It was the right, guaranteed by a treaty to which Germany was a signatory, of our private individuals to sell munitions and supplies, but as Prince von Buelow once remarked on December 13th, 1900, in the Reichstag, "I feel no embarrassment in saying here, publicly, that for Germany, right can never be a determining consideration."
Indeed the tame professors were let loose and many of them rushed into government-paid print to prove that, according to law, the murders of the Lusitania were justified. A German chemist friend of mine told me that the chemists of Germany were called on, after poison gas had been met by British and French, to devise some new and deadly chemical. Flame throwers soon appeared together with more insidious gases. And it is only because of the vigilance of other nations that German spies have not succeeded in sowing the microbes of pestilence in countries arrayed against lawless Germany.
Remember there is nothing that Kaiserism is not capable of trying in the hope of victory.
CHAPTER IV
THE KAISER AND "LÈSE-MAJESTÉ"
The talents and ability and agreeable personality of the German Emperor must not blind us to the fact that he is the centre of the system which has brought the world to a despair and misery such as it never has known since the dawn of history. We must remember that all his utterances disclose the soul of the conqueror, of a man intensely anxious for earthly fame and a conspicuous place in the gallery of human events; envious, too, of the great names of the past, his ears so tuned for admiration and applause that they fail to hear the great, long drawn wail of agony that echoes around the world. His eyes are so blinded with the sheen of his own glory that they do not see the mutilated corpses, the crime, the pestilence, the hunger, the incalculable sorrow that sweeps the earth from the jungles of Africa to the frozen plains of the North, from Siberia to Saskatchewan, from Texas to Trieste, from Alaska to Afghanistan—everywhere he has brought the dark angel of mourning to millions upon millions of desolate homes.
Do you remember that picture of the Conquerors, Cæsar and Alexander, Attila and Napoleon, Charlemagne and Cambyses, astride their horses or in chariots in the centre of the picture, dark, gloomy, menacing? On each side of them, lining a vast plain that fades in the distance, lie the dead—stiff, cold, grey, reproachful;—yet all the victims of those conquerors, as well as all their battalions do not equal the countless number that have already drenched a forgiving earth with their dying blood in this war:—victims all of the vain-glorious ambition of a single mortal—the German Kaiser.
But the despot who sends his subjects to die, as Frederick the Great said, "in order to be talked about" is not indigenous to any one particular country. Like conditions produce like results. The career of Louis XIV, the "Sun King," for instance, whose wars and extravagances sowed the seeds of the French Revolution, is epitomised in two phrases uttered by him: "I am the State" and "I almost had to wait."
After the French Revolution, another despot, the first Napoleon, not only sought the conquest of the world, but made his ex-waiter and ex-groom marshals and his washerwomen duchesses ape the manners and customs of the old régime. Despotism has been characteristic of many generations but the world had thought itself rid of the worst offenders.