CHAPTER V. WHICH DROPS A FEW ROUNDS OF SHRAPNEL ON THE HUNS IN AMERICA
Mr. Potter had got through with the gun. He rose and went to the wash basin as if intending to wash his hands. He turned suddenly as if he thought Germany were more in need of a washing. He strode toward me with a new idea gleaming in his eye and said:
“Darn it, I ain't got time to wash now. These Germans claim that they are the freest people in the world, and they are right.”
He thumped the table with a shut fist as he resumed his talk.
“One kind of liberty thrives under the Hohenzollerns: license is the precise word for it—not liberty—license to eat and drink and be sorry- -to satisfy the appetites of the flesh. The great crowd will stand a lot of tampering with its rights if you give it a good time—a broad privilege of self-indulgence. The Germans were a great people when Bill Hohenzollern took the reins of power—good-natured, industrious, God- fearing. The young men were encouraged to found their happiness on the sands of women, wine and song.
“The wine press and the beer vat are the indispensable adjuncts of Hohenzollerism. Alcohol is the balm of the mislaid conscience, the nourishment of the big-head and the pneumatic brain. These things lead to worse things. Swinish indulgence leads to the morals of the swine-yard.
“The church began to lose its power. The clergy were treated as Frederick treated the common soldier. They were kicked into servility. At first this kicking was politely done. Often the sore part was salved by the gift of a hundred marks. They were treated like hired men. They were to understand that they were just humble servants and that the Kaiser needed none of their advice. He knew all about the plans of God. Of course, in a little while, no man of brains and character would go near a pulpit. The priests of God became servile sycophants. The people ceased to respect them. The church had lost its power. To Germany it was an immeasurable loss.
“In France I found good evidence of the utter depravity of the German soldier. God knows I would not have thought it possible—the raping, the maiming of children, the daughters of whole communities carried into bondage. I would have thought that the decency common among dogs, even, in a Christian country, these days, would have shielded the helpless from such cruelty. It is evident that the officers gave countenance and encouragement to these crimes, or they could not have been accomplished. At the knowledge of these things, a cry of shame for their brothers in Germany has risen from the lips of all civilized men the world over.
“The infamy goes back to the men higher up—to Bill Hohenzollern and his gang of pirates and highwaymen. They have slain the soul of Germany.
“I am told by men who have lived there that in certain provinces a chaste woman is a thing unknown. Let us hope this exaggerates the truth. As to that I have no knowledge. But that the land of the Kaiser has lost its chivalry I have no doubt whatever. The loss of chivalry stands for the loss of conscience—for moral degradation. A man's value as a man may be accurately measured by his respect for women. A man who has no respect for women will have respect for your rights only because he has to. He would steal your purse if he dared. He is rotten to the core. Moreover, unless women are pure there can be no purity because they have the tender soul of childhood in their keeping.
“We ought to establish a moral quarantine here and save ourselves from the peril of German leprosy. It has arrived. It is spreading. You will find its symptoms in our theaters, now largely in the hands of the Germans.
“I have traveled much these late years and have failed to find an American city in which there was not one or more plays or moving pictures which reflected the morals of the swine-yard. There I have found girls and boys and children who are to make the life of America, drinking at the fountain of pollution, cleverly designed by the sex maniacs who live in the white lights of Broadway. On every sort of specious pretext—mostly that of warning the young—spaniel youths and porcelain-faced daughters of iniquity are paraded in libidinous enterprises. The cabarets and brothels of New York, with their fist fights between young women, their desperate, bull-dog encounters between sex maniacs, their ogling, besotted degenerates, sometimes with a lame pretense of a moral and sometimes without it, are shown for the entertainment of young America.
“The Huns have already invaded America, my friend. They are armed with things more deadly than guns and bullets. Their gun is the camera, their ammunition, the moving picture. That picture penetrates to the heart and soul of the young and no surgery can remove it. To them, seeing is believing.
“A man is mostly the sum of his memories. Think back and tell me what you remember of your childhood. It's the pictures you saw. I think the first thing I remember is the picture of a cat which my mother drew on a slate for me—a highly benevolent cat it was. The one I have remembered best is that of my mother standing in the morning sunlight among the hollyhocks by the open door and waving her handkerchief to me the day I went away to school. How often it has flashed out of my memory in these last forty years. There is no power like that of a picture for good or evil in the life of a child. Pictures are, indeed, the universal language of childhood.
“Now what is there in this special claim of the sex mongers that the truth about life—however hideous and revolting it may be—would best be known of all? Just this—it should be made known but not publicly in books and theaters. It should not be made a familiar thing—sitting at meat and lying down in bed with the sensitive imagination of the young. That will be sure to make it the one great truth of life. I prefer the privacy of home and the loving caution of a mother, taking care to impart the whole truth with its setting of perils and with no glamour of romance about it. I would as soon have my daughter's feet enter a brothel as her brain. She might shake the dust from her feet.
“What were the fruits of this home method in old New England? I would remind these European Americans who provide our amusements for us that the world has never seen a civilization like that of old New England. I am not saying that it had no faults, but its human product has justly excited the wonder and admiration of the world. There was not much of it. You could pick up those six little states and set them down within the boundaries of Minnesota and have 19,200 square miles to spare. Yet they gave to the world in the space of forty years, men of the stamp of Daniel Webster, Silas Wright, Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, William M. Evarts, George F. Edmunds, James G. Blaine, E. J. Phelps, Rufus Choate, Henry Ward Beecher, Dr. Channing, Lyman Abbott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry W. Longfellow, John G. Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Edmund C. Stedman, the Dwights, the Washburns.
“Wouldn't that seem to be doing fairly well?
“Now the fact is, men and women long for inspiration to a nobler life. There are those who will tell you that the crowds who go to hear Billy Sunday, do it simply to be amused. It is not true. It is a deeper thing. They go, driven by soul hunger. They long for wholesome food for the spirit. They wish to be stirred to nobler action and feel the inspiration of better ideals. They come by tens of thousands.
“There never was a clean, uplifting, noble work of fiction that did not number its readers by the million. There never was a strong inspiring play—like Peter Pan or Shore Acres—that failed to play to the full capacity of the house in which it was presented for years.
“Why then, ask us to wallow in all uncleanness—in the swine-yard of humanity?
“It is because uncleanness is cheaper and easier to get and is sure of an audience equally large and less discriminating; it is because these Huns care only for their own pockets and not a fig for the public good.
“Now, here is a work for the women of America. Here is a battle front on which they can fight the Huns. Men can help and will help, but they are busy with the more obvious and commonplace problems. This is a job of housecleaning. It is primarily a woman's job—that of setting in order the great house of America and looking after the welfare of its children. There is no greater work to be done than that of regenerating the theater. They can do it if they will.”