Chapter II: Part 2

In a cyclone of desolations surpassing the terrors of the insane, the world, so far from recoiling, rolls forward into vast and irrevocable changes that seemed but yesterday the remotest goals of laborious evolution; rolling up the precipitous steep of custom in all the fury with which we should look to see it roll down. And the unique wonder of this fifth and last of these supreme events is that only it has sprung primarily from an evil design and can attain its true end only by that design’s everlasting overthrow.

So speaks the matchless hand of Raemaekers. The vastest murderer the race has ever borne and, at his heels, his most remorseless waster of blood together watch the glass of time, abhorring every upward plunge of a maddened world and daily hounded by one implacable question, one four-headed dog of hell: Will their treasury, will their sinking of ships, will their delusion of their own people, last?

No. One or another will presently fail, and when one fails all fail and the world, refined by fire, will be, shall be, saved.

GEORGE W. CABLE.

“_The Ugly Talons of the Sinister Power_”

The attitude of scorn, of contempt and of defiance with which Raemaekers in his cartoon, “America’s Choice,” represents Uncle Sam as he confronts the treacherous Kaiser, bearing the olive branch in his talons, well expresses the attitude of the United States towards Germany at the time we entered the war, and this attitude will probably continue for a generation or two after the war ends.

“The Intolerable Thing,” which President Wilson so aptly named the irresponsible German Government, can never disguise itself so that we will not detect the terrible menacing claws with which Raemaekers portrays the Kaiser. It will continue to be an Intolerable Thing until the horrors of this war are forgotten.

The German philosophers brazenly justify their nation’s course in this aggressive war with all its attendant horrors, by an appeal to the Darwinian doctrines of the struggle for existence, and the consequent survival of the fittest, which play such a prominent part in biological evolution.

Germany must be taught the lesson that while man is the product of evolution like all other creatures, yet in his case new factors come into play--he is a part of the animal kingdom, but is a new kind of animal, and new factors, not operative in the orders below him, have played leading rôles in his development. These factors are his reason, which gives him a sense of the true and the false, and his conscience, which gives him a sense of right and wrong. These faculties subordinate the rule of might to the rule of right, and they have resulted in the establishment of conduct for individuals, for communities, and for organized governments that do not exist in the lower animal orders, and only in a limited sense in the lower human orders.

Amid a national rejoicing, a waving of flags and ringing of bells, such as are evoked by a great national festival, the Germans celebrated the _Lusitania_ murders--the entire nation suddenly slumping into a barbarism worse than that of their ancestral Huns. The Hun was again triumphant, gloating over his unspeakable crimes, his plunders and piracies, his orgies of crime and lust--a spectacle to make the Genius of Humanity veil her face and weep tears of blood.

It is a comfort to know that the Allies have killed or rendered harmless several million of these modern barbarians, and that many of their carcases have gone to enrich the soil of France and Belgium. In this way a dead Hun may help to undo some of the evil which a living Hun has wrought. If two or three of their bodies could be planted in every shell hole which their guns have made in France and Belgium, though the inoffensive soil might sicken, yet in the course of years the poison of the Hun would disappear, rendered innocuous by the beneficient alchemy of Nature.

JOHN BURROUGHS.
_Tryon, N. C.
February 12, 1918._

_Restitution and Reparation_

It is with good reason the Prussian covers the thick bone of his head with a helmet, for into it ideas of right and justice can only be battered with a club. The tough, club-resisting helmet is the arch-symbol of Prussianism. From its earliest days Prussia has taught its neighbors the Prussian theory of right and justice by means of a club. When the Prussian wishes to educate his neighbors to an appreciation of Prussian ethics he puts on his helmet, picks up a club and slugs the neighbor on the head.

The Prussian theory of right and justice is this: “What is mine is mine. What is yours is also mine if I want it.”

This idea is deep buried beneath the thick bone of the Prussian head. He holds it with stolid stupidity and deep, prehistoric crudity, like a pig or an idiot. He cannot understand that there are any rights higher than Prussian greed. “If I want it, it is mine because I want it.” It is the logic of the primitive human animal, the cave-man.

Cornered and accused of his thefts he clings to his loot like the pig that has stolen a carrot. When asked to disgorge he is shocked by the suggestion. “But they are mine! I wanted them, so they are mine!” he says. Right and Justice answer, “They are not yours; you stole them.” “Maybe so!” says the Prussian. “But just the same they are mine--I stole them a long time ago.”

The logic of the Prussian fills ten thousand volumes. It is written in hundred-line paragraphs and six-inch words. It can be condensed into two short words--piggish greed: piggish because it knows neither right or justice, greed because it is greed.

ELLIS PARKER BUTLER.

_The Only Possible Position for Traitors_

While the submarine controversy was at its height, a Hun high in authority in his nefarious land said that it was impossible for the United States to enter the war, because there were a half million German reservists in our country. “That is true,” replied the American to whom this contemptuous remark was addressed; “but there are also a half million lamp-posts.”

Since the German reservists have failed to fulfil the expectations of the Fatherland, the lamp-posts of the United States are as yet unadorned with their lifeless bodies. But history has shown that while Americans are an easy-going race, when once their anger is aroused there is no withholding it; therefore let the traitors in our midst take warning from the cartoon upon the opposite page.

One may pardon a murderer who kills in a moment of passion, one may even revere a military spy who penetrates an enemy’s lines to gather information needful for victory; but for the skulking traitor who whispers sedition within the land which harbors him and seeks to hamper the efforts of its government by a stealthy means, no punishment seems too severe, since of all crimes his is the most despicable.

It is not to the half million German reservists alone that Mr. Raemaekers’ warning is addressed; for, inconceivable though it be, there are native-born traitors aplenty to shame the land which gave them birth. For these, the only position which will seem possible to Uncle Sam, when once his anger, ever slow to rise, bursts forth in righteous indignation, will be the one which Mr. Raemaekers has depicted. Let these traitors remember that there is an abundance of lamp-posts in the land as well as a goodly supply of hempen rope.

H. C. CHATFIELD-TAYLOR.

“_Do You Mean to Make a Real War?_”

“Germany has once more said that force, and force alone, shall decide whether justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men, whether right as America conceives it or dominion as she conceives it shall determine the destinies of mankind. There is, therefore, but one response possible for us: Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall make right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.”

--_From President Wilson’s Message on the First Anniversary
of the Declaration of War, April 6, 1918._

_Justice!_

The woman figure called Justice in Raemaekers’ cartoon has a Greek name. She is Themis, consort of Zeus, Themis, who sits by his side on the judgment seat. The scales are the scales of Ægina, in her day a great money centre, whose talent was the standard of value then, as the American dollar is to-day. Ægina was the mother of Æacus, one of the three great judges of the lower world, and be it remembered, it was Æacus that administered justice. Ægina is called by one of the greatest Greek poets the place where Themis is worshipped more than anywhere else on earth, and he tells us further that there was much weighing in Ægina, the Merchant State. Heavy weights there were in either scale. Much care was needful in the weighing, no little balancing doubtless. So there were many in our Ægina who felt the draw of kindred, of friendship, of fellowship. But this is the Day, the Day of Decision, the Day of Lord Æacus. After the knife edge of the balance comes the knife edge of the guillotine.

BASIL LANNEAU GILDERSLEEVE.

_Another Peace Proposal_

The artist has depicted a spectacled Old Gentleman wearing a triple crown and a pontifical mantle, who is offering a proposal of peace to a heroic young woman, torn, bleeding, thorn-crowned, but dauntless, who spurns it with scorn. The spectacled Old Gentleman is the Pope; the heroic young woman is, I take it, outraged Justice.

Since Justice is our cause, we must try to be just. The Pope is not lying on a bed of roses. He is in a position of the utmost difficulty. He has faithful adherents on both sides, he dislikes war, and finds his perplexities, great enough in time of peace, now magnified an hundred-fold. He is not a hero; he is old, he is a lover of ease, and would dearly like to wear a King’s crown and hear multitudes in St. Peter’s cry out “Papa-Rè, Papa-Rè.” Let us be just. The first Pope (according to Roman Catholic reckoning), received the grace of a great opportunity to be true to his Master, but he denied Him thrice. Why should we be surprised to find Benedict XV denying his Master? Fate has held out her hand to him, as she held it out to St. Peter, and offered him his opportunity to be greatly true. In the old happy days when all the world cried “hosanna” to Justice, the Pope also had professed himself a disciple of Justice. But now Justice has been taken by bloody-minded men to be crucified, and the Pope has stayed afar off. Many witnesses have remarked, “This man also was a professed disciple of Justice.” And now the Pope denies it vehemently. He has put forward a series of humiliating proposals that Justice--heroic, bleeding Justice--should hold out her hand to the murderers of Belgium and confer, as if there had been _equal error_ on both sides, upon the crafty schemes of peace by which Germany hopes to dominate the world.

Poor Old Gentleman! Timidity, love of ease, fear of Austria, and fantastic ambition, have induced him to deny his Master. The cock will crow, and he will weep bitterly. Poor, pitiable Old Gentleman.

HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK.

_The Fine American Spirit_

Who are these, watching from ancestral doors
The instant passing of our youth to France?
Henceforth, a chapter of the world’s romance
Their eyes have seen; it fills their native shores
With an undying moment; now it pours
On silent breasts, o’erawed, the voice, the glance,
The last, fond gleam of each loved countenance,
And the heart trembles, while the spirit soars.

The generations draw immortal breath
That breathe a nation’s soul. From sire to son
The glory of the fathers entereth
The children’s hearts, and maketh all as one:
Bright, at time’s touch, breaks out the holy flame,
And to all lands doth freedom’s blood proclaim.

G. E. WOODBERRY.

_Poisoning the Well of Public Opinion_

Aliens in this country must assist in maintaining the liberty they enjoy, or we shall know the reason why.

“Ninety-five per cent. of the people of the United States would die as willingly for their beliefs as the men of 1776. It is for the other 5 per cent. to show not the slightest manifestation of disloyalty.

“Our message to them will be delivered through the criminal courts all over the land. And may God have mercy on them, for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging government.”

--_Speech of Attorney-General Gregory in New York, November, 1917._

_The Enemy Within_

Not even the prodigious Cruelty of the Germans in this Atrocious War has shocked the moral sense of mankind as much as has their Deceit. We are horror-stricken by the reports of their premeditated cruelties which link the Germans with the beasts--the wolf, and tiger, and boa constrictor, and vulture. The beast does these things because he has never risen to a higher plane than that of the beast. But Deceit is the attribute of Man; of one who dwells above the standards of the brute creation, who has had the moral sense developed in him, who has known the compulsions of conscience, who has acknowledged the obligations of duty, and has recognized himself as being a striver after the Ultimate Good. Through some flaw in the German’s nature all these qualities in him changed, turned bad, and he hailed Evil as his guide and inspiration. Whatever of good there was in him he uses to promote his wicked designs. Had he not been human he could never have understood how to make his perverted nature work successfully to deceive his fellow-men. The snake and panther do not deceive us, we know their ways and guard against them. But the moral pervert can deceive, because he hides his purpose and his method behind the mask of a counterfeited virtue.

Lying is the commonest form of Deceit. The German Emperor practised it for twenty-five years, when he proclaimed to the world his ardent desire for peace; and it was natural for him to lie when, on making war, he declared that the sword was forced into his hands. Then the German nation, fed so long on falsehood, accepted this. Another common form of German Deceit has been to accuse their enemies of the very enormities which they themselves invented and carried out. Diplomatic chicane is a commonplace tool which the Germans employed, only clumsily. But we cannot measure the full extent of German Deceit unless we follow it in its varied propaganda among foreign peoples, in its spies, its instigators to violence, its corrupters of the press. It poisons food and wells; it sets fires to burn crops or forests; it hires ruffians to burn factories or blow them up, to hide bombs in ships; it incites sabotage and strikes.

So universally do Germans take to Deceit, that it has evidently become their national trait. The soul of Germany is a lost soul, which worships Satan as its master and welcomes Evil as its Good.

WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER.

_Count von Bernstorff: “Noblesse Oblige”_

Behold this group of sinister and menacing forms surrounding the nation as typified in the person of its President. For four years past they have been coming, one by one, out of the darkness. We can now only too well recognize them and the dangers with which they threaten us. In front, there is arrogant, boastful, jealous and unscrupulous Hate, with its policy of “might before right,” and its doctrine of “frightfulness,” conscienceless and cruel, in its murder of the innocent, its arson, its robbery, its slavery of the weak, and its outrages of womanhood. Crouching, while it tramples on our flag, is Treachery, ready to use pistol and dagger, to burn bridges, to place bombs, to blow up ships, to hide and sneak and cringe, if only it can deliver its blow more surely and safely. And back of both, is hypocritical and lying Diplomacy, with its protestations of innocence and friendliness,--studiedly polite in manner, but really black at heart.

Behind, all engaged in tying the nation’s hands, lest it might strike promptly and forcefully, is Pacifism, cowardly and self-seeking, more anxious to avoid temporary suffering than to preserve the honor and safety of the nation; and Divided Allegiance, traitorous to both causes which it vainly endeavors to harmonize; and Intrigue, working in secrecy to part friends, and stir up strife between those whose interests are common, or even identical.

But out of the darkness comes also the call to the nation: “America! awake. Open your blinded eyes. Banish partisanship. Abjure political jealousies. Leave it to the men who know. Make your hearts stout. Grasp the sword firmly. Listen to no compromises, until the nation is proved worthy of its birthright, civilization is rescued, and the world made safe for Democracy.”

GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD.

_Peter the Hermit_

“_Dieu le Veult!_”

The Prussian outdoes the world in his single-minded devotion to physical things. He believes and frankly declares that mercy and honor weaken human power, that if you consider them you must eventually fall before the strong who disregard them. Germany’s attempt to prove the soundness of the Prussian thesis has gradually loosened the moral consciousness of the world. It has gathered to defend the things of the spirit in what is as truly a crusade as that which Peter the Hermit led, a crusade to preserve the sanctity of contract, the few laws between nations that men have worked out, the right of the weak to their chance. Germany, disbelieving in the strength that love of mercy and of honor give men, cannot counter-attack in kind. Every day develops more clearly that the weak place in the Prussian armor is its indifference to moral considerations.

IDA M. TARBELL.

_The Germ-Man_

The stout gentleman on the opposite page wears a pleased look, as if he were enjoying his occupation. That is natural, for he is a scientist engaged in a very pretty process--the propagation of lockjaw, typhus and other malignant germ cultures with which he expects to speed up the annihilation of his enemies. How does he propose to accomplish this? I will tell you: he is going to introduce those young and vigorous colonies of germs into those little packages marked with a cross which you see lying on the table before him. Those are Red Cross bandages, and they will presently be binding the wounds of our soldiers, and the lockjaw and typhus hordes in them will awake, and rally in a silent loathsome attack that will lay torture and death upon thousands which the noisy, mis-aimed guns have failed to destroy. The germ-man is assured that his atomic missiles will not be mis-aimed. His government has efficiently arranged for those packages to go to the hospitals of Roumania and Belgium and France. That is why he smiles--that is why he has that roguish look.

In the germ-man’s smile is incarnated “Deutschland über Alles” and its correlative, “The end justifies the means.” We in America have produced exponents--criminal exponents--of a similar psychology, and we have generally (when we could catch them) hung or electrocuted or imprisoned for life these moral perverts, in order to make the world a safer and cleaner place to live in. Only a little while ago the State of New York electrocuted a man who, having set up his individual “Ueber Alles and General Justification” court, had proceeded cheerfully to introduce malignant germs and other deadly things into the foods and medicines of his wife’s parents, who stood between himself and fortune. Here we have an exact parallel. Those defenceless old people were doing him no wrong. They in fact admired and trusted him, just as Rumania and Belgium and America only a little while ago admired and trusted Germany. They stood in his way, however, and from the “Ueber Alles” standpoint any means for their removal was warranted.

Secret assassination is an ancient art. It has been practised in every age and in every nation and its votaries have been hunted down and exterminated by decent people. To-day, for the first time in the history of the world, we have the spectacle of stealthy death for the defenceless adopted as a government policy. For the decency and safety of mankind the allied nations have highly resolved that the government which promotes such a policy must “perish from the earth.”

ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE.

“_A Tid-Bit for ‘The Sick Man’_”

The nearness to America of the European theatre of war so greatly fills our minds with the contest there raging that we give but little thought to the progress of events in the far countries tributary to the Tigris River. For a time, the heroic resistance of General Townsend to the Turkish forces which surrounded him aided by the natural obstacles of river and climate, claimed a share of our interest, and later, the splendid and successful work achieved by the new British army under General Maude, awakened renewed interest in a campaign designed to split Islam into two parts: one, acknowledging the domination of the Turk and his German masters; the other, a new Caliphat of Bagdad, Arabian, rather than Turkish, looking to the ideals of justice and freedom, rather than to the rule of the sword; finding its inspiration in the tradition of the enlightened and humane Haroun-al-Raschid, rather than the warring, bloody conquerors and Muhammed and Sulìman. Still later, the northward progress of British arms extended over the greater part of Palestine, and the capture of Jerusalem brought the sacred places of Israel and of Christianity within the control of Christendom after five centuries of Turkish occupation.

These campaigns are only second in importance to the progress of the German invasion of France; for if the British successes in Arabia and Palestine shall be maintained, and the Islamites of Egypt, Arabia and Mesopotamia shall look in the future to the Caliph of Bagdad, not to the Sultan of Turkey, as their spiritual head, the great German scheme of aggression in the Near East will have been defeated.

The subtle Teuton suggestion to the Turk of a Pan-Turanian league, was but a scheme for the promotion of a closer Turkish organization under German control, as Raemaekers’ cartoon, “A Tid-Bit for the Sick Man,” so cleverly intimates. The Turks should have said to themselves, “Beware of the Greeks--the Prussians--and the gifts they bring.” A German gift is like the shirt of Nessus,--it will consume utterly those who accept it.

Not alone on the shores of the Mediterranean, but on the Persian Gulf, on the Baltic, on the English Channel, in the Caribbean, on the Pacific,--there is no limit to the schemes of expansion of German control to which that nation in its mad lust of power has given itself. Never since the dawn of recorded history has an issue been made so plain. Aut Cæsar aut nullus. The world must choose between Germany, the highly developed, hyperorganized, scientific state, proceeding on the openly avowed theory that might alone makes right, and that no principle of ethics, morality or religion must be allowed to affect or deter a course which scientific militarism determines to be best calculated to attain a pre-determined end, and the other nations, who believe in God and in His justice, who conceive that it doth not profit a nation to gain the whole world at the cost of its soul.

Once this issue is manifest to the world, the result cannot be in doubt.

GEORGE W. WICKERSHAM.

_Plain Language from Truthful James_

_The Mexican-Japanese Plot_

“For ways that are dark
And tricks that are vain--”

_Helping Hindenburg Home_

“We regret being unable on this occasion to follow the counsels of our masters, the French, but the American flag has been forced to retire. This is unendurable, and none of our soldiers would understand their not being asked to do whatever is necessary to reëstablish a situation which is humiliating to us and unacceptable to our country’s honor. We are going to counter-attack.”

This was a message sent by an American general in command of American forces south of the Marne on Monday afternoon after the Germans had succeeded in forcing the Americans back towards Conde-en-Brie.

The French commander had informed the American general that the early German success could not have any great effect on the fate of the battle; that it was understood perfectly that after hard fighting the Americans had slowly retired, and that it was not expected that they immediately launch a counter-attack. He added that a counter-attack could be postponed without risk, and it might be better to give the American troops an hour’s rest.

Immediately after the American general sent the above message, which is quoted by the correspondent of the “Matin,” the Americans launched their counter-attack and the lost ground was soon recovered, with an additional half mile taken from the Germans for good measure.

_The New York Times, July 18, 1918._

_A Bad Prophet_

_The All-Highest: “Only a sham war with Uncle Sam? Oh, Hollweg, you are a bad prophet!”_

One of the delusions the German Government and its General Staff have been laboring under for many years is that the United States could not create an army that was worth consideration as a foe. That Government and its General Staff are tasting the quality of our troops in the field, and the flavor is bitter on their tongues. One hundred and twenty-six years ago there was fought a battle in France (at Valmy, within the zone of war today) on the date that France first called herself a republic. Kellermann won that battle against the Prussians and Austrians with levies of new troops from the lower and middle classes of France, who “found that they could face cannon balls, pull triggers, and cross bayonets without having been drilled into military machines, and without being officered by scions of noble houses.” They had, it seems, the same spirit we like to think animates our army, which the Germans abroad and some critics at home denied our men: “they awoke to the consciousness of instinctive soldiership.”

_The Army and Navy Journal._

_At the Holland Frontier_

WHETHER THE WAR BE LONG OR SHORT, THE QUICKEST ROAD TO PEACE IS THE ROAD STRAIGHT AHEAD OF US, WITH NO DIVISION AMONG THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN.

_A Rehearsal_

“_When I say, Down with Wilson! you all cheer!_”

_The Path of Kultur_

Here ran a road for lovers once,
With maples in the moon;
And under a bridge a water went
Weaving a dreamy rune.

And high upon the sycamores,
The nightingales all night
Besieged the dark with melody,
Disturbed the boughs with flight.

And here in coverts of tall grass
Looked up a friendly spring,
Glad to behold a face bent down,
Or feel a fleeting wing.

But now the lovers come no more;
The road is rutted and marred
By wheels and shrieking shells: the trees
Are shattered, chopt and charred.

New graves are billowing now: the field
Like windy water heaves:
The nightingales are gone: the spring
Is choked with bloody leaves.

And here at noon a vulture swoops
On obscene errands bound:
And here at night remembering ghosts
Go by without a sound.

EDWIN MARKHAM.

_To the Victor!_

_France crowns with laurel the dead American aviator._

Tho’ the American mother mourns across the seas for her hero son, who has touched the skies in France, the foster mother lays her laurel of glory on the bier of Youth, whose brave spirit in passing welds an eternal bond of sympathy and union to the end.

GERALDINE FARRAR.

_June 23, 1918._

_The Eyes of the Army_

The great poet of Victoria’s reign, in his wondrous vision of the future,

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nation’s airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder-storm;

Till the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

Dealing not with the shadowy future but with the actual present the great Artist of the Great War sees aerial navigation, not in terms of commerce nor of battle engines, but as the “Eyes of the Army”; the sense without which the terrestrial movements of war, both by land and sea, tend to become mere blind and purposeless blundering. With one graceful figure in a finely balanced design the artist tells the story.

Future generations will be grateful to the Prussians for one thing--and one thing only. From war--that “noble art of murdering,” as Thackeray called it, they have stripped the last vestiges of romantic glamor. They have not hesitated to press the premises of militarism to their logical conclusion,--with results that have staggered humanity.

In one field only has it been possible for something of the old knightly chivalry to linger. Romance, driven from earth, has taken wings; and the world, sated with horrors of trench and shambles, thrills with eager wonder at the new science of the sky; at the individual skill and daring of its pilots and their wonderful service to their fighting brethren on earth.

But even as we read of these things come tales of Zeppelin raids over defenseless cities and the deliberate dropping of bombs upon hospitals.

Civilized warfare! it is a contradiction in terms. It may be necessary,--it has proved to be necessary, for civilized men to fight the barbarians in order to uphold and preserve the great principle of individual liberty; but war must come to an end among civilized peoples; and to that end there must be a closer and closer union of such as care for law and order, believe that the weak have rights which must be protected, and are willing to base their governments on the firm and enduring foundations of LIBERTY, EQUALITY and FRATERNITY.

THOMAS MOTT OSBORNE.

_July 19, 1918._

“_Is It Nothing to You, All Ye Who Pass By?_”

All we need to remember hour by hour is that we are living through the greatest crisis in the history of the world; that the greatest number of people are concerned in it ever concerned in one thing before; and that the most important epoch concerning humanity since the birth of Christ is now at hand; that humanity is about to fall to a lower plane of living or rise to a higher one than it has ever reached; that we can only do our little share toward that rising by stiffening ourselves to a long endurance. We have proven our mere ability to give valuable service. What we must prove now is our patience and steadfastness, without which brilliancy is worthless. We must strike a pace which we can hold, both mentally and physically and plod on together. We must and we will be ready, for our own sake, for our country’s sake and for the sake of what the world was created for.

RACHEL CROTHERS.

_The Rainbow Division Leaves for France_

As the rainbow is heaven’s token of faith, so have we faith in these modern knights journeying to beloved France to give battle to invading barbarians.

Ponder a moment over these men of the Rainbow Division, lads with minds clean as their hearts are true, and compare them with the blood-craving hordes reared in a school having no other aim than to kill their fellow beings. One is Man in the superlative, and for the other there is no name sufficiently abhorrent.

When an American soldier enters Hun territory we know how scrupulously the laws of humanity will be respected: he will at least be knightly and merciful.

And the four years’ record of German savagery is so well known that it must forever befoul the pages of history.

Lack of opportunity in the library has prevented a thorough exploration of the unspeakable atrocities of the early Huns who under Attila ravaged a great part of Europe. But sufficiently have I read to be convinced that the Huns and Vandals and Goths of early history, compared with the Hohenzollern-inspired fiends, were scarcely more than bungling altruists. We know it to be fact that German soldiers murdered priests and raped nuns in Belgium, violated practically every young woman in the Aisne and Champagne, razed defenseless towns and hamlets in these French Departments, murdered old people and children and mutilated youths everywhere, delighted in destroying hospital ships and treated Red Cross signs as targets for their guns, inoculated French prisoners as a means of furthering the Berlin plan to diminish the French race, and in cold blood murdered scores of women and children on the _Lusitania_.

These are awful indictments, with not one excusable on the ground of military need or expediency. Given trial at the bar of civilization their perpetrators must forever be judged as outside the pale of humanity and hereafter can have no standing in lands where the principles of Christianity and humanity have a meaning. With my own eyes I have seen scores of proofs of German “frightfulness”; with me it is not hearsay. And remember that it was none other than Goethe who wrote that “the Prussian was born a brute, and civilization will make him ferocious.”

Positive is it that the United States and her Allies will crush the conscienceless militarism of Germany, and ever of good omen is the Rainbow, telling of improving skies and perfect conditions for the morrow.

FREDERIC COURTLAND PENFIELD, _American Ambassador
to Austria-Hungary_, 1913-1917.

_Russia Reborn_

In a hundred years no people has been so tortured and abused by rulers of its own blood and faith as the Russians. The free peoples have nothing in their experience by which they can imagine the greed and cruelty of which the subjects of the Romanoffs have been the victims. No adequate picture of the diabolical old régime can be painted till scholars have had time to explore its archives and expose the dark forces that operated it.

Let no one look for Freed Russia to be shining and beautiful. From the gloomy caverns in which they have mouldered the Russian people stagger out upon the sunlit heights of freedom weak, bent, half blind. Few of the older will ever conquer the dense ignorance in which they were kept by autocracy. Few of the characters twisted and deformed by oppression will ever become quite straight. In the behavior of this people there will be exhibited folly, fanaticism and brutality that will make the peoples born free uneasy as to the new sister.

Whatever happens, doubt not that the Russians are gifted and great-hearted. Their excesses have proclaimed how much they were held back and brutalized by the Tsars. It will take long for them to rid themselves of the traces of their servitude and misery. Even the children born in the new era will catch from their parents some of the evil heritage. Only the grandchildren of the common people of today will come into the full birthright of the free and prove the worth that is in the Russian race.

EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS.

_Higher Than a Sour Apple Tree_

Other wars end with those who made them. It is the will of the German Emperor that _his_ war should pass on like a blight from generation to generation upon those whose fathers dared to stand against the ravager. To this end he has not only slaughtered and enslaved the defenders; he has sought to destroy the very fruitfulness of the land whereby their descendants must live.

To me the deliberate, coldly reckoned murder of the invaded countries’ trees and vines so that the children of the slain and enslaved and their children’s children may draw no sustenance from the kindly earth--that seems the most perverse, the most detestable, the most typical of all the crimes of Kaiserism.

The sterilization of Mother Earth! It took the mind of a Wilhelm to conceive it. And for that offence against generations unborn he shall hang, higher than was ever ruler before him, gibbeted in the righteous hatred of an outraged posterity.

SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS.

“_What a Mean Trick to Turn on That Strong Light!_”

“Peace must be framed on so equitable a basis that the nations would not wish to disturb it. It must be guaranteed by destruction of Prussian military power, so that the confidence of the German people shall be put in the equity of their cause and not in the might of their armies.... Europe is again drenched with the blood of its bravest and its best, but do not forget the great succession of hallowed causes. They are the stations of the cross on the road to the emancipation of mankind. I again appeal to the people of this country and beyond that they should continue to fight for the great goal of international rights and international justice, so that never again shall brute force sit on the throne of justice nor barbaric strength wield the sceptre over liberty.”

_From the Rt. Hon. David Lloyd-George’s Glasgow speech
on war aims, June 29, 1917._

_Christmas, 1917_

On the day of the Nativity, the Infant Brother of Humanity was born and was laid in a manger, there being no room for his human mother at the inn. But wherever he lay--there, through the mystery of his kinship, was the shining Gateway of Heaven. That translucent Light, from the moment of its appearance, intensified, as by opposite polarity, the baleful lights from all unholy fires in human breasts. Herod was first aroused to the Slaughter of the Innocents, and he has had his successors in every age during the growth of Christendom.

As the Light of the World has expanded these nineteen centuries, shining in the hearts of men, ever awakening new ideas of Truth, Justice, and Mercy, against every fresh gleam, promising wider horizons of human Love and Sympathy, have been arrayed the brutish hosts, with Hatred and Murder in their hardened hearts. For the present generation has been reserved the vision of the very Armageddon of this Conflict, in which the world is divided against itself. The Powers precipitating it inaugurated it and have in its whole course attended it with every conceivable form of atrocity and outrage against noncombatants--innocent men, women, and children. But that Heavenly Light which shone in the stable at Bethlehem can never be put out!

HENRY MILLS ALDEN.

_Helping Uncle Sam to Get Up Speed_

“The military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf. When they found that they could not do that, then agents diligently spread sedition among us and sought to draw our own citizens from their allegiance....

“They have learned discretion. They keep within the law. It is opinion they utter now, not sedition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of their masters; declare this a foreign war which can touch America with no danger to either her lands or her institutions ... and seek to undermine the Government with false professions of loyalty to its principles.

“But they will make no headway. The false betray themselves always in every accent.... The facts are patent to all the world, and nowhere are they more plainly seen than in the United States, where we are accustomed to deal with facts and not with sophistries; and the great fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a people’s war, a war for freedom and justice and self-government among all the nations of the world.”

_From President Wilson’s Flag Day Address, June 14, 1917._

_The Wind of Democracy_

“Without doubt, the majority of the German nation is still monarchist. The different peoples of Germany still hold to their princes, more or less, according to the individual character of the sovereigns. But that confidence in the supreme chief of the Empire is still entirely intact is an affirmation which, after three years of war, cannot be maintained.... Confidence in the direction of the Empire has begun to disappear among the German people.... They begin to ask themselves how it happens that nearly all the world is in arms against us, and who is responsible for it.”

_Reply of Prince von Hohenlohe to the clerical deputy, Spahn,
in the Reichstag._

“_This One for the Babies_”

Germany, in her war against Civilization, has disregarded not only International Law and the ordinary laws of humanity, but has ruthlessly set aside the four great laws of the social order which all civilized nations recognize as having a divine sanction. “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” She has broken her treaties and lied openly, frequently, brazenly. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” She has permitted, if she has not given official sanction to rape committed upon a scale never before known in the history of the civilized world. “Thou shalt not steal.” She robbed her neighbor’s hills of their coal and iron, her neighbor’s fields of their standing crops, her neighbor’s banks of their money, her neighbor’s houses of their pictures, statuary and books, and what she could not carry away she has in mere wantonness destroyed. “Thou shalt not kill.” She has murdered thousands of defenceless men, women, children, and little babes, and has done this not in a sudden and feverish rage, but as part of a deliberately conceived and carefully executed policy. One must multiply Raemaekers’ picture by the thousand in order to get its full significance.

LYMAN ABBOTT.

_A Scene on the Somme_

“Infinitely interesting is our contact with the American troops. They have occupied the sector immediately beside ours. We have seen them at work, and could form an idea, and it should be told and retold that they are marvelous. The Americans are soldiers by nature, and their officers have the desire to learn with an enthusiasm and an idealistic ardor very remarkable. There is the same spirit among the privates. They ask questions with a touching good-will, setting aside all conceit or prejudice. Naturally they have the faults of all new troops. They show themselves too much and expose themselves imprudently, letting themselves be carried away by their ardor, not knowing when to spare themselves or to seek shelter or when to risk everything for an end. This experience will be quickly learned.

“As for bravery, activity, and discipline, they are marvelous. They absolutely astonished us on a morning of attack. The cannonading, suddenly becoming furious, had just thrown me out of my bunk. No doubt about it, it was a Verdun attack. Taking time to seize my revolver, put on my helmet, and gather up several documents, I descended to the streets. When I arrived there they were already filing by with rapid, easy, decided steps, marching in perfect order in silence with admirable resolution, and above all with striking discipline, to their fighting positions. It was fine. You can have no idea how cheering it was to my Poilus.”

--_From a letter of a French officer published in the Paris “Temps.”_

_Hollweg as Robespierre_

_The Kaiser: “He has managed to fool the German Socialists. Why should he not fool the Russian Socialists?”_

Few things have been more disheartening in the course of the War than the way in which the Teutonic foes of liberty have used so many friends of liberty in Russia as unwitting instruments to undermine and destroy the resistance of the Russian people to the German armies.

Vast territories, amounting to nearly half a million square miles in area, have thus been abandoned to German domination, practically without a struggle; and over fifty million people in the abandoned regions have seen their prospects of freedom vanish.

The German armies thus released from the eastern front and poured into northern France, have enormously increased the difficulties of the Armies of Liberty, battling in France and Belgium to save the world for Democracy.

J. G. PHELPS STOKES.

_President Wilson’s Declaration_

Raemaekers is, here, having the President say:

“When Germany is defeated, and peace can be discussed, we shall pay the full price of peace,--namely, justice for all the nations.”

We know what justice will be for the nations spoiled. But what will be justice for the spoiler? We know what this latter would be to an individual; and a nation is only a greater individual, capable of greater mischief, subject to greater punishment.

An individual, who, with progressive malice, had broken all the laws of his country, society and God, from simple lying, through perjury, robbery, piracy, up to wholesale murder, would be destroyed--for the good of his fellowmen and as a warning to others. If he should escape the noose the quieter but no less inevitable force of public morality would destroy him. Neither man nor nation has ever long lived by force, flaunting his crimes in the face of the world, committing, threatening yet others. Nor will Germany. She is now, I believe, in the way of destruction, either by the public executioner, or, more likely, by the slower, but not less certain, process of isolation and decay.

She has unmasked herself and we now see the hideous, distorted face of her. How can so monstrous a Thing have friends after this? Who will trade with her? Who will ever again accept a promise of hers? Who but must be ashamed of her name and her language? Anathema she will be to all peoples--the outcast of nations--living for and upon herself, where her life-doctrine of force must inevitably turn to her own destruction. This has been the fate of every world-conqueror and his nation. And, surely, none of them all has so richly deserved it as this intolerable Germany. Ask History! And, yet, to the individual, there is always left repentance and restoration--even though he, himself, must be destroyed.

So, if this besotted Germany had but the courage and virtue to lay down her arms and retire behind her own borders, she could have the peace she pretends to wish for in twenty-four hours--for so little and simple and right a thing as that!

I think, indeed, that the nations she has so wantonly spoiled would permit her to go without further punishment at their hands, leaving that to the very God she has so vilely exploited as her partner in her monstrous crimes. I think they would accept back the goods which she has stolen, damaged as they are, beyond redemption, glad to be rid of her and her debasing contact. But she is mad. Germany is quite mad. She would laugh, like a blood-smeared, amuck-running lunatic at any such proposition. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. The madness is accomplished. I believe that it will be for the peace of the world that the rest shall be.

JOHN LUTHER LONG.

“_Don’t Stand in Our Way to Victory_”

All wars bring their full measure of miseries and misfortunes, and this world war, initiated by Germany for the purpose of imposing a military domination upon Europe and America, and conducted with methods which combine the barbaric standards of the Huns and Mongols with the skilled mechanism of the twentieth century, has brought upon the world miseries that can hardly be estimated or described. There are some offsets, however, even in a contest like the present, which is a fight for the preservation of civilization against the onslaughts of scientific barbarism. No nation can take up arms for the defense of its rights and liberties and for the fulfilment of its obligations without bringing into the souls of the people some development of national and patriotic spirit.

The soldiers in the trenches and the citizens working at home are fighting and working for a common cause.

They come in this manner to have realization of what they owe to each other, to their country and to their consciences.

We may feel assured that through the sacrifices that are being made today in our country, of lives, of labor and of wealth, there will be developed from a people which had in its prosperity been growing rich and lazy-minded and forgetful of national morality, the soul of America.

Louis Raemaekers has done more than any one man to bring into expression the spirit of fierce indignation and horror that has come not only upon the people of Belgium and of northeastern France, who have been directly exposed to the brutal despotism of the Prussians, but upon all of those who are fighting to rescue the people of these imprisoned devastated provinces, and upon the whole civilized world.

Raemaekers has been able with the powerful genius of his pencil to give expression in cartoons that belong to the history of art and of the world, to this protest of civilization.

He is a poet as well as an artist.

His weird and sombre conceptions gave evidence of a powerful imagination. His work has been compared to that of Gilray, but the caricatures which in 1805 amused English men and frightened English children were merely clever pieces of drawing.

The wonderful designs of Raemaekers set forth the devilishness of the policies and the actions of the Prussians as incisively and as conclusively as if he had been sitting as judge in the court of final appeal.

These grim pictures constitute indictments of great criminals. It is impossible to tell how far they may as yet have penetrated Germany, but sooner or later these irrefutable judgments of criminal acts will be brought home to the consciousness not only of Prussia, and of the leaders who are directly responsible for the murders and the other horrors, but of the whole people of Germany who, poisoned by the fumes of prussic acid from Berlin, have been willing to give their strength and their force to the attempt to impose Prussian tyranny upon the peoples of the world.

GEO. HAVEN PUTNAM.

_February 1, 1918._

“_German Soldiers Cut the Throat of an American Sentry_”

A LAYMAN’S PRAYER FOR AMERICAN SOLDIERS

Our Father which art in Heaven, bless and inspire our armies in the field, our ships upon the sea. Watch over the sons of America fighting for Liberty. Strengthen and hearten them in the hour of pain and peril. Grant them victory, we beseech Thee, and lead them safely home. Make us who love them do our part loyally. Keep us united in our will to bring upon earth a reign of right and freedom. _Amen._

CLEVELAND MOFFETT.

_Bang!_

“_Dog-gone it, Hindenburg, don’t make your strategic moves when I am standing directly behind you!_”

On one occasion, when Hindenburg reported having “carried out his retreat according to plan,” the Kaiser, encamped at the rear, received a very discomfiting bump. Evidently, the “plan” was no less an inspiration of the moment than many others the Germans have announced, in order to put a good face upon their reverses.

“_I Must Break in Here Before That Comes Down_”

The small speck that at first seemed a dull mist hanging over the Western Hemisphere caused little else than sarcastic flings at our own Republic, and had it been possible to awaken pity in the breast of the Arch Demon, striving to spread his wings over the whole world, some sympathy might have fallen to us, for the weak mind we showed in presuming we could do anything to check the Imperial army in its brutal course. But happily great oaks from little acorns grow, from stationary mists dark clouds may rise, from low uncertain rumblings the ear-splitting thunder clap may spring, and make man and beast seek cover. So, by the Grace of God, things have developed, and the mist that was a banquet joke, is transformed, and spread into a veritable storm, and its direction is across the wide ocean; it is an on-rusher that awakens a craven fear; and it well may. It is no autumn cloud, whose fleecy skirts the sun has painted with gold; but something equalling the harbinger of death, that the soothsayers saw driving over Rome when Cæsar’s end was nigh; on which could be seen “Fierce fiery warriors in ranks, and squadrons and in right form of war”; and from which blood is drizzling, not only to fall over France, or Flanders, but perhaps to darken the sky, and crimson the soil, even at that nest of iniquity, Potsdam.

PALMER COX.

_Bring Her In!_

Yea, bring her in--the scarlet sign of shame!
Of shuddering horror to all times and lands!
Bring her, though late, to justice. Those, her hands,
With children’s blood thick-crusted, are the same
That stealing through night’s peaceful curtains came
To throttle blameless Belgium; from the brands
Of sacked and burning churches those dark bands
Befoul her garments, noisome as her name.

“Guilty of more than murder!” Not alone
Of broken hearts, drained eyes and myriad graves
Shall men make up the sum of her dread score,
But of faiths blasted, world hopes overthrown.
Then judgment write in tears of her bowed slaves,
“Earth sickens of her--Let her be no more!”

CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL.

_Germany’s “Peace” with Russia_