"1683-1920" / The Fourteen Points and What Became of Them—Foreign Propaganda in the Public Schools—Rewriting the History of the United States—The Espionage Act and How It Worked—"Illegal and Indefensible Blockade" of the Central Powers—1,000,000 Victims of Starvation—Our Debt to France and to Germany—The War Vote in Congress—Truth About the Belgian Atrocities—Our Treaty with Germany and How Observed—The Alien Property Custodianship—Secret Will of Cecil Rhodes—Racial Strains in American Life—Germantown Settlement of 1683 and a Thousand Other Topics

by Frederick Franklin Schrader

Along with the splendid tribute to the American spirit of patriotism and unselfish devotion of Steuben, it seems fit and timely to add here the “creed” which was adopted by the officers of the American army at Verplanck’s Point, in 1782:

We believe that there is a great First Cause, by whose almighty fiat we were formed; and that our business here is to obey the orders of our superiors. We believe that every soldier who does his duty will be happy here, and that every such one who dies in battle, will be happy hereafter. We believe that General Washington is the only fit man in the world to head the American army. We believe that Nathaniel Green was born a general. We believe that the evacuation of Ticonderoga was one of those strokes which stamp the man who dares to strike them, with everlasting fame. We believe that Baron Steuben has made us soldiers, and that he is capable of forming the whole world into a solid column, and displaying it from the center. We believe in his blue book. We believe in General Knox and his artillery. And we believe in our bayonets. Amen.

The gratitude of the American people, many years after Steuben’s death, was solemnly attested by Congress in dedicating a monument to his memory at Pottsdam, with the inscription:

To the German Emperor and the German People:
This replica of the monument to the Memory of
General Friedrich Wilhelm August von Steuben.

Born in Magdeburg, 1730; died in the State of New York, 1794. Is dedicated by the Congress of the United States as a Token of Uninterrupted Friendship.

Erected in Washington in Grateful Appreciation of his Services in the War of Independence of the American People.

Sulphur King, Herman Frasch.

Sulphur King, Herman Frasch.—Inventor of the method of pumping up sulphur from its deposits, known as the water process, patented in 1891, which made available the large sulphur deposits in southern Louisiana and other places, which had puzzled engineers for years. Frasch came originally from Germany in the steerage, obtained work sweeping out a retail drug store, became a clerk and finally was graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. He joined the Standard Oil Company, and in prospecting for oil came upon abandoned sulphur workings. The deposits were covered with quicksands which had caused the death of several men, they exhaled noxious gases and the attempts to mine them were called a failure. Frasch bought them for a song on his own account, and began sinking his own perforated pipes through which he forced steam and hot water from a battery of boilers which he had rigged up. Frasch became a millionaire and revolutionized sulphur mining in Sicily.

Sutter, the Romance of the California Pioneer.

Sutter, the Romance of the California Pioneer.—The romance of American colonization contains no chapter more absorbing than that of the winning of the West. A poetic veil has been cast about the California gold excitement and the rugged pioneers of the gulch, by Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller and Mark Twain; but few historians have thought it worth their pain to uncover the romance of the original pioneer of California on whose land was found the first gold that formed the lodestone of attraction for the millions that swept westward on the tide of empire.