The spokesmen of these newly formed governments say they will be democracies. But who are the spokesmen? Are they not of them who until yesterday were fighting for the preservation of the country and government which had been selected by God and by themselves to thrust "Kultur" upon the world, and which had been wantonly attacked by its neighbors on the north, the south, the east, and the west? Did they admit until that fateful yesterday that their government was not perfect, or at least possessed of only such trifling imperfections that they, the Socialists of one kind or another, could readily remove them? Nothing has transpired in Germany since the abdication of the Kaiser, so far as we have been informed, that permits us to say with anything like assurance what form of government Germany hopes to have. All that we really know is that the government has fallen into the hands of the German Socialists, the deeply dyed-in-the-wool Socialists and the Socialistic Democrats. So far as one can predicate judgment on the reported sayings of the spokesmen of either of these two parties, the purpose of the present government is to save as much as it can of the previous régime and to continue it, minus the Kaiser and the war lords.
In none of the addresses or communications of any of these spokesmen is there any real admission of defeat, any intimation of humility, any indication of having been lessoned, nor, indeed, of anything that can be interpreted as recognition of the fact that Germany has been the victim of Grossenwahn, megalomania, which prompted and compelled her to a line of conduct which conditioned her destruction. On the contrary, everything that has been said has a note of determination to rehabilitate herself in order that she may take the leading position, morally, intellectually, commercially, in the world. At the very moment when admission that she had lost the war was forced from her, and while she was prostrate on the field of battle and in a state of collapse in every acre of her territory, instead of silence and of resignation, instead of an indication of that humility which tauts the heart-strings of the conqueror, there was clamor of exultation setting forth the virtues of the people and their ineradicable potentialities. Having been denied victory on the field of battle, if that Gott who was their Feste Burg does not desert them, they will now win a greater victory—they will show the world that they can conquer themselves and convert defeat into victory. They are without shame and without modesty. They ask for succor from the nation which less than eighteen months ago was a negligible quantity and which four years ago was made up of drivelling idiots and men mad with lust for wealth. "You will not let countless thousands of women and children die of starvation." No, we shall not let them starve, but we shall have adequate care that never again will it be within your power to thrust the mailed fist of one extremity upon the honest, God-fearing people of the world while with the other you snatch the food from the mouths of those unable, because of age or infirmity, to provide for themselves.
One does not fail to detect the ring of exultation with which they say that they will win the greatest of all victories—that of showing that, though defeated in arms, they can be masters of themselves. They have no recognition whatsoever that the destruction of mediæval imperialism and the unfurling of the flag of liberty have been due to valor and sacrifice of the peoples of the whole world, who have accomplished it without other motive than to make the world a fit place in which an honest man can live. In short, they are endeavoring to make it seem that their defeat in the material control of the world by the German sword is to be an opportunity for a great German triumph.
At this distance it is impossible to distinguish between the arrogance of the German Kaiser and his supporters and the arrogance of the German Socialists. They have every appearance of being born of the same monstrous mother made big of Satan. That which the latter are now stating they can do is the same as the Kaiser and his cohorts of authority, founded in divine rights, thought they could do and set out to do a quarter of a century ago. The Germans are as intoxicated with their own vanity, their own self-sufficiency, their own divine mission and potentialities to-day as they have been at any time in the twentieth century.
No one denies that Germany defeated may make any attempt at government which she chooses. At the same time no one can abrogate the right of the conquerors to see to it that the form of government which she institutes and which she attempts to carry into operation shall not be one that militates against the success of the ideals for which the Allies have striven, not for themselves alone but for the whole world. It needs no prophetic vision to discern in the expressions of dictatorial arrogance of those who have taken the government in hand in Germany the same assumption of superiority which led to their defeat, the greatest the world has ever seen. In brief, as we see it to-day, the effort in Germany at the present time is to substitute one kind of class interests for another which was admitted by the world's best judges to be not only pernicious but destructive of liberty. If the former was of such a nature, why does not the latter partake of it? If there were any indications of sincere desire to establish an honest form of democratic government in Germany, there is no doubt that its originators and the whole German people would soon realize that they were dealing with a magnanimous conqueror, but in view of the fact that the wild beast has now in its agonal days the same snarl, the same venom, and the same sharp teeth that it had when it was lusty and well-nourished, it is necessary that the conquerors should harden their hearts and judiciously guard the springs and cisterns of their generosity.
Promises of Germans should no longer be adequate. We should demand deeds, and not only that but that they should be backed by the sentiment and determination of the whole people and not of those who in maintaining that they speak for them speak only for themselves and their malignant ambitions. Teutonic tradition and authority must be replaced by Jeffersonian, Mazzinian, Wilsonian liberty and justice.
It would be well for the whole world to realize that we are on the threshold of the most fundamental transformation that the human mind can conceive. We have been so long accustomed to the institutions and conventions that constitute authority and privilege that it is almost impossible for any one to realize that they are about to cease to exist. Not only has the death-knell of such class privileges been rung, but likewise that of institutions which have stultified intellectual growth and moral supremacy, and amongst them none has more importance than organized religion, that is, religion which claims to be authoritative in so much as its directors or trustees—call them what you may—formulate a dogma to the teaching of which all others must conform in order that they may have life everlasting. People's religion must be left to the free choice of the people.
Few of us realize that the curtain rung down on the 11th of November, 1918, was the closing of the second act in that great drama of which the first act was the French Revolution and of which the third and closing act will be devoted to social and political reconstruction. The majority have some ill-defined notion or thought that we shall go back to the kind of world that existed previous to August, 1914. There isn't the smallest chance of it. I doubt whether even those who have had a vision of the impending transformation realize, however, how great or far-reaching the change will be. The time has come when the people are going to rule the world. They are going to administer its affairs in such a way that every man and woman capable of taking thought will have opportunity to be heard and will be privileged to live without authority, whose purpose it is to make the masses conform to a line of conduct that will make for the advantage of the few, favored by birth or fortune which may have been their birthright or their acquisition. For years the word socialism and that for which it stands have been redolent of bad odor. This war has purged it of its disagreeable connotation, and to-day that which is meant by socialism is equivalent to the rights of man. In the minds of many socialism and anarchy are synonymous, but in reality the socialism which the war just finished has nurtured to a lusty youth is much freer from anarchy and from the potentialities of destruction than the reign of autocracy, of capital and of bosses, which it supplanted.
I realize that it is difficult to defend this position in view of what is happening in Russia. To-day the bugaboo to the world's children is Bolshevism; that is what will "get us if we don't look out." When a riot breaks out anywhere nowadays it is Bolshevism. It has become a shibboleth, a name to conjure with, this social and political experiment in organized and carefully planned violence that has been carried out by the Jews in Russia since the conclusion of the peace of Brest-Litovsk. The word has suddenly come into wide-spread use and it is being given the connotation of socialism. In truth it is the socialism of the young Russia. Its theory is a perverted Marxism and its practice is an envenomed Hindenburgism. The etymology of the word Bolshevism as a name for a pseudopolitical party finds its origin in the programme of the party itself, that is, in the ultraradical tendencies of "Maximilist extremists" professed by the party leaders, Lenine, Trotzky, and Sinowjew. The leader Lenine said of the Bolsheviks in a moment of frankness: "For every genuine Bolshevik of my party there are sixty idiots and thirty-nine rascals," and no one can doubt his fitness to judge. We should not forget that the Russian public that looks on Lenine as its idol is honeycombed with deserters, ruffians, and at least three hundred thousand common criminals who were liberated from the prisons and from exile in Siberia by the revolution.
The Bolsheviks are neither a party nor are they the expression of democratic and revolutionary Russia, as a great many persist in believing. They are a mob drunk with ultraradical doctrines, who from exceptional circumstances have become able to seize the power, dominating with methods ferociously reactionary a hundred and twenty million individuals. And the world is witnessing in astonishment the spectacle offered by these bandits who, illegally holding the state power, arbitrarily decide the fortunes of a whole people after having allured them with fallacious promises, betraying them before the enemy.