respected the law and bound yourself by its rulings? Have you performed the service within your power for the good of society? Have you sacrificed your private interest upon the altar of the public interest?

If you have done all of this, or some of it, then you are the homeland's dutiful son and its faithful soldier.