To the merely morbid mind, the white faces of the starved, the moans of the maimed, the black habiliments of those who mourn, may be thought parts of a drama whose terrible appeal has found no counterpart in the human emotions. For the average man, soon to settle back to the grim struggle of making his living, perhaps even these scenes will fade, the world turning from them because the world can endure no more. But someone must make the peace, must bind up the wounds. Someone must point out the future to the staggering peoples, dizzy from their hurts. And it is not alone Europe which has a future to outline. Our own history is not yet written; our own problems lie before us still.
What shall a just peace be? If it must be tempered with mercy, to whom shall we show mercy—to the foe whom we have beaten, or the coming generation of Americans whom that foe has done all he could to betray and ruin? Shall we fight this war through now until it actually is done; or shall we face an indeterminate future, with possible further yet bloodier and more appalling wars?
Now the dead arise and demand their justice. The world leans over the rail of the arena, cold-faced, thumbs down, pitiless of the armed bully who lies vanquished and whimpering. A race which would fight as Germany has fought, and for such reasons, will fight again when possible. Such a race understands nothing but force. Mercy is mistaken with a people which knows not the meaning of mercy. Britain has a huge war bill against Germany; that of France is larger still. What of our own bill? And what of the total of all these sums, added to that which the war has cost Germany herself? If the Germans should be serfs for centuries, they could not pay the reckoning in silver and gold alone. But that is not the great question. What of the silent dead, demanding also their due before Almighty God?
Germany never can pay her bill. So long as her language is spoken, it will be the tongue of a debtor race whose account never will be paid and never can be. And why should the world forgive that debt or that debtor, even should it find it impossible to collect the debt. What outlaws such a debt in the just belief of the world? Shall continued arrogance and treachery serve to outlaw that unpaid debt? Shall a continuance in America of the old German ways in America serve to outlaw her awful and eternally unpaid debt?
Why does such feeling as this exist in the minds of the most chivalrous of foes against whom Germany ever fought? Why should America and France and Britain feel an implacable hatred against a helpless enemy? In other wars the sign of submission has arrested the wrath of warriors. But not in this war. The world looks on beaten Germany to-day with cold scorn and with no feeling of relenting. It is the way that she fought—it is the spying that she did, the brutality that she showed, which has awakened the ice-cold wrath of the world to-day. That wrath means to exact its pound of flesh from the heart of Germany itself. What of the dead who died unfairly? What of the innocent and the unarmed dead? Only in her own tears of blood could Germany learn the humble and the contrite heart. She has not yet learned her lesson. It must be taught her for a century yet and more.
More and more as the facts shall come from Europe, uncovering the real Germany, showing her ferocious treachery all over the world, her utter insensibility to any feeling of responsibility, her abysmal ignorance of such a term as honor, shall we be ready to make fair conclusions; for these must be our only premises.
It is only those who really know Germany’s methods in America—those who know her treachery, her duplicity, her efforts to undermine our country—who can make up a fair judgment as to how Germany should be treated in the future.
The members of the A. P. L. have drawn aside the masks and found hundreds of thousands of two-faced “citizens” amenable to no sense of honor and fair play, hating the flag they have sworn to honor. America does not need those people. America needs only the facts about them. The judgment thereon will be written in the next two generations of American history.
The plea of Germany for food after the Armistice was only part of her old propaganda. Her attempts to split this country away from the Allies is now carried on only as a part of her old systematic propaganda. It behooves us to be well aware of such methods, since we once have known them. Germany will not be allowed at the peace table. She will not be allowed in the League of Nations. Why? Because she has lost the right to shake the hand of honorable soldiers. How about honorable citizens?
There is not so much bitterness as cold and relentless reason in all such statements. But you may get a trace of bitterness from the press of Europe, suffering as Europe has all these years under the ruthlessness of German war. There is indeed “every reason for belief that other pledges would be as treacherously shattered did not the victors control the only agency which Germany understands—sheer material force. There can be no compassion based on any code of sound morality for people so despicable as to snivel for help in the midst of an orgy of cowardly iniquity. Germany in this last and most loathsome of her ugly roles should excite about as much legitimate sympathy as a hungry snake.”