The End of the Hindenburg
Line
THE Hindenburg line is a menace to every courthouse in America. In my recent journeys through the West I have never seen a courthouse tower printed against the sky without relating it to the great world conflict. We are fighting for all that is embodied and expressed and safeguarded in these citadels of democracy. A little while ago I looked with reverence at a log hut preserved at Decatur, Illinois, the first courthouse of the county. In that little room Abraham Lincoln appeared as attorney for pioneer citizens who understood perfectly the promise of American democracy. The laws invoked to preserve their rights were a crystallization of the thought and the hope of liberty-loving peoples, and no settler in wilderness or prairie, no matter how humble, but felt himself a partner in the benefits of American institutions and the great tradition of English law. Every American courthouse is founded upon Magna Charta. If we are indebted for anything in our democracy to the Teutonic-Turkish combination I am unaware of it. Dull of wit indeed, the Hohenzollern BEAST, to think his mailed fist could ever splinter the door of one of these American courthouses! The price our forefathers paid for their liberty was too great for any yielding to a devil gone mad and attempting to bestride the world. During the Civil War Lincoln once remarked to Seward, speaking of Weems’ “Life of Washington” which he had read before the fireplace in his father’s cabin in Spencer County, Indiana, “It occurred to me that it must have been something pretty fine those men were fighting for.” It was; and it is for that same fine thing that America has again drawn the sword.
MEREDITH NICHOLSON.
“Something’s Wrong. She
Doesn’t Seem to Inspire
Confidence”
IT is Germany’s “Kultur,” her spiritual code, that is responsible for America’s entrance into the war; her gruesome sacrifice to Moloch of all which distinguishes humanity from the brute and the savage. It is her philosophy which has made us her horrified but resolute foe.
The fruits of her spirit stand forth alike in her speech and acts. “Kultur is a spiritual organization of the world, which does not exclude bloody savagery. It raises the daemoniac to sublimity. It is above morality, reason, science,” so wrote a Teutonic expounder in the first year of the war. “We have become a nation of wrath; we think only of the war. We execute God Almighty’s will, and the edicts of His justice we will fulfil, imbued with holy rage, in vengeance upon the ungodly. God calls us to murderous battles, even if worlds should thereby fall to ruins,” so wrote one of Germany’s poets. “Whoever cannot prevail upon himself to approve from the bottom of his heart the sinking of the Lusitania, whoever cannot conquer his sense of the gigantic cruelty to unnumbered perfectly innocent victims—and give himself up to honest delight at this victorious exploit of German defensive power—him we judge to be no true German,” so wrote one of her pastors. And for hideous, ruthless deeds which violate every sanctity and deify falsehood we need but cite her slaughter of children and the aged, her poisoning of wells, her shooting of nurses, her sinking of hospital ships, her brutal deportations and all the revolting sinuosities of her spy system.
It is this catalogue of crimes committed in the name of moral superiority that has incensed the American people. It is to combat “Kultur” which Germany extols as the quintessence of civilization, this gospel which constitutes military might the only inviolable law, that we have pledged our precious sons, our abundant resources, our supreme, indefatigable energies. If Prussian arrogance be not rebuked, Christian civilization fails. Hence the growing and embattled sentiment that a world in ruins yet free for man would be preferable to the sway of Satanic Teuton efficiency.
ROBERT GRANT.
