Face to Face with Kaiserism

by James W. Gerard

"The idea of such propaganda has been conceived by the supreme military command. And it is therefore desirable that all should conform to it. The official cinema has been ordered by the supreme command to enter into direct communication with the daily press, and many leading newspapers have hastened to express their readiness to insert these patriotic caricatures, for the drawing of which the service of the best artists in Munich and Berlin have been secured. These caricatures will regard chiefly the heads of state of the Entente powers, their political leaders and those who make no mystery of their hatred for Germany. The blocks will be supplied free of expense."

German employers will never be able to grind down their workmen as before the war. The men who have fought in the trenches will return with a new feeling of independence, a new spirit of revolt against the caste prejudices, a disinclination to do the same work in the same hours and for the same wages.

My tailor in Berlin told me that several of his men who had returned after being discharged from the army because of some physical disability or wounds took an entirely different attitude and that one of them, for example, had said to him: "Do not think that I have come back to work as before. I have the Iron Cross, I have helped to save Germany. I am a hero and I do not propose again to be your industrial slave."

That is the new spirit which after the war will animate the deceived, hitherto down-trodden lower classes of Germany.

In our own country, the balance of political power may be held by the soldiers who are enlisted in the war and who, like the G. A. R.'s after our Civil War, may doubtless organise not only for protection but for political purposes. And this great restless body of returned troops, veterans of wars beyond the seas, may change our whole foreign policy in ways of which we do not dream. We shall be a more warlike nation, less patient to bear insult, more ready for war, unless this war ends all wars.

The war after the war, in trade and commerce, may be long and bitter. The rivers of Germany are lined with ships of seven or eight thousand tons, many of them built or completed since the war, and Germany designs as her first play in this commercial war to seize the carrying trade of the world. The German exporter has lost his trade for years. Alliances have already been made in great industries, such as the dyestuff industry, in preparation for a sudden and sustained attack upon that new industry in America. Prices will be cut to far below the cost of production in order that the new industry of America fighting single handed against the single head German trust may be driven from the field. The German Government will take a practical hand in this contest and only the combination of American manufacturers and the erection of a tariff wall of defence can prevent the Americans, if each fights single handed and for his own end, from falling before the united, efficient and bitter assault of German trade rivals.

The war has brought new power and new responsibility to women. Armed with the franchise they will demand not only equal rights but equal pay. In Great Britain alone, before the war, there were less than five hundred thousand women workers where now over five million carry the burden even of the war industries of the country.

Unless the war ends with a victory so decisive for the Allies that an era of universal peace shall dawn for the world, each nation will constitute itself an armed camp fearing always that the German, with his lust for war and conquest, will again terrorise the world by a sudden assault.

And a necessary sequence of this preparation for war will be the desire of each nation to be self-sufficient—to produce within itself those materials indispensable for the waging of war. Capital will be wasted because each nation will store up quantities of these materials necessary to war which it is compelled to import from other countries.

For instance, Germany will always carry great stocks of grain and of fats, of copper and cotton and wool, all of the materials for the lack of which she suffered during the present war.