Germany’s “Peace” with Russia
COUNT HERTLING asks resentfully: “Who dares to suggest that I am not on the side of justice?” Count Hertling is undoubtedly sincere. Until this war began the world had almost forgotten the record for duplicity and inhumanity of the military tyrants of Prussia,—the treachery and barbarity of the race of which he and they are the offspring. They are running true to type, but for the time we had forgotten what the type was; yet it was known well enough to Julius Cæsar and to the others who ruled the Roman world. For him the Germans were “that treacherous race which is bred up from the cradle to war and rapine,” who “practise the base deception which first asks for peace and then openly begins war,” who are “outside the pale of negotiations”—yet Cæsar had not heard of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk! History is repeating itself after two thousand years, yet two thousand years ago it was then only repeating itself. The Prussian has always been the same. His instincts are today as they were when he roamed the swamp lands, naked and with a stone club in his fist, pig-eyed and bull-necked, like the mastodon of his native forests. Raemaekers has done well to symbolize him in his treatment of helpless Russia, as a hairy prehistoric beast crushing out the life of a bleeding nation beneath his ponderous feet. Count Hertling says he is on the side of justice. He is—of German justice, the justice of which the butchered civilians and outraged girls of Belgium, the crucified Canadians, the murdered Edith Cavell, and the martyred babies and their mothers of the Lusitania, are examples. It is the justice of the mammoth and the cave-man, the sabre-toothed tiger and the woolly rhinoceros,—all of whom would agree that Count Hertling in his dealings with Russia was actuated by the only recognized Prussian ideal—the right of the strongest brute to ravish and destroy.
ARTHUR TRAIN.