Page:The web (1919).djvu/482

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exact working out of a business system—she made it her industry, her ambition, her business enterprise for this generation. Is such an ambition as this stifled forever in her soul, on either side the Atlantic? Let us not be too easy and too foolish. We are just beginning to learn about our own citizenship. If Germany struck medals to commemorate its gallant dead, each dead man of ours at the peace table ought to bear that medal in his hand which would serve as proof of Germany's oneness with her Kaiser in this war!

In these merciful and liberty-loving terms a German apostle of "kultur" writes:


Let us bravely organize great forced migrations of the inferior peoples. Let them be driven into "reserves," where they have no room to grow . . . and where, discouraged and rendered indifferent to the future by the spectacle of the superior energy of their conquerors, they may crawl slowly toward the peaceful death of weary and hopeless senility.


Superior energy! Thrift! Efficiency! Let dead lips at the peace table spell out those words. We remember the Alamo. We remember the Maine. Shall we forget the Lusitania?

That statesmanship is not acceptable American statesmanship which plans mercy for such a people, or which tolerates the thought of unsafely letting in more of that breed within our country's gates. It is a false and weak statesmanship to mince matters in days like these. Had Germany's war been fought out honestly by soldiers in uniform only, against soldiers in uniform, in accordance with the customs among warriors, then that war might one day be forgotten. But Belgium and France, plus von Bernstorff and von Papen and Scheele—No, no, and again, No! We Americans can not forget.

The propaganda campaign is beginning again here, now, in America, even in the existing confusion of our industries, in the hurrying of our own plans for demobilization. We shall soon hear stories intended to make us believe that France robbed us commercially, that Britain does not love us and only used us. Can you not hear now the German song: "The war is over now. We are at peace. Let us forget. Kamerad!"