And what will be the attitude of Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Italians and Russians after the war, toward the mad-dogs and wolves of Germany? For the sake of "business" and "trade" and "cheap goods" will we fraternize once more with the red-handed murderers of ten thousand Belgian and French civilians, the ravishers and enslavers of 100,000 Belgian and French women, the sinkers of the Lusitania, and the murderers of Captain Fryatt and Nurse Cavell? Will we buy goods made by blood-stained German hands, that have dragged Belgian and French girls from their screaming mothers? Will we buy and use goods made on stolen Belgian machines, of materials stolen from France? Will we patronize the German "science" that produced chlorine gas for British soldiers, or the German artillery artists who have gleefully pounded the Cathedral of Rheims into ruins?
Will we not hear with the swan song of Lohengrin the dying shrieks of the Lusitania women and children as they struggle in the icy waters?
In view of the records of the past three years, what two words are more loathsome and detestable than "German kultur"?
The only logical conclusion of Germany's career of crime and dirty fighting is, at the close of the war, the contempt, the aversion and the loathing of the civilized world, and a universal policy of non-intercourse. Let Germany go and live with Austria, and the loathsome Turk, in a hell of their own. Can any American not of German birth ever again desire to visit and travel in the land of the criminal Kaiser who started the war, the land of the murderers, ravishers and traitors whom the war brought to the surface? We cannot conceive it possible.
And after the war is over, the less we hear in America of the German language and of German literature, music, art and science, the better for all concerned. The German idols one and all lie in the mud, in fragments,—cast down and smashed by the mad-dogs of Germany, and no one else! Americans of German descent may build monuments to their memory, but never again can they be set up for Americans to worship.
Through her crimes and her dirty fighting, Germany has earned the contempt and aversion of the world, and it will be paid to her as long as civilization endures. Whole libraries will be written about the brutalities of the German Germans, the cowardice of their navy, the blunders of their alleged statesmen, and the carnival of lies of the Kaiser and his advisors.
Men who fight honorably take their punishment like men, get over it, and often become friends again. But not so when one party is "a dirty fighter," a gouger, and a hitter below the belt. Even the youngest American schoolboy despises the unfair fighter, and loathes the sight of him.
After this war is over, no man outside the Teutonic-Turco mad-dog influence will be so poor or so mean as to look upon a German German with real respect, much less with admiration. The world will cheerfully go naked and hungry ere it accepts food and clothes made in Germany. Americans with self respect will refuse to buy German goods, or to trade in stores that offer them for sale,—not indeed to "punish" Germany, but because the source is so loathsome and offensive. Germany, Austria and Turkey already have the contempt, the scorn and the hatred of the whole world, and after the war they should be ostracised and shunned for a thousand years.
It will be only the most sordid and mean-spirited people of America, England and France who will again buy of Germany because her goods are cheap. It is now time publicly to declare in America the existing aversion to Germany, in order that all importers may be made to know and understand the intentions of the public, and thereby avoid loading their shelves with goods that they can not sell to Americans. Let signs go up now reading: "No German goods sold here."