Chapter I (4)

“Why, there are some of our friends so tender-footed and
so fearful of offending the majesty of Great Britain
that they do not want to retain any of these so-called
retaliatory provisions in this bill; and, yet, in violation
of every treaty obligation, we find that Great Britain has
not only been interfering with our commerce but is doing
the very things that this measure is intended to relieve
against; not only blacklisting our merchants but opening
and censoring our mails. Only a few days ago I got a letter
from a constituent of mine inclosing a letter from his
good old mother in Germany, who wrote him that she had not
heard from him for months, and yet he has been writing to
her every week. Why? Because on the plea of military or
other necessity Great Britain is invading the mails of the
United States even when addressed to neutrals or neutral
countries, and taking from the mail pouches private letters
and every other kind, except such as may be protected not
by international law--because they violate international
law--but by special agreement between that country and
this; not only letters but drafts and money and papers and
everything else. I have letters from a prominent man in
Pennsylvania who tells me that letters containing orders
to his house from neutral countries are opened, the orders
taken out and sent to British manufacturing establishments,
and there filled; and the Government that has done these
things has the impudence, as suggested by the letter
addressed to the Senator from Washington, to insist that
if we enact such legislation as that proposed and which
we deem necessary to protect our people and our country,
she will retaliate in some way. She can not retaliate
any worse than she has done, Mr. President, without law,
without authority, and in violation of every national and
international right.

“I know that there are Senators here who do not agree with
me. I heard a distinguished gentleman say tonight that
Great Britain was fighting our battles. If that be true,
does she find it necessary, in fighting our battles, to
destroy our commerce, to rifle our mail sacks, to take our
money, to prevent our intercourse with neutrals, and to do
everything or anything to our injury, whether sanctioned by
the laws of nations or in spite of them?

“I get tired of hearing this, Mr. President. Until the
United States has the courage that Great Britain has always
had to assert her rights and dare maintain them, the United
States may expect to be imposed upon. One of my reasons
for advocating preparation for self-defense was to let
the world know that from this time on the United States
expected to protect her citizens and her country and her
country’s interests at all hazards; and the very fact
that she is prepared to assert those rights when occasion
requires and demands is all that it will be necessary to
do. She will never have to utilize her resources for war.

“Mr. President, I serve notice on the Senate now that I
propose to introduce a bill at the next session of Congress
embodying the provision under consideration and try to
call it to the attention of the Senate, and, if necessary,
to the attention of the country, and to show the country
who is responsible for this base surrender of our rights
to the demands of the Canadian Government. =I want to
protest as loudly as I can against Sir Joseph Pope or any
other Canadian official or the representatives of any
other foreign Government coming over here, either to the
Executive Chambers or to the Department of State or to any
other department of the Government, unless duly accredited,
and interfering with the enactment of laws by the American
Congress that the American people feel are necessary for
their protection and the protection of their commerce. I
think if any American citizen ever dared to enter upon such
a course without an invitation, there ought to be some way
found to punish him for attempting to interfere with the
legislation proposed by a foreign government in its own way
and for its own purposes.=”

Was the Senator, in the closing sentence, referring to any particular American citizen--to a citizen acting as the attorney for a foreign government and sustaining close relations to a distinguished member of the Cabinet?

On September 7 Senator Williams, of Mississippi, undertook to defend the Canadian Government, and incidentally described a hypothetical condition which eventually became a reality as to the German element--that of their children killing the children of their kin, against which, as to Canada, Williams forefended with religious protestations.

Mr. WILLIAMS. Mr. President, there is just one thing that
even my friend George Chamberlain cannot do. He cannot
create war between us and the men and the women and the
children of Canada. =We are too near akin to one another
in blood and in language and in literature and in law and
in everything else that makes men and women akin to one
another for that.=

=The greatest crime that the world could possibly witness
would be a war between the people of the United States
and the people of Canada. It is unthinkable from a sane
man’s standpoint, no matter what happens, no matter what
occurs....=

The Senator says that we assert and we dare to maintain
our rights. Of course we do. =So do they assert and so do
they dare maintain their rights, and they are weaker than
we.= All the more reason why we should be considerate in
our treatment of them, and by God’s blessing we are going
to be. We are not hunting retaliation with Canada, either
from her ports or from ours. We are seeking nothing except
justice in the world.

There is one more thing to be said, Mr. President. A
pathway of commercial retaliation is a pathway of war. In
the long run it means that. It can not mean anything else.
What we want is the old Democratic standpoint of the utmost
free-trade relations with everybody on the earth. The
utmost they grant us we ought to grant them. That spells
peace; that spells amity; that spells friendship. The
opposite course spells war in the long run, and to attempt
to convert these 3,000 miles of boundary between us and
Canada into an area of retaliation and trade hostility is
to convert it ultimately into a relationship of war.

I, for one, have been opposed to it all the time, and I am
opposed to it now. =I can not conceive of a greater crime
than having our children kill the children of the Canadians
or have their children kill our children in an absolutely
useless species of hostility. If we start with trade
hostilities, we will wind up with warlike hostilities.=

Senator Williams was one of the foremost in defending Great Britain and inciting to war with Germany. Senator Chamberlain had said that there was entirely too much Toryism in the Senate as well as in the House; but though he had mentioned no names, the Toryism of which he had referred stood self-revealed the next day.

=France’s Friendship for the United States.=--The “French and Indian wars” with which the American settlers had to contend in the early history of the colonies long antedated the Revolution, and massacres were instigated by French policy of conquest and retaliation. In the Revolution a number of patriotic Frenchmen, nursing a long grievance against France’s ancient enemy, England, saw opportunity to enfeeble their country’s hated rival. Encouraged by Frederick the Great, who had a score to settle with England for the treachery which Bute had practiced against him in paying secret subsidies to Frederick’s enemy, Austria, while England was allied with him, by heroic efforts they succeeded in sending succor to the colonies in the form of troops (many of them Germans) under Lafayette. This is so well understood that the American historian, Benson J. Lossing, specifically points out in his writings what he calls the “superstition” that we owe our “being as a nation to the generosity of the French monarch and the gallantry of French warriors.” Revealing the motives that governed France, he writes:

In the Seven Years War, which ended with the treaty of
1763, France had been thoroughly humbled by England.
Her pride had been wounded. She had been shorn of vast
possessions in America and Asia. She had been compelled, by
the terms of the treaty, to cast down the fortifications
of Dunkirk and to submit forever to the presence of an
English commissioner, without whose consent not a single
paving stone might be moved on the quay or in the harbor
of a French maritime city. This was an insult too grievous
to be borne with equanimity. Its keenness was maintained
by the tone of English diplomacy, which was that of a
conqueror--harsh, arrogant, and often uncivil. A desire for
relief from the shame became a vital principle of French
policy, =and the most sleepless vigilance was maintained
for the discovery of an opportunity to avenge the injury
and efface the mortification=.

The quarrel between Great Britain and her colonies,
which rapidly assumed the phase of contest after the
port of Boston was closed, early in the summer of 1774,
attracted the notice and stimulated the hope of the French
government. But it seemed hardly possible for a few
colonists to hold a successful or even effective contest
with powerful England--“the mistress of the seas;” and it
was not until the proceedings of the First Continental
Congress had been read in Europe, the skirmish at Lexington
and the capture of Ticonderoga had occurred, and the Second
Congress had met, thrown down the gauntlet of defiance at
the feet of the British ministry and been proclaimed to be
“rebels” that the French cabinet saw gleams of sure promise
that England’s present trouble would be sufficiently
serious to give France the coveted opportunity to strike
her a damaging blow.

Lossing sums up our debt to France in the following words:

That all assistance was afforded, primarily, as a part of a
State policy for the benefit of France;

That the French people as such never assisted the
Americans; for the French democracy did not comprehend
the nature of the struggle, and had no opportunity for
expression, and the aristocracy, like the government, had
no sympathy with their cause;

That the first and most needed assistance was from a French
citizen (Beaumarchais), favored by his government for State
purposes, who hoped to help himself and his government;

That, with the exception of the services of Lafayette and
a few other Frenchmen, at all times, and those of the army
under Rochambeau, and the navy under De Grasse, for a few
weeks in the seventh year of the struggle, the Americans
derived no material aid from the French;

That the moral support offered by the alliance was
injurious because it was more than counterpoised by the
relaxation of effort and vigilance which a reliance upon
others is calculated to inspire, and the creation of hopes
which were followed by disappointment;

That the advantages gained by the French over the English,
because of their co-operation with the Americans, were
equivalent to any which the Americans acquired by the
alliance;

That neither party then rendered assistance to the other
because of any good will mutually existing, but as a means
of securing mutual benefits; and

That the Americans would doubtless have secured their
independence and peace sooner without their entanglements
with the French than with it.

A candid consideration of these facts, in the light of
present knowledge on the subject, compels us to conclude
that there is no debt of gratitude due from Americans to
France for services in securing their independence of Great
Britain which is not cancelled by the services done by the
Americans at the same time in securing for France important
advantages over Great Britain. And when we consider these
facts and the conduct of the French toward us during a
large portion of the final decade of the last century, and
of the decade of this just closed--=the hostile attitude,
in our national infancy, of the inflated Directory,
sustained by the French people, and the equally hostile
attitude, in the hour of our greatest national distress, of
the imperial cabinet, also sustained by the French people,
Americans cannot be expected to endure with absolute
complacency the egotism which untruthfully asserts that
they owe their existence as a nation to the generosity and
valor of the French=.

Though President Wilson brought back from Paris a treaty of alliance between the United States, England and France, which he asked the Senate, on July 29, 1919, to ratify, and declared that “we are bound to France by ties of friendship which we have always regarded and shall always regard as peculiarly sacred,” he stated in a much earlier work, “The State,” that though the Congress at Philadelphia had explicitly commanded Franklin, Adams and Jay, the American commissioners, to be guided by the wishes of the French court in the peace negotiations, “it proved impracticable, nevertheless, to act with France; for she conducted herself, not as the ingenuous friend of the United States, but only as the enemy of England, and, as first and always, a subtle strategist for her own interests and advantage. The American commissioners were not tricked, and came to terms separately with the English.”

Having accomplished the object of giving aid in humbling England through the loss of her colonies, the French, far from remaining our friends, became our enemies, and from 1797 to 1835 we find the messages of the Presidents abounding in complaints of the treatment France was according our young merchant marine on the high seas. In 1798 we found ourselves in a state of war with France. “Such an outburst had not been known,” says the historian, Elson, “since the Battle of Lexington.” Patriotic songs were written, and one of these, “Hail, Columbia,” still lives in our literature. Washington was again called to the command of the American army, but beyond some engagements at sea, no blows were actually struck.

But ere long France was again at her old tricks. In 1851 we were on the eve of war over the Hawaiian Islands, which France had seized, though knowing that she could never hold them save as the result of a successful war. On June 18, 1851, Secretary of State Webster instructed the American minister in Paris to say that the further enforcement of the French demands against Hawaii “would tend seriously to disturb our friendly relations with the French government.”

The third conspicuous instance of France’s persistent enmity to us was at a time when President Lincoln was harrassed by the distressing events of the most critical hours of the rebellion and the possibility of England and France together undertaking the cause of the Confederacy. England had been approached by the Emperor, Napoleon III, with a proposal for an alliance, and in both countries the Union cause was at its lowest ebb.

Justin McCarthy in his “History of Our Own Times” (II, p. 231) says: “The Southern scheme found support only in England and in France. In all other European countries the sympathy of the people and government alike went with the North.... Assurances of friendship came from all civilized countries to the Northern States except from England and France alone.”

While the Northern and Southern States were engaged in a death grapple, Napoleon III was defying the Monroe Doctrine by invading Mexico, and in 1862 was sending instructions to the French general, Forey, as follows:

People will ask you why we sacrifice men and money to
establish a government in Mexico. In the present state of
civilization the development of America can no longer be
a matter of indifference to Europe.... =It is not at all
to our interest that they should come in possession of the
entire Gulf of Mexico, to rule from there the destinies of
the Antilles and South America, and control the products of
the New World.=

After Lee’s surrender General Slaughter of the Confederate army opened negotiations with the French Marshal Bazaine for the transfer of 25,000 Confederate soldiers to Mexico, and many distinguished Confederate officers cast their lot with the French to establish Maximilian on the throne. General Price was commissioned to recruit an imperial army in the Confederate States. Governor Harris of Tennessee and other Americans naturalized as Mexicans and now took the lead in a colonization scheme of vast proportions. The North became thoroughly alarmed. A French army co-operating with Confederate expatriates could not be tolerated on the Mexican border.

The government at Washington lodged an emphatic protest with the French government, and an army of observation of 50,000 men under General Sheridan was dispatched to the Rio Grande, ready to cross into Mexico and attack Bazaine at a moment’s notice. =The American minister in Paris was instructed by Seward to insist on a withdrawal of the French forces from Mexico, and as the French government was in no position to engage in a war in a distant country against a veteran army of a million men it was forced to yield.=

“The Emperor of the French,” writes McCarthy (p. 231), “fully believed that the Southern cause was sure to triumph, and that the Union would be broken up; he was even willing to hasten what he assumed to be the unavoidable end. He was anxious that England should join with him in some measures to facilitate the success of the South by recognizing the Government of the Southern Confederation. He got up the Mexican intervention, which assuredly he would never have attempted if he had not been persuaded that the Union was on the eve of disruption.”

The French populace was enthusiastically on the side of Napoleon in the Mexican adventure, as attested by the proceedings in the French legislature, especially by the scenes in the Senate, February 24, 1862, and in the Corps Legislatif, June 26 of the same year, when Billault, Minister of Foreign Affairs, spoke on French aims in Mexico. On March 23, 1865, Druyn de Lluys, the French Premier, notified Mr. Seward, our Secretary of State, that American intervention in favor of Juarez, the Mexican patriot, =would lead to a declaration of war on the part of France=. The necessary military preparations had been made by Marshal Bazaine, who, as related by Paul Garlot in “L’Empire de Maximilian” (Paris, 1890), had erected “fortified supports” at the United States frontier and made certain “arrangements” with Confederate leaders.

=“In our dark hours and the great convulsions of our war,” said Charles Sumner, then chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations in the Senate, in New York, September 11, 1863, “France is forgetting her traditions.”=

=Benjamin Franklin.=--In his pointed comments on the disfavor with which practical politicians regard the independent voter in politics, Prof. A. B. Faust, of Cornell University, in his valuable work, “The German Element in the United States,” says of conditions in Pennsylvania preceding the Revolution: “The Germans, with few exceptions, could not be relied upon either by demagogues or by astute party men to vote consistently with their party organization. The politician catering to the German vote often found himself strangely deceived. He never expected that the German might think for himself and vote as seemed right to him. The politician in his wrath would declare the Germans politically incapable. From his point of view they were un-American. They did not cling to one party. The fact of the matter is, they were independent voters, and they appeared as such at a very early period. Benjamin Franklin made the discovery before the Revolutionary War, and he was provoked to an extent surprising in that suave diplomatist.” In a letter to Peter Collinson, dated Philadelphia, May 9, 1753, Franklin says:

I am perfectly of your mind that measures of great temper
are necessary with the Germans, and am not without
apprehension that through their indiscretion, or ours, or
both, great disorders may one day among us.

Then he speaks of the ignorance of the Germans, their incapability of using the English language, the impossibility of removing their prejudices--“not being used to liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it,” etc.

They are under no restraint from any ecclesiastical
government; they behave, however, submissively enough to
the civil government, which I wish they may continue to do,
for I remember when they modestly declined to meddle in our
elections, but now they come in droves and carry all before
them except in one or two counties.

The last sentence, comments Faust, betrays the learned writer of the letter; the uncertainty of their votes is the cause for his accusations of ignorance and prejudice.

On the point of ignorance we get contradictory evidence in the same letter. “Few of their children in the country know English. They import many books from Germany and of the six printing houses in the province, two are entirely German, two are half-German, half English, and but two entirely English. (This large use and production of books disproves want of education. Their lack of familiarity with the English language was popularly looked upon as ignorance.--Faust.) They have one German newspaper and one half German. Advertisements intended to be general are now printed in Dutch (German) and English. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places, only German. They begin of late to make all their bonds and other legal instruments in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our courts, where the German business so increases that there is continued need of interpreters; and I suppose within a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our legislators what the other half say. In short, unless the stream of importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so outnumber us that the advantages we have will, in my opinion, be not able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”

Illustration: GERMAN PIONEERS
Group of the Monument Erected to the Memory of the Settlers
of Germantown, Pa., by Albert Jaegers.

It is obvious from many indications that Benjamin Franklin did not adhere to his point of view and learned to regard the Germans in a far more favorable light than in 1753, twenty-three years before the Declaration of Independence. The Revolution, as Bancroft relates, found no Tories among the German settlers of Pennsylvania, but a unanimous sentiment for independence, and their full quota of fighting men in the American ranks.

When queried before the English Parliament concerning the dissatisfaction of the Americans with the Stamp Act, he was asked how many Germans were in Pennsylvania. His answer was, “About one-third of the whole population, but I cannot tell with certainty.” Again the question was put whether any part of them had seen service in Europe. He answered, “Many, as well in Europe as America.”

When asked whether they were as dissatisfied with the Stamp Act as the native population, he said, “Yes, even more, as they are justified, because in many cases they must pay double for their stamp paper and parchments.”

If the German element felt the injustice of the Stamp Act more keenly than their neighbors, the conclusion is patent that they could not have been ignorant, as the illiterate and ignorant were least affected by its harshness. Even the honor of being the first printer of German books belongs to Franklin, for he furnished three volumes of mystical songs in German for Conrad Beissel, 1730-36. When the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia (1743) agitated for the foundation of the “Public Academy of the City of Philadelphia,” the institution that later developed into the University of Pennsylvania, Franklin designed its curriculum and recommended the study of German and French, besides English. In 1766 he attended a meeting of the Royal Society of Science in Göttingen while on a trip through Germany and visited Dr. Hartmann in Hanover to see his apparatus for electrical experiments. He was made a member of the Göttingen learned society.

Conclusive proof of Franklin’s change of view is furnished by his testimony before a committee of the British House of Commons in 1766. Referring to the Germans, who, he said, constituted about one-third of the population of 160,000 whites in Pennsylvania, he described them as “a people who brought with them the greatest of wealth--industry and integrity, and characters that had been superpoised and developed by years of suffering and persecution.” (Penn. Hist. Magazine, iv, 3.)

=Frederick the Great and the American Colonies.=--Because Frederick the Great was a Hohenzollern and a Prussian, it became the fashion early in the course of the war to frown upon all mention of his connection with the revolutionary struggle of our American forefathers, and his statue before the military college, which was unveiled with so much ceremony during President Roosevelt’s term, was discreetly taken from its pediment and consigned to the obscurity of a cellar as soon as we entered the war. Yet Frederick was the sincere friend of the Colonies and contributed largely if not vitally to the success of the struggle for American independence. The evidence rests upon something better than tradition. A more just opinion of his interest in the success of the Colonies than has been expressed of late by his detractors is contained in the works of English and American writers of history having access to the facts, who were not under the spell of active belligerency and the influence of a propaganda that has magically transformed George III into a “German king.”

Had Russia in 1778 formed an alliance with England, Russian troops would have swelled the forces arrayed against the American patriots to such proportions that the result of the struggle presumably would have been different. The influence of Prussia in that relation is a chapter of history practically closed to most students. But for immense bribes to Count Panin, Catherine the Great’s premier, paid by Frederick the Great, as testified by British authorities, Russia would have extended aid to England in her struggle with the Colonies which might have proved decisive.

It was England’s interest to secure, if possible, the alliance of Russia, and, as in the Seven Years War, to involve France in continental complications. In 1778 there seemed every reason to expect the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. The continuance of the war gave an increased importance to an alliance with Russia, and while the Dutch appealed to Catherine on the ground that Great Britain had broken with Holland solely on account of the armed neutrality, the English government offered to hand over Minorca as the price of a convention.

In 1778 Catherine was approached by the English government through Sir James Harris and invited to make a defensive and offensive alliance. But the opposition of the Premier, Nikolai Ivanovich, Count Panin, influenced by Frederick the Great, prevented any rapprochement between England and Russia, and Catherine declared her inability to join England against France unless the English government bound itself to support her against the Turks.

“The Prussian party, headed by Panin at St. Petersburg,” writes Arthur Hassall, M. A., in “The Balance of Power, 1715-1789,” p. 338; (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907), “had won its last triumph, and all chance for an Anglo-Russian alliance had for the moment disappeared.... Since 1764 Count Panin had been the head of the Prussian party at the Russian capital, and the Prussian alliance had been the keystone of Catherine’s policy.... =Frederick the Great, partly by immense bribes to Panin, had kept Catherine true to the existing political system, and had contributed to prevent Russian assistance from being given to England during the American struggle.=” (P. 361.)

Writing to his minister in Paris, Goltz, in August and September, 1777, Frederick said: “You can assure M. de Maurepas that I have no connection whatever with England, nor do I grudge France any advantage she may gain in the war with the Colonies.... Her first interest requires the enfeeblement of Great Britain, and the way to do this is to make it lose its colonies in America.... The present opportunity is more favorable than ever before existed, and more favorable than is likely to occur in three centuries.... The independence of the colonies will be worth to France all which the war will cost.”

Bancroft writes: “While Frederick was encouraging France to strike a decisive blow in favor of the United States, their cause found an efficient advocate in Marie Antoinette.” On April 7, 1777, Frederick wrote: “France knows perfectly well that it has absolutely nothing to apprehend from me in case of war with England.... =If it= (the English crown) =would give me all the millions possible I would not furnish it two small files of my troops to serve against the colonies.= Neither can it expect from me a guaranty of its electorate of Hanover.”

Bancroft comments: “The people of England cherished the fame of the Prussian king as in some measure their own. Not aware how basely Bute had betrayed him, they unanimously desired the renewal of his alliance; and the ministry sought to open the way for it through his envoy in France.” Frederick replied, “No man is further removed than myself from having connections with England. We will remain on the same footing on which we are with her.” Bancroft says: “Frederick expressed more freely his sympathy with the United States.”

The port of Emden could not receive their cruisers for want of a fleet or a fort to defend them from insult; =but he offered them an asylum in the Baltic at Danzig=. He attempted, though in vain, to dissuade the Prince of Anspach from furnishing troops to England, and he forbade the subsidiary troops both of Anspach and Hesse to pass through his domains. The prohibition which was made as public as possible, and just as the news arrived of the surrender of Burgoyne, resounded through Europe; and he announced to the Americans that it was given him “to testify his good will to them.”

Every facility was afforded to the American commissioners to purchase and ship arms from Prussia. Before the end of 1777 he promised not to be the last to recognize the independence of the United States, and in January, 1778, his minister, Schulenburg, wrote officially to one of the commissioners in Paris: “The king desires that your generous efforts may be crowned with complete success. He will not hesitate to recognize your independency when France, which is more directly interested in the event of the contest, shall have given the example.”

“I have no wish to dissemble,” Frederick wrote in answer to the suggestion of an English alliance; “whatever pains may be taken, I will never lend myself to an alliance with England. I am not like so many German princes, to be gained for money.” Of the Landgrave of Hesse, he said: “Do not attribute his education to me. Were he a graduate of my school he would never have sold his subjects to the English as they drive cattle to the shambles. He a preceptor of sovereigns? The sordid passion for gain is the only motive of his vile procedure.”

Foerster, in “Friederich der Grosse” (1871, viii) quotes the great King as follows: “This subject leads me to speak of princes who conduct a dishonorable traffic in the blood of their people. Their troops belong to the highest bidder. It is a sort of auction at which those paying the highest subsidies lead the soldiers of these unworthy rulers to the shambles. Such princes ought to blush at their baseness in selling the lives of people whom, as fathers of their countries, they ought to protect. These little tyrants should hear the opinion of mankind, which is one of contempt for the misuse of their power.”

=The “Fourteen Points.”=--On January 8, 1917, less than sixty days before we found ourselves in a state of war with Germany, President Wilson presented to Congress the following fourteen specific considerations as necessary to world peace:

1. Open covenants of peace without private international understandings.

2. Absolute freedom of the seas in peace or war, except as they may be closed by international action.

3. Removal of all economic barriers and establishment of equality of trade conditions among nations consenting to peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

4. Guarantees for the reduction of national armaments at the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

5. Impartial adjustment of all colonial claims based upon the principle that the peoples concerned shall have equal weight with the interest of the government.

6. Evacuation of all Russian territory and opportunity for Russia’s political development.

7. Evacuation of Belgium without any attempt to limit her sovereignty.

8. All French territory to be freed and restored, and France must have righted the wrong done in the taking of Alsace-Lorraine.

9. Readjustment of Italy’s frontiers along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

10. Freest opportunity for the autonomous development of the peoples of Austria-Hungary.

11. Evacuation of Rumania, Servia and Montenegro, with access to the sea for Servia, and international guarantees of economic and political independence and territorial integrity of the Balkan States.

12. Secure sovereignty for Turkey’s portion of the Ottoman Empire, but with other nationalities under Turkey’s rule assured security of life and opportunity for autonomous development, with the Dardanelles permanently opened to all nations.

13. Establishment of an independent Polish State, including territories inhabited by indisputably Polish population, with free access to the sea and political and economic independence and territorial integrity guaranteed by international covenant.

14. General association of nations under specific covenants for mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to large and small states alike.

This was the programme laid down for the attainment of peace and was accepted by both sides, the Allied powers as well as Germany and Austria-Hungary.

The total disregard of the Fourteen Points in the peace treaty proved a grievous disappointment to the majority of the thinking people of America. In the final analysis of the work of the Paris peace conference it was found that we had achieved not a single point of our programme, except as to the last provision, from which evolved the so-called League of Nations, subsequently defeated in the Senate.

Instead of “open covenants openly arrived at,” the treaty was made in secret conference; we did not gain the freedom of the seas, but helped Great Britain to strengthen her command of the seas by eliminating her greatest rival; we witnessed no removal of economic barriers--not even among the Allies, as the President himself recommended an American tariff on dyes; disarmament was decreed for Germany and Austria only; self-determination of small nations became a dead letter at once as to Ireland, German Austria, the German Tyrol, Danzig, Egypt, India, the Boers, Korea, Persia, and numerous others, especially where the question involved the self-determination of Germans; Hungary’s borders were at once invaded by Rumania, Serbia and Czecho-Slovakia; Russia was not permitted to determine her own fate, as Kolchak was formally recognized and supported by the powers; Belgium remains a vassal of England and France; in addition to righting the wrong of 1871 by the recession of Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar Valley was taken away from Germany and a plebiscite was ordered in Schleswig, Silesia, and German-Poland under the guns of the Entente; Italy’s borders were not readjusted along national lines, for the Brenner Pass, the Voralsberg, parts of Dalmatia and a lease on Fiume provided; the autonomous development of Austria-Hungary was interpreted to mean that the German-speaking part of Austria was forbidden to unite with Germany; the independence of the Balkan States was made subject to the invisible government of the Big Four; autonomy for Turkish vassal states and the internationalization of the Dardanelles was construed to mean that these States should become mandatories of the Allies and the strait to be under Allied control; Polish freedom celebrated its advent with Jewish pogroms, while the League of Nations became a league of victors, in which Japan was bribed to enter by the cession to her of the Shantung peninsula.

“Germany has accepted President Wilson’s fourteen points,” said Dr. Mathias Erzberger, “but so have the Allies.”

That President Wilson fully recognized his responsibility and that of his European associates under the Fourteen Points is shown by his own statement. On December 2, 1918, he said in addressing Congress:

“=The Allied Governments have accepted the bases of peace which I outlined to the Congress on the 8th of January last, as the Central Empires also have=, and very reasonably desire my personal counsel in their interpretation and application, and it is highly desirable that I should give it =in order that the sincere desire of our government to contribute without selfish aims of any kind to settlements that will be of common benefit to all the nations concerned may be fully manifest=.”

In an interview printed in the Paris “Temps” of March 25, 1919, Count Bernstorff, former Ambassador to the United States, said:

“The armistice of November 11 was signed when all the Powers interested had accepted the program of peace proposed by President Wilson. Germany is determined to keep to this agreement, which history will regard, in a way, as the conclusion of a preliminary peace. She herself is ready to submit to the conditions arising from it, and she expects all the interested Powers to do the same.”

The President’s reversal was diplomatically covered under various specious pretexts by the staff of English journalists at the peace conference. Sir J. Foster Frazer put it this way: “Mr. Wilson has broadened in vision since he came to Paris. He has abandoned his purely national point of view.”

The same writer discoursed entertainingly of the methods pursued in the conference. “Except at intervals,” he wrote, “the conferences are not in public, that is when a certain number of journalists are permitted to be present. The great things are debated in private, and at these private conversations in M. Pichon’s room at the French Foreign Office, the full representation of the five powers is not in attendance.... The full conferences of the seventy delegates will have but little option but to acquiesce with the conclusion of the ten.... It is a perfectly open secret that the three men who are ‘running the show’ are M. Clemenceau, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George.”

The noble writer frankly admits that the conferences revolved around the secret treaties among the Allies instead of the Fourteen Points. He reports:

“We already know there were three secret treaties made
during the war and to all of which Great Britain was a
party; (1) conceding to Italy the Dalmatian coast in return
for her help, (2) the concession of the former German
islands in the North Pacific to Japan, (3) the promise of
Damascus to the King of Hedjaz.”

Again he says: “Japan is in possession of the Marshall and Caroline groups of islands in the Pacific, and has a document signed by both France and Britain that she shall retain them.”

So much for “open covenants openly arrived at,” though they do not cover all the secret pacts which determined the conditions of peace.

Only once Mr. Wilson rose to the importance of his mission, when he declared that Fiume must go to the Jugo-Slav Republic. His announcement was soon followed by an invasion of Fiume under d’Annunzio, the Italian poet-patriot, with the apparent secret connivance of our associates in the war.

At the peace conference, when it was Germany’s turn to be heard, it was decided that the interests of all concerned were best served by precluding any discussion, and the German delegates, with revolution and starvation in their back, and with arms wrested from their hands by a promise, were left no alternative but to affix their signatures to the most violent peace treaty ever consummated. The commission, headed by Brockdorf-Rantzau and Scheidemann, resigned rather than sign, and a new delegation was named, which signed the treaty without being given an opportunity to discuss it. In the streets the German delegates were stoned.

Thus was realized the golden promise held out in the speech Mr. Wilson made on the very day that Congress met to declare war:

“=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 the 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 people were
nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked
and waged in the interests of dynasties or of little groups
of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow
men as pawns and tools.”

When Germany, in 1871, had France prostrate at her feet, the French people were represented at the peace conference by their statesmen, just as France was represented at the Peace of Vienna after the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Mr. Wilson had said peace must not be determined as it was in the Congress of Vienna. Sir Foster Frazer furnishes the answer. In 1871 the terms of peace were arranged by Bismarck on one side and a full delegation of French statesmen on the other. Bismarck relented so far as to release back to France the great fortress of Belfort, claiming only the recession of Alsace-Lorraine and a war indemnity of five billion francs. So far from seeking to crush France, everything possible on the German side was done to enable her to recover from the war, and no sooner had Paris surrendered, than trainloads of foodstuffs were rushed into the city by the Germans to feed the starving population.

The European allies had first starved Germany, with a loss of 1,000,000 souls by famine, then severed portions of her territory whose possession antedated the American Revolution, on the ground of Mr. Wilson’s point in behalf of the self-determination of small nations, and on top of all left the country in helpless vassalage to her enemies, under a war indemnity that staggers humanity. Erzberger cried out in despair:

“I appeal to the conscience of America by reminding her of the American famine conditions in the years 1862-65. At that time it was Germany who sprang to America’s aid, and steadied her, sending her not only money, but clothes, shoes and machinery as well, thus making it possible for the United States to recuperate economically.

“Today, after half a century, the situation is reversed. Germany needs American wheat, fats, meats, gasoline, cotton and copper.

“Germany’s credit is low. If America today stood by Germany as Germany stood by America fifty years ago, she could furnish us foodstuffs and raw materials against German credits and thus help us to work ourselves out of debt--and, besides, make money in doing so.

“The German people cannot live on the promises they are getting.”

=Fritchie, Barbara.=--Immortalized by Whittier in a patriotic poem bearing her name, in which her defense of the Union flag during the Civil War is celebrated, came of an old German family which settled in Pennsylvania in colonial times, and her own life spanned the two great crises in the history of her country, the founding of the republic and the struggle for the preservation of the Union. She was born in Lancaster, Pa., December 3, 1766. Her maiden name was Hauser.

=First Germans in Virginia.=--Jamestown, Va., the cradle of Anglo-Saxon America, is the place where the Germans are met with for the first time. The earliest incidents on record are cases of imported contract laborers. Those sent to Virginia in 1608 were skilled workmen, glass-blowers. Capt. John Smith (“John Smith, the Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, the Summer Isles,” London, 1624, p. 94), characterizing his men, gives the following account of them: “labourers ... that neuer did know what a dayes work was: except the Dutch-men (Germans) and Poles, and some dozen others.” In 1620 four millwrights from Hamburg were sent to the same settlement to erect saw mills. (“The Records of the Virginia Company,” ed. S. M. Kingsbury, Washington, 1906, I, pp. 368, 372, 428.) In England timber was still sawed by hand. (Edward Eggleston, “The Beginners of a Nation,” New York, 1896, p. 82.) The Germans who settled in the Cavalier colony in large numbers about the middle of the seventeenth century seem to have been attracted chiefly by the profitable tobacco business. The most highly educated citizen of Northampton county in 1657 was probably Dr. George Nicholas Hacke, a native of Cologne. (Philip Alexander Brue, “Social Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century,” Richmond, Va., 1907, p. 260.) Thomas Harmanson, founder of one of the most prominent Eastern Shore families, a native of Brandenburg, was naturalized October 24, 1634, by an act of the Assembly. (William and Mary College Quarterly, ed. L. G. Tyler. Williamsburg. Va., I, 1892, p. 192.) Johann Sigismund Cluverius, owner of a considerable estate in York County, was ostensibly also of German birth. (From “The First Germans in North America and the German Element of New Netherlands,” by Carl Lohr, G. E. Stechert & Co., New York, 1912.)

=First German Newspapers.=--The oldest German newspaper in the U. S., the weekly “Republikaner,” at Allentown, Pa., ceased publication December 21, 1915, after an existence of 150 years. Another old paper in the German language, the “Reading Adler” ceased in 1913, after continuous publication since November 29, 1796.

=German Americans in Art, Science and Literature.=--An analysis of a comparatively recent edition of “Who’s Who in America” shows a list of 385 German-born persons in the United States who have achieved fame in art, science and literature, against a total of 424 English-born persons so distinguished, a remarkable bit of evidence, considering that the former were initially handicapped by the necessity of having to learn a new language in their struggle for recognition. Nor does this list include a number of Germans credited to Austro-Hungary by reason of their birth.

Dating back to the early decades of 1600 down to the present day, the German element has produced a formidable literature, ranging from travel descriptions to political works, like Schurz’s “Life of Henry Clay,” von Holst’s important work on American constitutional government, George von Bosse’s comprehensive volume on the German element, A. B. Faust’s “The German Element in the United States,” Seidensticker’s and Kapp’s books on the early settlements of Pennsylvania and New York, and further including scientific books by eminent authorities, original explorations, discussions of the fauna and zoology of certain regions, novels and contributions to the poetry of America in both languages.

One of the most active minds in political circles was Carl Nordhoff, who came to the United States with his father in 1835 at the age of five, and in his later years represented the New York “Herald” as its Washington correspondent through numerous sessions of Congress. At the age of nineteen he enlisted in the United States Navy, visited many parts of the world during his term of three years’ service, and after publishing some books about the sea, he worked for many years for Harper Brothers in a literary capacity and for ten years was employed in the editorial department of the New York “Evening Post.” In the interval he published several books, notably his popular “Politics for Young Americans” and then acted as Washington correspondent of the New York “Herald.” His chief literary work was published in 1876 as the result of a six months tour of the South, “The Cotton States,” in which he exposed the Republican misrule in the South.

While Steinmetz, Mergenthaler and Berliner rank high among American inventors, Herman George Scheffauer, George Sylvester Viereck and Herman Hagedorn are among the foremost poets of the present day, to cite those writing in the English language, without taking account of a generation of German-writing poets of the distinguished lineage of Conrad Kretz and Konrad Nies. Theodore Dreiser is one of the best-known novelists. Bret Harte had a strong German strain in his blood; Bayard Taylor had a German mother; the second name in Oliver Wendell Holmes indicates German relationship; Joaquin Miller was of German extraction; Owen Wister owns to German antecedance, while one of America’s greatest actors, Edwin Forrest, was the son of a German mother, and Mary Anderson is likewise credited with this racial admixture; Maude Powell, the famous violinist, had a German mother to whom she attributed her genius for music.

The greatest American historical painter is still Emanuel Leutze, whose “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “Westward the Star of Empire” are among the most cherished art possessions of the American people. Save Remington, none has pictured the stirring life of the frontier as Charles Schreyvogel, notably in his painting, “My Bunky,” while a host of others, like Albert Bierstadt, Carl Marr, Carl Wimar, Toby Rosenthal, Henry Mosler, Henry Twachtman, F. Dielman, Robert Blum and Gari Melchers, have permanently taken their place in the gallery of famous artists. A. Nahl was selected to perpetuate in historic paintings the frontier days of California, and his works may be seen in the capitol at Sacramento and in the Crocker Art Gallery of that city.

Hiram Powers’ name is one of the most familiar in the art history of America, but few are aware that the sculptor’s instructor was Friedrich Eckstein, who went to Cincinnati in 1825 and opened an academy where Powers obtained the training that enabled him to create his masterwork, “The Greek Slave.” In fact, one of the most enduring influences exercised by the German element has at all times been as teachers and instructors.

American musical history would have had an entirely different aspect had it not been for the pioneer work of Theodore Thomas in carrying the cult of classic music into the remotest corners of the land under all kinds of physical discouragements, and had it not been for the numerous brilliant conductors who passed various periods in America to give it the best products of their genius, but particular credit is due to the host of individual Germans who scattered throughout the country and became part of town and village life as tireless instructors in music and art. Their influence was similar to that of the countless thousands of skilled chemists and mechanics who contributed so vastly to the development of our industries.

The number of distinguished architects, sculptors and engineers is legion, though a few can be named here, famous architects like Johannes Smithmeyer and Paul J. Pelz, the architects of the Congressional Library in Washington, and other public buildings; Alfred Ch. H. C. Vioch, Ernest Helffenstein, G. L. Heins, Otto Eidlitz and Carl Link. Famous sculptors: Karl Bitter, Joseph Sibbel, Charles Niehaus, Albert Weinmann, Albert Jaegers, F. W. Ruckstuhl, Otto Schweitzer and Prof. Bruno Schmitz, the designer of the Indianapolis monument.

The great engineers and bridge builders of America are Johann August Roebling and Gustav Lindenthal. The former built the first suspension bridge over Niagara Falls, the Brooklyn bridge and Ohio River suspension bridge, and was the first manufacturer of bridge cables; Lindenthal constructed the new railway bridge across Hellgate from Manhattan to Long Island, said to be the most perfect piece of bridge construction in the United States.

Famous among novelists, whose works were translated into all languages, was Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postel) who wrote equally well in both languages, writing in English “Tokeah, or The White Rose,” and several other works. Friedrich Gerstaecker and Otto Ruppius lived many years in the United States and wrote novels of American life which were translated into English, French and Spanish. A female writer of considerable repute was the wife of Professor Robinson, known by her pen-name of “Talvj.” She was born in Halle, Germany, and was a friend of Washington Irving, and, after publishing “Ossian not Genuine,” a story of Captain John Smith and a work on the colonization of New England, wrote in English “Heloise, or The Unrevealed Secret,” “The Exiles” and “Woodhill.”