Eckert, Thomas.
Eckert, Thomas.—General superintendent during the Civil War of military telegraphy, and assistant secretary of war (1864). Given the rank of Brigadier General Appointed general superintendent of the Western Union Telegraph Company in 1866, and in 1881 became its president and general manager, and also director of the American Telegraph and Cable Company also of the Union Pacific Railroad.
Eliot, Prof. Charles W.
Eliot, Prof. Charles W.—One of the most eminent as well as bitter enemies of the German cause. Prof. Eliot has attacked German civilization and German institutions in magazines and newspaper articles and in a book. Yet in 1913, one year before the war, at a public dinner, Prof. Eliot paid German “Kultur” this high tribute: “Two great doctrines which had sprung from the German Protestant Reformation had been developed by Germans from seeds then planted in Germany. The first was the doctrine of universal education, developed from the Protestant conception of individual responsibility, and the second was the great doctrine of civil liberty, liberty in industries, in society, in government, liberty with order under law. These two principles took their rise in Protestant Germany; and America has been the greatest beneficiary of that noble teaching.” Yet with all these political and civic virtues, Prof. Eliot reversed himself like a weather-cock within a few months and became the hysterical spokesman of the most violent section of the Anglo-American coterie.
England Plundered American Commerce in Our Civil War.
England Plundered American Commerce in Our Civil War.—From Benson J. Lossing’s “History of the Civil War:” “The Confederates ... with the aid of the British aristocracy, shipbuilders and merchants, and the tacit consent of the British government, were enabled to keep afloat on the ocean some active vessels for plundering American commerce. The most formidable of the Anglo-Confederate plunderers of the sea was the ‘Alabama,’ which was built, armed, manned and victualled in England. She sailed under the British flag and was received with favor in every British port that she entered. In the last three months of the year 1862 she destroyed by fire twenty-eight helpless American merchant vessels. While these incendiary fires, kindled by Englishmen, commanded by a Confederate leader, were illuminating the bosom of the Atlantic Ocean, a merchant ship (the “George Griswold”) laden with provisions as a gift for the starving English operatives in Lancashire, who had been deprived of work and food by the Civil War in America, and whose necessities their own government failed to relieve, was sent from the City of New York, convoyed by a national war vessel, to save her from the fury of the British sea-rover!”
Recent statistics show that while 90% of our imports and 89% of our exports were carried in American bottoms before the Civil War, they had declined to 10 and 7½% of our imports and exports in 1910.
English Tribute to Germany’s Lofty Spirit.
English Tribute to Germany’s Lofty Spirit.—The following tribute to the lofty spirit of the German Empire is from the pen of Prof. J. A. Cramb, “Germany and England,” (Lecture II, p. 51, 1913):
And here let me say with regard to Germany, that, of all England’s enemies, she is by far the greatest; and by “greatness” I mean not merely magnitude, not her millions of soldiers, her millions of inhabitants; I mean grandeur of soul. She is the greatest and most heroic enemy—if she is our enemy—that England, in the thousand years of her history, has ever confronted. In the sixteenth century we made war upon Spain. But Germany in the twentieth century is a greater Power, greater in conception, in thought, in all that makes for human dignity, than was the Spain of Charles V and Philip II. In the seventeenth century we fought against Holland, but the Germany of Bismarck and the Kaiser is greater than the Holland of DeWitt. In the eighteenth century we fought against France, and again the Germany of to-day is a higher, more august Power than France under Louis XIV.