These simple phrases, and hundreds more like them, plain to read in the book of evidence, make a better commentary than any I could write on this drawing. There are, indeed, many passages more terrible, such as the tale of the unspeakable treatment of the priest, dragged into Aerschot from the neighboring village of Gelrode. And I turn from reading such things to an English newspaper, wherein is the report of the speech of a person at a great gathering of people interested in coöperative trading—a person who hopes, after the war, to “take by the hand” the creatures guilty of these infamies. It has been my experience to know many sad blackguards in the worst parts of London, but I cannot remember one who could fall as low as that. To find such we must search the smuggeries and the priggeries and the Fellowships of Reconciliation.
The Old Serb
THE calculated brutality of German and Austrian “frightfulness,” its cowardice and cold-blooded evil, are already familiar to all impartial students of Teutonic warfare. But a Nation that has consented to its own slavery cannot value freedom, or be supposed to respect the life or liberty of the innocent and weak. With her neck under Prussia’s heel, tamed Germany strives in word and deed to reflect the spirit of her masters, and so far succeeds that she can contemplate the atrocities of this war with satisfaction, and from pulpit, school, and press applaud each new manifestation in turn. Blind obedience to command has brought the Germans to a state where even their thinking is done for them; they grovel before the brute power that drives them and kiss and sanctify the bloody hands that hold the whip.
Luther said the justification of liberty was that man could only truly serve God and his fellow-man if freedom of choice of means were permitted to him. The German of to-day relinquishes that freedom and is content to be herded under a political system that denies him his independent manhood. He sacrifices responsibility and liberty alike to a race which he still suffers to inherit the privilege of directing his State; he prostitutes his own reasoning faculties and ignores the evolution of morals by applauding Prussia’s reactionary ideals at the expense of every modern movement for the progress of humanity. He knows the right and does the wrong—a willing slave to an archaic autocracy. Thus servile obedience to physical power is the noblest principle that United Germany has yet attained, and the consequences permeate the people in a spiritual indifference to elementary honor displayed alike on her battlefields and in her council chambers.
The lie is accepted as her first diplomatic weapon; “frightfulness” is developed as an invaluable ally of conquest; cruelty and treachery are praised by the scholar and pastor, practised as a matter of course by the soldier and politician. None sees what dishonor is thus heaped upon his country and how her history has been defiled by this generation on the precepts of the last.
Ignoring, as she always does, every contact with other cultures, Germany, out of a congenital megalomania, has evolved her own; and in her eyes it is no doubt as beautiful and precious as the ugly treasure of the child in the perambulator, who discards the most delightful modern toys for its own battered and hideous doll.
In this regard she is indeed still a child; but a study of comparative cultures, following upon the destruction of her present rulers and their doctrine of force, should create a larger-minded nation wherein the civilized concepts of older States shall find recognition.