All wars bring their full measure of miseries and misfortunes, and this world war, initiated by Germany for the purpose of imposing a military domination upon Europe and America, and conducted with methods which combine the barbaric standards of the Huns and Mongols with the skilled mechanism of the twentieth century, has brought upon the world miseries that can hardly be estimated or described. There are some offsets, however, even in a contest like the present, which is a fight for the preservation of civilization against the onslaughts of scientific barbarism. No nation can take up arms for the defense of its rights and liberties and for the fulfilment of its obligations without bringing into the souls of the people some development of national and patriotic spirit. The soldiers in the trenches and the citizens working at home are fighting and working for a common cause. They come in this manner to have realization of what they owe to each other, to their country and to their consciences. We may feel assured that through the sacrifices that are being made today in our country, of lives, of labor and of wealth, there will be developed from a people which had in its prosperity been growing rich and lazy-minded and forgetful of national morality, the soul of America. Louis Raemaekers has done more than any one man to bring into expression the spirit of fierce indignation and horror that has come not only upon the people of Belgium and of northeastern France, who have been directly exposed to the brutal despotism of the Prussians, but upon all of those who are fighting to rescue the people of these imprisoned devastated provinces, and upon the whole civilized world. Raemaekers has been able with the powerful genius of his pencil to give expression in cartoons that belong to the history of art and of the world, to this protest of civilization. He is a poet as well as an artist. His weird and sombre conceptions gave evidence of a powerful imagination. His work has been compared to that of Gilray, but the caricatures which in 1805 amused English men and frightened English children were merely clever pieces of drawing. The wonderful designs of Raemaekers set forth the devilishness of the policies and the actions of the Prussians as incisively and as conclusively as if he had been sitting as judge in the court of final appeal. These grim pictures constitute indictments of great criminals. It is impossible to tell how far they may as yet have penetrated Germany, but sooner or later these irrefutable judgments of criminal acts will be brought home to the consciousness not only of Prussia, and of the leaders who are directly responsible for the murders and the other horrors, but of the whole people of Germany who, poisoned by the fumes of prussic acid from Berlin, have been willing to give their strength and their force to the attempt to impose Prussian tyranny upon the peoples of the world.
GEO. HAVEN PUTNAM.
February 1, 1918.
