November 20, 1917
The attitude of the United States at this moment toward Germany’s three vassal allies, Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria, is a fifty-fifty attitude between peace and war. It is not honest war, neither is it honest neutrality. It is the attitude of the backwoodsman, who, seeing a black animal in his pasture at dusk and not knowing whether it was a bear or a calf, fired so as to hit it if it was a bear and miss it if it was a calf. Such marksmanship is never happy.
Bulgaria is now simply the tool of Germany and Turkey. I was formerly a stanch champion of Bulgaria, and would be again if she returned to her senses. But she now serves the devil, and shame be upon us if we do not treat her accordingly. No one can doubt that the Bulgarian Legation is an agency for German spies in this country. The Administration has published reports showing that for over a year, previous to our entry into the war, the German Embassy was the center of the spies and dynamiters with whom Germany was already waging war against us. These papers show that Germany’s allies are her mere tools and that Germany is withheld by no scruple from the commission of every conceivable treacherous intrigue and brutal outrage against us. Under these conditions it is a grave offense against our allies not to declare war on all of Germany’s allies.
Turkey has been and is the tool of Germany, but Germany has permitted her on her own account to perpetrate massacres on the Armenian and Syrian Christians which renders it little short of an infamy now to remain at peace with her. It is hypocritical to express sympathy with the Armenians and appoint messages to be read in the churches about them and yet refuse to do the only thing that will permanently help them which is to declare war on Turkey.
With Austria our present relations are less definable than our relations with any other power. No one can truthfully say exactly whether our attitude is one of peace or war. We have not declared war on Austria and yet we are furnishing money, coal, and munitions to Italy in order to enable her to fight Austria. If we really are at peace with Austria, we are flagrantly violating our duty as a neutral and we ought to be condemned in any international court. But if we are really at war, then we are committing the cardinal crime of hitting soft. If we had gone to war with Austria when we broke with Germany and had acted with proper energy, the disaster to Cadorna would probably not have occurred.
We are now taking part in the general council of our allies. The only way in which to make our part in the war thoroughly effective and our leadership felt to the utmost is whole-heartedly to throw ourself into the war on the side of all our allies and against all their and our enemies.
THE GERMANIZED SOCIALISTS AND PEACE
November 26, 1917
The American Socialist party at the present time is a thoroughly Germanized annex of the Prussianized militaristic and capitalistic autocracy of the Hohenzollerns. Honest social reformers have left it. No patriotic American ought longer to stay in it. It is purely an aid to the capitalist and militarist Hohenzollern party of Germany. It is a bitter enemy of the United States and a traitor to the cause of liberty throughout the world. Its leaders are the supporters of an alien autocracy and are seeking to secure a peace which would immensely benefit this Prussian autocracy. They stand beside the Bolsheviki, whose antics have made Russia at this moment a by-word, both of derision and hope to every believer in despotism and every opponent of liberty throughout the world.
Any man who feels that there is the slightest exaggeration in the above statements would do well to read the articles in which the New York Tribune has recently set forth the connection of Mr. William Bayard Hale with the pro-German propaganda in this country, with the Hearst papers and with the Socialist campaign in New York on behalf of Mr. Hillquit and a peace satisfactory to Germany. These articles should be published in permanent form and circulated as a tract among all decent Americans who still believe that the Germanized Socialist party in America to-day is anything except the foe of America, the foe of democratic liberty throughout the world, and the tool and ally of the autocrats, the capitalists, and the brutal and unscrupulous military chiefs of the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns.