Louis Raemaekers has done more than any one man to bring into expression the spirit of fierce indignation and horror that has come not only upon the people of Belgium and of northeastern France, who have been directly exposed to the brutal despotism of the Prussians, but upon all of those who are fighting to rescue the people of these imprisoned devastated provinces, and upon the whole civilized world.
Raemaekers has been able with the powerful genius of his pencil to give expression in cartoons that belong to the history of art and of the world, to this protest of civilization.
He is a poet as well as an artist.
His weird and sombre conceptions gave evidence of a powerful imagination. His work has been compared to that of Gilray, but the caricatures which in 1805 amused English men and frightened English children were merely clever pieces of drawing.
The wonderful designs of Raemaekers set forth the devilishness of the policies and the actions of the Prussians as incisively and as conclusively as if he had been sitting as judge in the court of final appeal.
These grim pictures constitute indictments of great criminals. It is impossible to tell how far they may as yet have penetrated Germany, but sooner or later these irrefutable judgments of criminal acts will be brought home to the consciousness not only of Prussia, and of the leaders who are directly responsible for the murders and the other horrors, but of the whole people of Germany who, poisoned by the fumes of prussic acid from Berlin, have been willing to give their strength and their force to the attempt to impose Prussian tyranny upon the peoples of the world.
GEO. HAVEN PUTNAM.
February 1, 1918.
