Not even the prodigious Cruelty of the Germans in this Atrocious War has shocked the moral sense of mankind as much as has their Deceit. We are horror-stricken by the reports of their premeditated cruelties which link the Germans with the beasts—the wolf, and tiger, and boa constrictor, and vulture. The beast does these things because he has never risen to a higher plane than that of the beast. But Deceit is the attribute of Man; of one who dwells above the standards of the brute creation, who has had the moral sense developed in him, who has known the compulsions of conscience, who has acknowledged the obligations of duty, and has recognized himself as being a striver after the Ultimate Good. Through some flaw in the German's nature all these qualities in him changed, turned bad, and he hailed Evil as his guide and inspiration. Whatever of good there was in him he uses to promote his wicked designs. Had he not been human he could never have understood how to make his perverted nature work successfully to deceive his fellow-men. The snake and panther do not deceive us, we know their ways and guard against them. But the moral pervert can deceive, because he hides his purpose and his method behind the mask of a counterfeited virtue.
Lying is the commonest form of Deceit. The German Emperor practised it for twenty-five years, when he proclaimed to the world his ardent desire for peace; and it was natural for him to lie when, on making war, he declared that the sword was forced into his hands. Then the German nation, fed so long on falsehood, accepted this. Another common form of German Deceit has been to accuse their enemies of the very enormities which they themselves invented and carried out. Diplomatic chicane is a commonplace tool which the Germans employed, only clumsily. But we cannot measure the full extent of German Deceit unless we follow it in its varied propaganda among foreign peoples, in its spies, its instigators to violence, its corrupters of the press. It poisons food and wells; it sets fires to burn crops or forests; it hires ruffians to burn factories or blow them up, to hide bombs in ships; it incites sabotage and strikes.
So universally do Germans take to Deceit, that it has evidently become their national trait. The soul of Germany is a lost soul, which worships Satan as its master and welcomes Evil as its Good.
WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER.
