The cartoons by Louis Raemaekers properly need no introduction, since they explain themselves in every line. But it might be usefully pointed out that, so far, our Fleet has saved us from actual sight of Germany’s war methods. What shells and bombs we know have arrived from the blue, lacking the personality of the despatchers. Raemaekers lives on the other side of an electrified wire within a very short distance of the slaughter-houses at work. He has dealt with people still bloody, sweating, and dusty from their flight. He knows, or he knows friends who know men and women dead or dishonoured, or in present peril of murder or rape. He understands, as well as all his countrymen, that Belgium is being vivisected on Holland’s doorstep, that Holland may take warning. He is more than any resident in Great Britain of that tragedy. His evidence then is as unimpeachable as his art.
Raemaekers also realises in his presentments what we do not—that the German foulness in war is an integral part of the German philosophy of life, and when the armies give themselves up to their reasoned abominations, it is no more than Germany going joyously to the realisation of the depraved dreams which have been instilled into its mind in peace. He does not lose his temper over the fact. His line cuts as deeply as possible because he knows not only the visible act, but the life-tendency which made the act inevitable. We do not. We still keep the idea that certain things “are not done.” Our geographical position prevents us feeling the pressure that keeps the neutral nations quiet and useful to Germany. Our caricaturists only see the outside of things. So it happens that we who would be most affected by defeat are the least affected now in our own minds.
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The abomination of frightfulness in Belgium recalls the sufferings and degradations which English women and children endured nearly sixty years ago when a section of the Indian army rebelled, and the mutineers, being joined by certain disaffected Indian princes and landowners, overcame small and isolated British communities and perpetrated identically the same barbarities as have been deliberately practised by the German troops during the present war. It was then that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the distinguished American essayist, gave utterance to the following opinion in the Atlantic Monthly; it is now embodied in his well-known work “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” Although the official voice of the United States has uttered no such protest, there is reason to believe that these words written by an American pen nine-and-fifty years ago do still represent the reasoned opinion of the bulk of American men and women:
Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with the higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in India—a white, superior “Caucasian” race, against a dark-skinned, inferior, but still “Caucasian” race—and where are English and American sympathies? We can’t stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does the same nature in the inferior animals—tame it, or crush it. The Indian mail brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers. England takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with empire, and makes a correction thus: Delhi, Dele! The civilised world says, Amen.
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Dele! Destroy utterly! Wipe off the face of the world—not Germany, or the German capital, or the German people, but the German philosophy of life as it has been expounded by its chief evangels, Treitschke, Bernhardi, and others. Dele! That should be the motto of each one of us. It is the message which Louis Raemaekers speaks with the whole strength of his genius. It has to be accomplished by the individual in his own sphere; it is a duty which cannot be deputised. Germany has proclaimed: “War is war; no treaty too sacred, no human right too divine, no woman too weak, no babe too tender to escape from the blind, brutal violence of war.” We must fight to the death. Either German philosophy is to be established, and freedom of body, mind, and soul crushed beneath the iron heel of Prussian Kultur, or else, at whatever the cost, this fearful menace to the peace and liberty of nations and individuals has to be destroyed root and branch. “I came not to send peace but a sword,” said the Saviour. Are we, who boast ourselves Christians and have heretofore rejoiced in Christianity, too weak or too fearful in this day of battle to take up the Saviour’s sword and to war for the eternal principles and ideals of right, justice, mercy, and loving-kindness?
This struggle is not merely a matter for the fighting men. It has to be carried into our counting-houses, our shops, our schools, and, if need be, our homes. Wherever we encounter the insidious presence of Germany and German ideas, there must they be overthrown, no matter how costly, difficult, or disagreeable the work may prove personally. The German has been taught that duty to his own State outweighs the laws of God and man. To betray hospitality, to be false to both written and spoken word, to be full of deceit, lying, and treachery—these are esteemed honourable actions even in times of peace where German interests are concerned by all her people from the Kaiser downwards. And the reverse is equally true. They who are not Germans, and who refuse to subscribe to the canons of Kultur, are reckoned beyond the pale of civilisation.
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Nothing has been stated here which cannot be proved by independent testimony. The literature of the war and of the events antecedent to the war has grown apace, and this short prefatory note is not the place to review it. But attention may be profitably drawn to the testimony, borne by another neutral, to German methods. Dr. Anton Nyström, one of the most distinguished sons of Sweden, a historian of high repute, who has travelled widely throughout Europe, in his book “Before, During, and After 1914,” written only last summer, establishes that public feeling has been deliberately created in Germany during the last fifty years that that country should assume the mastery of all nations related to Germany without regard to material and historical factors. And wherever this mastery has been assumed, whether in Schleswig-Holstein, Poland, or Alsace and Lorraine, a systematic and ruthless suppression of the mother-tongue has been attempted, and the peoples have been persecuted for any tokens of affection for their own nationality. As it has been, so it will be again, if Germany triumphs. Furthermore, we know well to-day that the mastery of the Germanic peoples was intended only to be the beginning of the mastery of the world.