"The Ugly Talons of the Sinister Power"
The attitude of scorn, of contempt and of defiance with which Raemaekers
in his cartoon, "America's Choice," represents Uncle Sam
as he confronts the treacherous Kaiser, bearing the olive branch
in his talons, well expresses the attitude of the United States towards
Germany at the time we entered the war, and this attitude will
probably continue for a generation or two after the war ends.
"The Intolerable Thing," which President Wilson so aptly named the irresponsible German Government, can never disguise itself so that we will not detect the terrible menacing claws with which Raemaekers portrays the Kaiser. It will continue to be an Intolerable Thing until the horrors of this war are forgotten.
The German philosophers brazenly justify their nation's course in this aggressive war with all its attendant horrors, by an appeal to the Darwinian doctrines of the struggle for existence, and the consequent survival of the fittest, which play such a prominent part in biological evolution.
Germany must be taught the lesson that while man is the product of evolution like all other creatures, yet in his case new factors come into play—he is a part of the animal kingdom, but is a new kind of animal, and new factors, not operative in the orders below him, have played leading rôles in his development. These factors are his reason, which gives him a sense of the true and the false, and his conscience, which gives him a sense of right and wrong. These faculties subordinate the rule of might to the rule of right, and they have resulted in the establishment of conduct for individuals, for communities, and for organized governments that do not exist in the lower animal orders, and only in a limited sense in the lower human orders.
Amid a national rejoicing, a waving of flags and ringing of bells, such as are evoked by a great national festival, the Germans celebrated the Lusitania murders—the entire nation suddenly slumping into a barbarism worse than that of their ancestral Huns. The Hun was again triumphant, gloating over his unspeakable crimes, his plunders and piracies, his orgies of crime and lust—a spectacle to make the Genius of Humanity veil her face and weep tears of blood.
It is a comfort to know that the Allies have killed or rendered harmless several million of these modern barbarians, and that many of their carcases have gone to enrich the soil of France and Belgium. In this way a dead Hun may help to undo some of the evil which a living Hun has wrought. If two or three of their bodies could be planted in every shell hole which their guns have made in France and Belgium, though the inoffensive soil might sicken, yet in the course of years the poison of the Hun would disappear, rendered innocuous by the beneficient alchemy of Nature.
JOHN BURROUGHS.
Tryon, N. C.
February 12, 1918.
