the limit of her capacity for the damage she has wrought, should consider the speech in which Herr Ebert, temporary dictator in Berlin, welcomed the returning Prussian troops, especially the following paragraph of that speech:
You protected the homeland from invasion, sheltered your wives, children and parents from flames and slaughter and preserved the nation's workshops and fields from devastation.
This to the soldiers whose bestiality has made the very name of Prussia a stench in the nostrils of a decent world.
There is not in Ebert's speech a hint of repentance for the atrocious crimes which Germany has committed. There is no recognition that Germany has committed crimes. Instead, there is a boasting glorification of the returning armies, and a reminder to the nation that German lands have been kept inviolate. It is one in sentiment with the kaiser's speech six months or so ago, in which he commanded his subjects who complained of their sacrifices to look at the devastated fields and cities of France, and see what war on their own ground would mean.
The victorious allies are civilized. Therefore, they can not repay German crimes in kind. They can not reduce Frankfort to the present condition of Lens, or desolate the Rheingau as von Hindenburg desolated Picardy. But in some way, they must bring home to the German people both the villainy and the failure of the German spring at the throat of Europe, and there seem to be but two methods of doing this. One is to inflict personal punishment on the men responsible for the grosser outrages, and the other is to make the German people pay, and pay, and pay for the ruin which they wrought.
Germany is not dead or defeated in America. She will
raise her head again. Again we shall hear the stirring in
the leaves, and see arise once more the fanged front which
has so long menaced the world. The time to scotch that
snake is now, to-day; and this is no time, when our maimed
men are coming home, when our young boys are growing up,
to be faithless to those men who—their eyes still on us as
they fling to us the torch of civilization—lie not yet content
nor quiet in Flanders Fields.
The great debt of the world is by no means yet paid. Whether or not Germany pays to the material limit, is not so much. Whether or not we get back a tenth of our war money, is not so much—that is not the way the great debt of the world is going to be paid. We cannot pay it by
