Having entered upon war as her chief national industry, and looking with greedy eyes upon the steel plants, the looms and factories of rich Belgium; envying France her unique supremacy as the leader of the fine arts; tempted by the little states like Holland and Denmark on the west and Rumania and Poland on the east, states that seemed like purple clusters, bursting with wine for German lips, it became necessary for Germany to find a philosophy that would break down the great convictions of morality inherited from Martin Luther.
All wise men trace deeds back to the thinking of the doer, just as they trace bitter water back to a poisoned spring. Of the German teaching of Prussianism we can only say, no grapes from Prussian thorns, no figs from Prussian thistles. What the Prussians thought in their hearts, that they became in their lives. What began as sparks of avarice and ambition has ended in this world conflagration, and Germany is responsible, not for the sparks, but for the world ruin. Alcibiades and Catiline and Benedict Arnold all thought in terms of selfishness, and they all did cruel deeds. The murder of Edith Cavell and Captain Fryatt, the sinking of women and children on steamers, the rape of Belgium and Northern France, the assassination of Poland, the deliberate, cold-blooded plots by the German officers with the Turkish soldiers to exterminate the Armenians, so that they could settle on the lands, are the outer exhibition in deeds of the inner philosophy of the Germans. That is why their favorite philosopher Nietzsche says that Germany's gift is brute force and not intellect. ("Ecce Homo," page 38, and page 134: "Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture. I feel it my duty to tell the Germans that every crime against culture lies on their conscience.")
A philosophy therefore was concocted, called "Prussianism." This philosophy is no secret, for Germany has trumpeted it forth, from the top of the palace in Potsdam and the Dom in Berlin. For fifteen years it has been the very essence of the teaching in her universities, her pulpit, her press and her Parliament. This is its substance: Over against Martin Luther's conception of God as the All-wise and Good Father, who is righteous Himself, and demands righteousness of His children, the new philosophy sets up the political State as the be-all and end-all for the German people. Omnipotence means a Kaiser's arm, with that of a war staff, carried up to the nth degree of power by seventy millions of other arms.
"Weakness is the only sin against the Holy Ghost," cries Bernhardi. Let the individual German soldier be strong enough to trample under foot the Belgian or French merchant or girl. Let the German navy be strong enough to sink every Lusitania or Sussex. Let the German army be equal to overrunning, looting, pillaging and dynamiting France and Belgium. To be beaten is to be contemptible, and therefore to be sinful. Whatever wins the victory on land or sea is right. The moment Germany crosses the frontiers all Belgians and Frenchmen lose any right whatever to either their lives or their property, but from that moment the invader's life and effects become sacred.
The Reflex Influence of the Pan-German Scheme Upon Germany's Statesmen
Most disastrous and disorganizing the reflex influence of Germany's philosophy of Prussianism, and her plot for a Pan-German empire upon Germany's statesmen and diplomats. From Phocion to Lincoln high-minded statesmen have been jealous of their pledges and of their treaties with other countries. In one of his noblest orations Edmund Burke speaks of "the peculiar sanctity attaching to an international treaty." Our own Washington spoke about the importance of consideration and long deliberation before an ambassador gave his word that, once it is given, must stand "like the law of God." Business men scoff at the trickster, who plays fast and loose with his written word given to the bank or to his creditors. Nor is there a tribe of Indians that, once they have eaten salt, or exchanged the pipe of peace, but considers the pledge precious as life itself. All civilized nations, therefore, have been horrified at the way Germany has broken down on the side of truthfulness, until it is a proverb in the world to-day that a thing is as worthless as a written pledge by Germany.
The Scrap of Paper
Our scholars have long known that Frederick the Great was the first German to say that international treaties were to be observed so long as they were useful and served his purpose, and when that time passed a treaty was to be counted "a scrap of paper." When then the English Ambassador, on July 1, 1914, told Bethmann-Hollweg plainly that if Germany invaded Belgium, England would have no other course than to join her armies to those of Belgium and France, the German Prime Minister exclaimed, "And declare war for what? For just a scrap of paper!" We now know that Germany signed treaties for purposes of diplomatic camouflage, to blind the eyes of other governments while she was making ready her weapons for attack. Most significant that speech in the Reichstag on July 31, 1914, that contains this: "We cannot longer postpone the fulfillment of the pledge given to Austria at the conference of July 5th." During all those days, between July 30th and August 4th, when the Kaiser was apparently trying to prevent war, Germany and Austria were secretly preparing cannon, guns, ammunition, railway trains, food, and secretly hurrying them to the front, during three entire weeks, following the agreement between the Kaiser and the Emperor. Upon eternal brass, therefore, Germany engraved her own infamy. "We are now in a state of necessity, and necessity knows no law. We were compelled to override the just protest of the Belgian government. The wrong—I speak openly—that we are committing, we will endeavour to make good as soon as our military goal has been reached. Anybody who is threatened as we are threatened can have only one thought, how he is to hack his way through,—how he is to hack his way through."
Consul to Norway
That is why our President, speaking for the republic, has told Germany plainly that no treaty signed by the Emperor and his government means anything whatsoever. There is no German in the Fatherland or in the United States but understands thoroughly that the word of a German statesman is less than nothing: the shadow of the shade of the possibility of a cipher. Here is von Bernstorff, given his papers and sent back to Berlin. Bernstorff gives out a final interview, stating that he has the full approval of his conscience (a favourite expression of German spies), in that he was carrying away from the United States the full consciousness that he had never done one deed or had one thought save to draw the Fatherland and the great republic closer together, though all the time his secret agents had been journeying back and forth between Washington and Mexico, carrying bribes, organizing sedition, maturing plots, looking towards war between Mexico and Texas, and pledging Carranza that Germany would restore to her New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Scarcely less horrible Luxburg's cipher despatch advising Germany to sink the steamers of the Argentine Republic, "leaving no trace behind." In Norway the German Ambassador from Berlin used his trunk, covered with the red sealing wax of the Foreign Office, to carry bombs, and the cultures of glanders and anthrax to spread disease among the Norwegian people and to sink their steamers. In the old days of Cæsar Borgia in Italy, poisoning was made a fine art. Whenever the Italian prince coveted a rich man's palace, diamond ring, beautiful wife or young daughter, or his villa, he invited the owner to dine at the palace, having first of all poisoned the wine or the meat. Now the world has wakened up to discover that the Borgias were children in the arts of dissimulation and hypocrisy, and that Germany is the original inventor of perjury. The Kaiser, Bethmann-Hollweg, von Bernstorff, and some pro-Germans in this country have displayed a form of wickedness so cool, calculated, and scientific, as to seem the characteristics of fiends, while their plots to plant bombshells on our steamers, and kill innocent people by the hundreds represent such hardened forms of fiendishness that even the worst thief would scarcely dare hint at such crimes to his own accomplice in devilishness.