had been a direct challenge to Russia or to France. In his wildest fit of megalomania, John Bull would never have boasted that one British soldier was a match for fifty Germans; and yet this is what the Germans attribute to him when they allege that he forced the them.

struggle upon

The sequence of events which we have traced shows that England actually waited until the Germans had invaded Belgium and France before deciding to fight, and that then her preparations for sending troops across the Channel were so inadequate that her expedition could not check the Germans in Belgium and reached France only in time to take part in the great retreat. The Kaiser correctly described her eighty thousand men on the Continent as a "contemptible little army," for he reckoned by millions. These facts dispose of the charge that England either made or planned an aggressive war against Germany. Even her mighty Navy did not at once take the offensive.

German mendacity has exhausted its ingenuity in inventing pretexts for the violation of Belgium. Of these the most characteristic is that, as Belgium was about to attack Germany, Germany was forced in self-defense to attack her first. This is as if a giant ruffian, bent on killing and robbing a neighbor, should start to cross an intervening lot, and the owner of that lot, a frail young woman, should refuse him passage, whereupon he outraged her, and went on his murderous way. And when people cried out in horror at his brutality, he retorted that he acted in selfdefense, as the frail young woman was about to outrage him. German apologists for the devastation of Belgium illustrate what I mean when I say that German mendacity bears witness to the insoluble barbaric residue in the German nature. Bethmann-Hollweg's first avowal that "necessity" forced them to invade Belgium, and that it was wrong, cannot be explained away. The future student who tabulates the score or more of "justifications,"

some official, some private, all mutually contradictory, which German defenders have since devised, will assemble an unparalleled exhibit of abortive casuistry.

I leave unnoticed the mendacity manufactured for home consumption by the official organs. That is a form of deception practiced by all governments in war-time, and it seems to succeed in proportion to the inability of the people to think for themselves. What shall we infer as to the intelligence of German troops who were told on reaching Brussels that they were in Paris? How shall we estimate the credulity of the German public which was informed that the Kaiser and his Army had taken Paris, but had refused to enter it in order to escape the typhus fever and cholera which raged there? In any other country but Germany we should suspect that the official purveyors of mendacity rated their countrymen's gullibility very high.

CHAPTER XII

THE PLOT TO GERMANIZE AMERICA

A Countryman returning home one winter's day, found a Snake by the hedge-side, half dead with cold. Taking compassion on the creature, he laid it in his bosom and brought it home to his fireside to revive it. No sooner had the warmth restored it, than it began to attack the children of the cottage. Upon this the Countryman, whose compassion had saved its life, took up a mattock and laid the Snake dead at his feet. · Those who return evil for good, may expect their neighbor's pity to be worn out at last.

Esop's Fables.

E Americans have other means by

Wwhich to treat German proficiency

in the art of deception; for when we raised a cry of indignation over the "scrap of paper" crime, and then a cry of horror over the atrocities in Belgium, the German Government dispatched to this country a squad of apologists and plotters, who, in collusion with Germans already here, conducted such a campaign as has never been seen before-a

campaign which on its criminal side would not have been tolerated by an Administration which had possessed either courage or regard for American honor. Only once before in the history of this Republic had its President stood by while those who were plotting its subversion worked unchecked; that President was James Buchanan.

It soon became evident that the German propagandists were plotting for something much more tangible than America's "moral" sympathy. They addressed us first in the tone of one whose feelings have been hurt by the unexpected coolness of a "dear friend"; but when they found that their explanations did not move us, they resumed their natural Prussian voice, rough, truculent, and defiant. They told us that we were not a nation, but a mob, at the mercy of the mob spirit, which was then controlled by British lies. They warned us that William II would lose no time in punishing us after he had vanquished the Allies. They argued very little, supposing