United States treatment of civilians, 1863.
"22. Nevertheless, as civilization has advanced during the last centuries, so has likewise steadily advanced, especially in war on land, the distinction between the private individual belonging to a hostile country and the hostile country itself, with its men in arms. The principle has been more and more acknowledged that the unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honor as much as the exigencies of war will admit.
"23. Private citizens are no longer murdered, enslaved, or carried off to distant parts, and the inoffensive individual is as little disturbed in his private relations as the commander of the hostile troops can afford to grant in the overruling demands of a vigorous war.
"24. The almost universal rule in remote times was, and continues to be with barbarous armies, that the private individual of the hostile country is destined to suffer every privation of liberty and protection, and every disruption of family ties. Protection was, and still is with uncivilized people, the exception."
German Government's reversion to barbarism.
These declarations were made in the midst of our Civil War—one of the world's fiercest conflicts. A half-century later, after more than 50 years of progress, the German Government has gone back to the methods used by "barbarous armies" and "uncivilized people." It has deliberately adopted the policy of deporting men and women, boys and girls, and of forcing them to work for their captors; it has even compelled them to make arms and munitions for use against their allies and their own flesh and blood.
No other act of the German Government has aroused such horror and detestation throughout the civilized world. Thousands of helpless men and women, boys and girls, have been enslaved. Families have been broken up. Girls have been carried off to work—or worse—in a strange land, and their relatives have not known where they have been taken, or what their fate has been.
This system of forced labor and deportation embraced the whole of Belgium, Poland, and the occupied lands of France.
The plan for setting forth the essential facts of the deportations and forced labor is as follows: the documents, that is to say, a small fraction of those which could be cited, will be allowed to tell the story, and only such comments will be added as are needed to enable the reader easily to grasp the connection of events.
BELGIUM.
"The deportations * * * were the most vivid, shocking, convincing, single happening in all our enforced observation and experience of German disregard of human suffering and human rights in Belgium." Vernon Kellogg, in Atlantic Monthly, October, 1917.