GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION CHAPTER I HUMILIATION NOT THANKSGIVING O, well for him whose will is strong. TENNYSON. OR the second time since the Atrocious FOR War began, the President of the United States calls upon us Americans to observe a day of Thanksgiving, on which we shall express gratitude for the manifold blessings Providence has showered upon us. Our harvests have surpassed all bounds. Our industries, under the unhealthy stimulus of war, have raised the wages of millions of laborers. Like the Pharisee we can thank God that we are not like our neighbors: they are at war, we are at peace. A year ago, President Wilson bade us hold a similar Thanksgiving; and those who have the catchwords of religion on their lips, but infidelity in their hearts, might infer-from our increased prosperity — that our prayers and thank-offerings were acceptable, and have been rewarded in overflowing measure. But those are not gods of the spirit who substitute gifts of corn and copper and iron and gasolene for the spiritual gifts, for lack of which our souls perish. In this crisis a true prophet of the soul would call us not to thanksgiving but to humiliation- the humiliation that every heart, into which the faintest instinct of nobleness has glimmered, must feel when it recognizes that it has betrayed the very law of its being. During fourteen months the memory of our dark shortcoming, of our great refusal, has lain like a mildew on our American conscience. Some of us, singly, have repudiated the shame; but even if every American had made his private disavowal, we should not have been freed from our supreme obligation. It was for the President of the United States, sitting in the chair where Washington and Lincoln have sat, the guardian for the time being of the principles on which this Republic was founded, the principles which have upheld it for one hundred and forty years, the principles which alone justify its existence and its perpetuation, it was for President Wilson, speaking for this nation, to utter the word of repudiation which could have absolved us from the guilt of allowing Belgium to be violated without our protest. He kept silent. Day after day brought news of fresh atrocities committed by the Germans in Belgium. What might have been regarded at first as a few sporadic cases of such cruelty as often accompanies war, proved to be in truth only the beginning of the enforcement of a system of Frightfulness, deliberately planned years before in the Bureau of the Prussian General Staff, unhesitatingly approved by the German Emperor, and now carried out with diabolical precision. Very soon the weight of testimony |