The murders of Liebknecht and of Rosa Luxemburg have excited certain strange comment in the German press. “What will the world think of us?” asks the German paper Vorwaerts, “if we commit murders such as this?”
That certainly is a purely German question! It is a trifle academic. What in Germany is the murder of one woman or one man? The seventh of May, 1915, was proclaimed a national holiday in Germany. On the seventh of May in 1916, 1917, 1918, the German people closed their shops and their factories, and in holiday attire paraded the streets to celebrate that glorious German victory when a submarine sank an unarmed vessel and murdered more than a thousand persons, many of them women and children. And now Germany asks what the world will think of her for killing one or two of her own people!
The whole truth will never be known, but more than 100,000 citizens of Belgium and France were put to death on various pretexts; thousands of women made the sport of violent beasts who wore the Kaiser’s uniform; thousands of little children maimed and tortured and every conceivable barbarity and infamy committed upon them. And yet Germany apologizes for killing two more persons! And Dr. Dernburg counts upon the future friendship of America!
It must be the just men and brave men of America who shall constitute the court to determine the treatment of the foreign element in America. All of those men within our gates who retain their sympathy for Germany are enemies of this country after the war as much as they were during the war. They must share then in the defeat of Germany and must pay the losses of the loser. The victor decides. “We are the victors. Let the foreign element reflect on that—we are the victors, not they, in this fight which they elected. It is only the man who makes the dollar his Ten Commandments who will feel toward Germany in America after the war as he did before.”
What we Americans need is not so much a League of Nations as a League of Americans. The soul of the American Protective League—renamed, rechristened and reconsecrated—must go marching on even though the League be disbanded, its unseen banner floating no more over a definite organization. As citizens we must unite in a common purpose, or the war will have been lost for us no matter what shall be the treaty at Versailles. If we open our hearts and homes again to the former traitors at our own table, then we have lost this war. It is of little consequence what is done with the Kaiser—he is too pitiable a figure to be able to pay much, even with his life. But Kaiserism in America, still growing, still reaching out in the old ways—that is a different thing. We were leagued against that once, and must be leagued against it forever.
It is accurate enough to say that this war was no lofty thing in any phase. It was much like any other war, based on the biological impulse of nations to go to war almost rhythmically, almost periodically. Commercial jealousy brought out the war, and that it was “forced on” Germany was never anything but a pitiable lie. Germany wanted to control the Suez Canal, to enlarge her possessions in East Africa, to obtain the rich Indian possessions of Great Britain. All this was to follow her defeat of England and France, her absorption of Belgium, Denmark and Holland, her consolidation of Middle Europe, her subjection of the mujik population of Russia, already suborned and bought and beaten by German propaganda. It was indeed a grandiose scheme of world conquest. Nothing that Alexander planned could have paralleled it. But it failed!
In our own country, we of the A. P. L. have seen treason weighed and bought like soap or sugar, and the price was ready in German gold, no matter how high. Our morale was continuously assailed. Through our colleges, our schools, our churches, Germany always intended to undermine America and to break down her patriotism. On the list of men of intellect whom Germany had bought, there are, besides a long list of college professors, fifty other names, including judges, editors, priests, men of large affairs. The German satyrs of diplomacy juggled huge figures carelessly in a cold-blooded commerce which dwelt in hearts and souls and honor. That was done merely in the hope to divide and conquer the United States, all in good time. German-American citizens? Why, no. Why use even that hyphen? If they were not Americans during the war, they are not Americans now. They are no more demobilized than Germany’s army is demobilized. Their hearts are no more changed than the heart of Germany has changed. If they were not at one time above prostituting the most sacred offices in the world, they are not above that now.
Let the dead speak at the peace table! Let them tell of the simplicity and worthiness of the German character, the German “love of liberty.” We are often told about Germany’s part in our Civil War. We are not fighting that war now—we are fighting this war. We are asked to distinguish between the German rulers and the German people; but the obvious truth was that Germany was more united for this war than we were united for it, more than Great Britain or France was united for it. She planned it as the exact working out of a business system—she made it her industry, her ambition, her business enterprise for this generation. Is such an ambition as this stifled forever in her soul, on either side the Atlantic? Let us not be too easy and too foolish. We are just beginning to learn about our own citizenship. If Germany struck medals to commemorate its gallant dead, each dead man of ours at the peace table ought to bear that medal in his hand which would serve as proof of Germany’s oneness with her Kaiser in this war!
In these merciful and liberty-loving terms a German apostle of “kultur” writes:
Let us bravely organize great forced migrations of the inferior peoples. Let them be driven into “reserves,” where they have no room to grow ... and where, discouraged and rendered indifferent to the future by the spectacle of the superior energy of their conquerors, they may crawl slowly toward the peaceful death of weary and hopeless senility.