THE four greatest events in history; the advent of Christ, the discovery of America, the Reformation, and the French Revolution, are all we can compare with the days in which we are living—and dying.
In a cyclone of desolations surpassing the terrors of the insane, the world, so far from recoiling, rolls forward into vast and irrevocable changes that seemed but yesterday the remotest goals of laborious evolution; rolling up the precipitous steep of custom in all the fury with which we should look to see it roll down. And the unique wonder of this fifth and last of these supreme events is that only it has sprung primarily from an evil design and can attain its true end only by that design’s everlasting overthrow.
So speaks the matchless hand of Raemaekers. The vastest murderer the race has ever borne and, at his heels, his most remorseless waster of blood together watch the glass of time, abhorring every upward plunge of a maddened world and daily hounded by one implacable question, one four-headed dog of hell: Will their treasury, will their sinking of ships, will their delusion of their own people, last?
No. One or another will presently fail, and when one fails all fail and the world, refined by fire, will be, shall be, saved.
GEORGE W. CABLE.
“The Ugly Talons of the Sinister
Power”
THE attitude of scorn, of contempt and of defiance with which Raemaekers in his cartoon, “America’s Choice,” represents Uncle Sam as he confronts the treacherous Kaiser, bearing the olive branch in his talons, well expresses the attitude of the United States towards Germany at the time we entered the war, and this attitude will probably continue for a generation or two after the war ends.
“The Intolerable Thing,” which President Wilson so aptly named the irresponsible German Government, can never disguise itself so that we will not detect the terrible menacing claws with which Raemaekers portrays the Kaiser. It will continue to be an Intolerable Thing until the horrors of this war are forgotten.
The German philosophers brazenly justify their nation’s course in this aggressive war with all its attendant horrors, by an appeal to the Darwinian doctrines of the struggle for existence, and the consequent survival of the fittest, which play such a prominent part in biological evolution.