Page:The web (1919).djvu/120

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  • erty were lost in this way through the activities of this

one perverted mind. Our censorship took care of some of that. Those losses of foodstuffs, of fuel, of clothing, had to be paid for by someone. They were subtracted from the world's useful supplies. Who paid for them? You and I and all the taxpayers of America paid for the losses. One does not know how much Scheele himself got out of it—not very much; for, two months before this war was "forced" on Germany, Scheele was ordered to sell his drug store, and did so—though he complained he was doing very well in it. His salary is not known to have been raised.

One of the astonishing and disgusting developments of this war had been the knowledge gained of the unspeakable depravity and degeneracy of the German mind. There are in the Government records at Washington countless cases of German officers who, over their own signatures, have written things so foul and filthy, so low, lewd and bestial, that no pen on earth ever would rewrite them save one of their own sort. The Huns were not clean-minded fighting men, but in large percent animal-like, low, cruel, cunning, unscrupulous, unchivalrous even in their most arrogant ranks. This explains out of hand the atrocities in Belgium and France and shows what atrocities were waiting for America had this war been won by Germany.

Germany fell because she was rotten in heart and in soul. That was why she fought foul—because she was foul, foul to the core. It was an amazing and an abhorrent "kultur," this which she offered to the world. It is no wonder that her ways of warfare were cruel, merciless, unchivalrous; no wonder that she crucified men and tortured women and children until there is no human way ever of squaring the account with her. She no longer belongs on the clear avenues of the world, and the one epitaph she has earned is the one word, "Unclean!" History has not usually recorded such statements. No. And history has not usually been in the way of discovering such truths.

It was this Dr. Scheele, an upper class German who lived here twenty-five years as a spy, who, under German Government order, started this friendly plan against Amer-