Let no one look for Freed Russia to be shining and beautiful. From the gloomy caverns in which they have mouldered the Russian people stagger out upon the sunlit heights of freedom weak, bent, half blind. Few of the older will ever conquer the dense ignorance in which they were kept by autocracy. Few of the characters twisted and deformed by oppression will ever become quite straight. In the behavior of this people there will be exhibited folly, fanaticism and brutality that will make the peoples born free uneasy as to the new sister.
Whatever happens, doubt not that the Russians are gifted and great-hearted. Their excesses have proclaimed how much they were held back and brutalized by the Tsars. It will take long for them to rid themselves of the traces of their servitude and misery. Even the children born in the new era will catch from their parents some of the evil heritage. Only the grandchildren of the common people of today will come into the full birthright of the free and prove the worth that is in the Russian race.
EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS.
Higher Than a Sour Apple Tree
OTHER wars end with those who made them. It is the will of the German Emperor that his war should pass on like a blight from generation to generation upon those whose fathers dared to stand against the ravager. To this end he has not only slaughtered and enslaved the defenders; he has sought to destroy the very fruitfulness of the land whereby their descendants must live.
To me the deliberate, coldly reckoned murder of the invaded countries’ trees and vines so that the children of the slain and enslaved and their children’s children may draw no sustenance from the kindly earth—that seems the most perverse, the most detestable, the most typical of all the crimes of Kaiserism.
The sterilization of Mother Earth! It took the mind of a Wilhelm to conceive it. And for that offence against generations unborn he shall hang, higher than was ever ruler before him, gibbeted in the righteous hatred of an outraged posterity.
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS.
