Really, the great question of the war is: What kind of people are the Germans?
Can they be reformed, or are they incurable?
All Germans are not alike. There are those who distinguish between North and South Germans, and tell us that the Saxons, in particular, have in them the making of excellent people. Doubtless all Prussians are not alike; doubtless all Bavarians are not of the type of the "Black Bavarians" whose exploits in the war have had unfavorable mention. But what has come to be the image that "German" calls up in the mind? It is an image of ruthlessness, of frightfulness, of poison gas and traceless sinkings; of murder, pillage, spies and lies; of a black and formidable ambition for mastery on any terms and at any cost; of treachery; of a tireless industry that gets up early to fetch away by work or wile whatever in the world is worth taking from any one who has it! The current image of the German is an image of an enemy—a savage enemy. Since 1914 German descent has been terribly prejudiced. As to every man of German blood the observer asks himself: What manner of man is this?
The Hohenzollerns did not invent the Germans. They found, acquired, trained and used them. For centuries—a thousand years at least—the Germans have had a known and demonstrated rating for brutality and brutishness. They have been cruel in war and destructive and greedy in pillage beyond most other nations that were their neighbors. When one hears it said that the trouble with Germany is Germans, there comes to mind abundant basis for that suggestion.
Yet the Germans are far too many and too useful to exterminate, and even if that were possible, no nation but Germany could seriously entertain the idea of exterminating a whole people.
So what do we come to?
To this: that Germany's fate rests in the hands of the Germans. Their qualities will determine their destiny. Along with their abilities go enormous disabilities. They must do according to what is in them. They must obey the demon that drives them until, out of the extreme of suffering, they gain the courage to expel it. They must destroy, and so invite destruction, until their racial propensity has wrought its own correction. They must keep on accumulating enemies, exasperating neutrals, alienating allies, until blind and wicked policies have perfected their work.
What the German has most to fear is what is inside of him. By current estimate the worst that can happen to Germans has happened already, in that they are Germans. The world is not going to adjust itself to their misfortune in this particular. It is they who will have to adjust themselves to the world. They will not be able to make the world an overgrown Germany in which the other peoples will have to live under German direction. No. They will have to live in a world largely populated and managed, as now, by folks who are not Germans and don't want to be, and whose primary concern for as long as is necessary will be to keep Germans in their place.
E. S. MARTIN.
