Great must be the subjugation before a practical people can reach this pass, or still fail to perceive, if on a material basis only, where the legend of world-power and world-trade has brought them. As sleepwalkers they pursued their dream and have not yet awakened to see where now they stand. Still they believe the issue undetermined; still is it hidden from them that their might is broken, that roughly half their foreign trade, which lay with the Allies, has vanished. Only ignorance and the tradition of servility postpone inevitable revolution.
Of Germany’s evil-genius and arch-enemy, now far advanced on the road that leads to his destruction, an illuminating picture has just been flashed to us. One who was long a publicist in the capitals of Europe has spoken of “Things I remember,” and he quotes a German author—a woman—who spoke thus of the “War Lord” before the war. None is a more shrewd and subtle student of character than a woman, when she holds an object worthy of her study.
“I can assure you that he extirpates, as of fell purpose, every independent character, root and branch. Think of the number of poor devils in prison for the crime of lèse majesté, not one instance of which he has ever pardoned; while there is not a case of a man having killed his opponent in a duel, however disgraceful might have been its cause, whom he has not pardoned, or at least remitted the sentence. Never has a monarch encouraged Byzantine servility to such a degree as this man. No sunbeam but it must radiate from him; no incense but it must fill his nostrils.”
May Germany use her waking hour to be rid forever of this archaic incubus; and if, at the end, she still cries for the domination of Prussia, then it is to be hoped that, when they have won the war, the Allies will save her from her own blindness and themselves perform the act of liberation.
The Voices of the Guns
ONE may characterize the figures in this cartoon as not altogether imaginary. In the villages behind the lines of the Somme, and in the tumbled country north of Verdun, there must be many such little homes as that in which the old man is pictured, homes befouled and desecrated by the presence of these hard-faced men who look on contemptuously while the old man listens. He and his kind know the voices of the guns, for they have heard them before. What memories of ’70 and his own fighting days must come to him and to all his kind as they wait the coming of the guns that shall drive out this scourge of France—this vileness that for nearly half a century has poisoned the life of all Europe, and on France especially has set an abiding mark? What hopes must be his for the day when Prussianism shall be no more than a vague name, and the sons of those sons of his who fight to-day shall work content in the knowledge that their fathers have freed them from this Damoclean threat?
How these people in the conquered territories have endured, how they have waited and hoped, even when there seemed no ground for hope, in the darkest of the days, we shall perhaps know when peace comes again. Yet even then we in Britain can never know all, for there is given to us a shield that France has never known—our shield, and in a measure our danger. For no man in Britain sits and listens for the guns that shall free his house and his land, and in that fact is possible lack of comprehension and consequent great danger; as once it has been, so it may be again.