The Treasure Boxes of Europe
"Belgium is a lamb, France and England are flocks of sheep, feeding and fattening in the pasture, ready for our shears." All these statements were sent out through Germany. The other nations are so many treasure boxes, ready for our military key to unlock them. Boys, farmers' sons, discussed the coming looting expedition in the hayfields. College boys talked about the treasures of England and France, Belgium and Holland, as boys once talked about emptying the newly discovered gold mines of California. Officers drank to "The Day." Editors added fuel to the flames of avarice. The statesmen cried, "It is our duty to rule these countries, and besides, by war we get great gain."
The influence of these incitements to avarice and ambition is found in the letters taken from the dead bodies of German soldiers. In one letter, found near Vitrimont, the German lover tells his sweetheart that he expects soon to be in Paris, and will bring her a handful of diamond rings, and a pocket full of bracelets and a few Paris gowns. Another German boy writes his young wife about a little valley in France with rich pastures and meadows, and beautiful farmhouses, and how Heinrich, Hans and Diedrich had decided to pick out the four best farms on which they would live as soon as they had cleaned up Paris. He adds, however, that Hans thinks it would be much better for them to wait until England is smashed, and when Canada is a colony, they can pick farms there two or three miles square, and make their children great landowners. For this war was to pay Germany a thousand per cent. dividend on her investment.
And who, even already, can deny that in large part Germany has made good the bribes offered to German boys? When one thinks how Germany has looted the states of Europe of her gold and silver, her bonds and stocks, their pictures, books, furniture, laces, silks, wheat, corn, wine, it is easy to understand the Kaiser's statement that "war should be Germany's chief national industry." With the Kaiser crime has prospered.
Germany wanted this war, planned this war, prepared for this war, and made treasure houses in which she could store the loot of this war. Blood went to Germany's head like drugged wine. For years she has been beside herself with military success. The Kaiser for twenty years has been rattling his sword and bullying the nations. Standing in the market-place, like some huge Goliath, in the spirit of the common braggart he has shouted, "I can lick anybody in the world." In the nature of the case, one brigand with his revolver is equal to a hundred business men and manufacturers in a railroad car. In the nature of the case also, Germany, with her military preparedness, should have been equal to a score of countries like Belgium and France and Great Britain and the United States—industrious, hard-working, but unmilitary, peacefully disposed. The deadly virus of avarice and militarism has burned like a fever in Germany's soul, even as avarice burned in the soul of Judas Iscariot, and made him a traitor that crucified not Belgium, but Jesus upon the cross.
The German People and the Kaiser
Little by little under the influence of this Pan-German empire scheme, the German people began to go to pieces morally. The breakdown of character is slow. The most virulent disease needs time to destroy the tissues, and poison the blood. The first to go over to the Potsdam gang were the officers and the army. Next followed the university professors, the bankers and the landowners. Last of all came the manufacturers and the shippers, who for a long time were timid lest their foreign trade be injured. Finally the state clergy, who received their salary from the Kaiser's treasury, were whipped into line, and men like Eucken, Harnack, heard the crack of the slave-driver's scourge above their heads, and became abject servants.
At last the woven web was spread all over the world through spies. Could any man have been lifted up above Berlin, and had full power to survey the whole world, he would have seen a spider's web, with its center in Berlin, with the Kaiser as the big black spider, sending out along the sinuous threads into every capital of every country and of every continent his evil plans and plots. Men like von Bernstorff in Washington, and Münsterberg in Boston, von Bopp, recently convicted in San Francisco, Luxburg in Buenos Ayres, with their schemes to blow up munition factories, planting of bombshells in ships, dynamiting Parliament buildings, blowing up bridges, organizing sedition in Mexico, India, and Brazil, the millions and millions of dollars spent in our own country, the secret decorations of medals given to bankers, manufacturers, shippers, editors, newspaper boys, stenographers, make up a story of Machiavellian deviltry and subtle cunning that has no parallel. The only difference between Judas and the average German spy is that the modern spy in the United States would not only have betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, but would have given ten per cent. off for cash. All that Germany won in three hundred years through the teachings of Martin Luther has been lost in twenty-five years through the influence of the Kaiser and his militarists. In the presence of all the world we have seen Germany lose her soul. All that John Milton taught, as to the fall of Satan as an angel, becoming a devil, has been literally enacted on the stage before the nations of the earth. What in 1900 was efficiency, in 1914 became the science of lying, theft, rape, poison and assassination.
Germany Constructs a Philosophy to Justify Herself