We have troublesome days of reconstruction ahead in America. Food prices and wages cannot go up forever, but it will be difficult to reduce wages and food prices. We shall have unemployment in this country. We shall have soldiers in this country dissatisfied because they find themselves and their deeds so soon forgotten. These things all are among the menaces of America, and they must be faced. It will require a united America to face them successfully.
Shall we import more such problems, or shall we dispense with certain of those which we now have? Besides all this irresponsible and sporadic Bolshevik propaganda, we may count upon the old, steady, undying, well-conceived and well-spread propaganda of Germany after the war as much as before and during the war. We shall meet—indeed, this very day are meeting—propaganda against the Allies intended to split us from France and Great Britain. Germany is going out after her lost markets all over the world as best she can. She will need all of her propaganda to help her crawl back even into a place in the shadows of the world and not in the sun of the world’s respect. While the war was going on, some firm in America bought a shipload of German toys. Who wants such blood-reddened toys in his home? Soon we shall see German goods in our markets. Who wants such goods? Soon we shall hear the subtle commercial scoff, “It’s all bosh to refuse German goods, for they are better and cheaper.” Is it so? Is it our duty to be unsentimental in business? Germany was quite unsentimental when she tore up the Belgian scrap of paper. It now would seem to be time that we had some sentiment of the old sort. Sentiment rarely is fundamentally wrong. So-called common sense quite often is no more than common selfishness.
As these pages go forward, the Allies’ declaration is that the Hun shall not be allowed in the peace conference nor in any League of Nations whatever that may be drawn up. One thing is sure. No League of Nations ever will be stronger than the individual thought of the countries combining. Our League of Nations will be no stronger than our feelings against pro-Germanism. If we forget that, and take up the game at the old place, our League of Nations is dead at its birth.
The Department of Justice, having removed restrictions on enemy aliens, and having wiped out the barred zones and the necessity of passes or permits, has released a great many pro-Germans who will slip back into their old places in America. In Great Britain the German waiter—so frequently the German spy—is not going to be allowed to take his old place. It may cause some inconvenience, but Great Britain is going to get on without him. That is what we must learn in America—to get on without some of the stolid or the obsequious labor that we have had. With the barring of alien labor, we should suffer many inconveniences in our personal lives. If we cannot endure those inconveniences, then we can have no League of Nations. With the refusal to buy any article made in Germany, we should be letting ourselves in for a considerable individual loss. Unless we are willing to accept that loss, we can have neither a League of Nations nor an America worthy of the name.
Germany is crippled, but not beaten and not repentant. The Germans regret the sinking of the Lusitania only because it was the thing which brought America into the war. For the war itself they are not sorry. If defeat did not make them repentant, heavy indemnities may help teach them something of their real place in the world. That lesson will be all the stronger if we in America shall make more stringent importation and deportation laws—if we shall deport more Germans and import less German goods. There is many and many an American home where German goods never again will enter the doors.
Prince Carl, of the House of Hohenzollern, when speaking of the war, said he thought that Germany ought not to have started her submarine warfare “without being absolutely sure it would succeed.” He said he regretted the German propaganda in the United States—because it had been carried out so clumsily; he said that Germany ought to have started her propaganda here on a larger scale, and ought to have spent millions of marks instead of thousands! There you see the German idea and part of the German policy in America. They have learned some lessons, but not the great lesson of the humble and the contrite heart.
Maximilian Harden has been a voice crying in the Hun wilderness for most of the time of the war. He says that now there is no real revulsion of feeling against the men who have caused Germany’s name to be a stench in the nostrils of the world. The soldiers returning from the front are cheered as heroes, though their hands are caked with the blood of innocent women and children. Not one of the groups scheming for advantage at Berlin has expressly repudiated the war. Not one has expressed horror at the violation of treaties.
Are these pages indeed bitter? They cannot be made bitter enough! We cannot sufficiently amplify and intensify the innate American horror at the revealed duplicity of this nation which we have fought and helped to beat. We find their spirit to have been one of fiendish ingenuity, their intellect of that curiously perverted quality to which attention has been called. Germany never has exulted more in the success of her armies in open warfare than in her success at stealth and treachery. Are these the men we wish to see marking our coming census maps?
We have nothing to fear from Germany. We have beaten the Germans at every game they have produced, and we can continue to do so. We are the victors and they are the vanquished. They made the vast mistake of being beaten in this war. There is no reason why we should fear them in the future, on either side of the Atlantic. Major H. C. Emory, a former professor at Yale, in a late address, rather colloquially voiced something of this feeling of confidence in his own country:
Let us get sane! Get over this German bug of thinking that somehow or other the Germans are superior. Morally they are greatly inferior, but people have thought that somehow, intellectually or in organization, they are better than the rest of the world. We have shown them that we can smash the German military organization, which we have smashed. There is an idea that the Germans can do us in business; that somehow this is a race that we cannot compete with on normally fair terms. Put that out of your head! They are a patient, hard-working race; they will work fourteen hours a day where a Russian won’t work four. They will plod faithfully. But, gentlemen, they are dumb; they are stupid. They do not understand things. They do not get the psychology of anybody else; and a large part of their science and their supposed superior way of doing things is bluff and fake. They have done some good work, but no better work, and they are not doing better work, in the field of economics than the English, the French, and the Americans. In the field of business they have nothing on you. For the love of Mike, don’t be afraid of them! You can put it over them every time.