“The time of the great assessment has come and the Lord God is taking His inventory. Everything is being measured and valued; even your usefulness, my friend. What are you producing? Is it enough to feed and clothe yourself and family, even? Corn and potatoes and wheat and wool are more than money these days. If you don't help to produce them, you are, more or less, a dead weight.
“The idle lands in America ought to get busy. How? The rich men should begin to cultivate them. I know one such man who is growing two hundred and fifty acres of potatoes in Florida where nothing has grown before, and it is estimated his yield will be at least fifty thousand bushels. Now, that man is doing a real service to Democracy.
“When the monster of war is devouring the fruitfulness of the earth and stopping the labor of those who produce it, there is only one remedy. We must increase that fruitfulness so that there shall be enough to feed the monster and the people at home. If this is to be done, every one must work. In such a situation, the idleness of the able-bodied becomes a disgrace, and his dinner the food of remorse.
“Get busy. I do not mean that we should never play. I do mean that every day we should do a fair day's work with our hands and brain for the good of the world at large.
“The war has established two brotherhoods, my friend—that's the big thing about it. A brotherhood of democracy and a brotherhood of slaves.
“This brotherhood of slaves has been created by the leprous soul of Bill Hohenzollern. He has broken down the will of the average man in Germany and established his own in place of it. He has yoked his people with the slaves of Turkey and Bulgaria, and with them has overawed the will of the Austro-Hungarians, mostly a decent people. The will of the Kaiser has spread over middle Europe like a plague. The name of the plague is Williamism. We have caught it in America.”
“In America!” I exclaimed.
“In America,” Mr. Potter went on. “The quarantine officer has been bribed. He has left the door open and the plague has come in. The name of that officer is Human Conscience. Williamism can make no progress save through the carelessness or neglect of the human conscience.
“Long ago the German people turned over their consciences to the Kaiser and the Bundesrath with a license to use them as they thought best. The people said to themselves: 'The Kaiser enjoys the special protection and favor of the Lord. He is an intimate friend with a pull. He ought to be able to make a more expert use of our consciences than we could ourselves. Therefore, we will appoint him our representative and proxy at the Court of Heaven. If he and his friends decide, after due consultation with God, that we had better violate good faith and break our treaties and seize the property of other races and indulge in murder, rape, arson and piracy, we will do it. To be sure such action would seem to be wrong, but that is only because we are common cattle. We are the best herd of common cattle there is, but we are not supermen. The Bundesrath, the Kaiser and God ought to know what is right.
“Now that, in effect, is exactly what they said to themselves. A people may prosper and come to no violent trouble under such a plan. But the fact is, they are living around the crater of a moral Vesuvius.