The need for reserve, which his official position lays on President Wilson, has evidently hindered him from disclosing his thoughts fully; for, as we shall see immediately, it would be particularly dangerous for the United States to imagine that they have nothing to do with the present quarrel, and to wait for the end of it in order to make up the account.
In reality, the true question for the United States goes far beyond that of German piracy in submarine warfare. That question really involves two quite distinct American interests; one of a moral, the other of a material or political nature.
From the moral point of view the United States must consider the barbarity with which Germany wages war, not only on the sea, but everywhere. Not only does she constantly violate the laws of war between belligerents, but also and above all the German authorities subject to a frightful reign of terror all the civil anti-Germanic populations in the territories now occupied by Pangermany from the North Sea to Bagdad. The sufferings inflicted by the Germans on the Belgians, the Slavs of Austria-Hungary, the Serbians, and the Armenians (whom they have caused to be massacred wholesale) amount to millions of indescribable pangs, of odious crimes, of atrocious martyrdoms. The Americans have intervened in the submarine warfare in the name of humanity. Can they remain neutral in face of this “ocean of crimes” committed by the Germans, without the smallest excuse, over enormous stretches of territory?
From the point of view of defending their own material interests, it is not certain that enough Americans even yet understand the magnitude of the formidable problem which the European war compels them to face and solve. It is quite natural that it should be so. In many circles of France and England it is only quite lately that people have come clearly to apprehend, as a whole, the real, the gigantic objects pursued by Germany in the war. Hence it is not surprising that the enormity of the German plot has not yet been grasped by the Americans of the United States, whose ideas about Europe at the beginning of the conflict were necessarily just as vague as the ideas of Europeans about the United States.
DISTRIBUTION OF GERMAN-BORN GERMANS IN THE UNITED STATES.
The accompanying map will enable the reader readily to appreciate the basis of the real problem which the war presents to the United States. As I have explained (p. 194), the Germans set themselves after 1895 to make a regular register of all the Germans scattered over the whole world. Our map is drawn up in accordance with the data of map 5 in the Pangerman Atlas of Paul Langhans, which gives the results of the register. The map shows what proportion the Germans, who had been born in Germany and had emigrated to the United States, bore to the American population about the year 1890. We can see that the proportion was considerable, since at some points (see the map) it amounted to 35%. Further, the general view presented by the map enables us to observe that in the United States the Germans have planted themselves by preference in the industrial and commercial regions of the East and of the Great Lakes. We can therefore understand what followed. Ever since 1900 the Alldeutscher Verband or Pangerman Union, in obedience to secret instructions from the official authorities in Berlin, has laid itself out to select from this mass of Germans in the United States all such as might best serve the cause of Prussian militarism at any given moment, in the most diverse domains, as soon as the European conflagrations should have broken out. Hence for the last twenty years most of the ten to fifteen million Americans of German origin have been organized. Little by little, in the midst of the great American Republic, there has grown up a State within a State, a State endowed with the most powerful means of influence. In point of fact, among the German-Americans there are manufacturers, merchants, and bankers of colossal fortunes, who control the lives of hundreds of thousands of workmen or employees living in dependence upon them. The German-Americans also own many newspapers and associations. They have therefore been able to exert a considerable influence on the policy of the United States, and even to secure the election to Congress of members devoted to their interests. The Delbrück law (see p. 195) has completed the German organization in the United States, by enabling an influential party of German-Americans to preserve the appearance of American citizens, while all the time they remain pledged heart and soul to forward the Kaiser’s scheme of universal slavery.
As the total population of the United States is 100 millions, it is easy to see what may be the power of 10 to 15 million German-Americans systematically organized for a definite purpose, when these are opposed to 90 million Americans who, never suspecting the Pangerman peril, have taken no kind of special precaution against their fellow citizens of German origin.
This very peculiar state of affairs explains the strange position occupied by the United States since the outbreak of the European War. From that time the German-Americans, in virtue of the immense means of influence and of action which they had prepared beforehand, have carried on a multifarious campaign, with extraordinary audacity in furtherance of the German game. Thus the German Ambassador, Count Bernstorff, and his military attachés von Papen, Boy-Ed, etc., have aided and abetted in the task of subverting the United States by a multitude of German-American spies and agents.