Page:The web (1919).djvu/469

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The Department of Justice, having removed restrictions on enemy aliens, and having wiped out the barred zones and the necessity of passes or permits, has released a great many pro-Germans who will slip back into their old places in America. In Great Britain the German waiter—so frequently the German spy—is not going to be allowed to take his old place. It may cause some inconvenience, but Great Britain is going to get on without him. That is what we must learn in America—to get on without some of the stolid or the obsequious labor that we have had. With the barring of alien labor, we should suffer many inconveniences in our personal lives. If we cannot endure those inconveniences, then we can have no League of Nations. With the refusal to buy any article made in Germany, we should be letting ourselves in for a considerable individual loss. Unless we are willing to accept that loss, we can have neither a League of Nations nor an America worthy of the name.

Germay is crippled, but not beaten and not repentant. The Germans regret the sinking of the Lusitania only because it was the thing which brought America into the war. For the war itself they are not sorry. If defeat did not make them repentant, heavy indemnities may help teach them something of their real place in the world. That lesson will be all the stronger if we in America shall make more stringent importation and deportation laws—if we shall deport more Germans and import less German goods. There is many and many an American home where German goods never again will enter the doors.

Prince Carl, of the House of Hohenzollern, when speaking of the war, said he thought that Germany ought not to have started her submarine warfare "without being absolutely sure it would succeed." He said he regretted the German propaganda in the United States—because it had been carried out so clumsily; he said that Germany ought to have started her propaganda here on a larger scale, and ought to have spent millions of marks instead of thousands! There you see the German idea and part of the German policy in America. They have learned some lessons, but not the great lesson of the humble and the contrite heart.

Maximilian Harden has been a voice crying in the Hun wilderness for most of the time of the war. He says that