CHAPTER II
THE PEACE TABLE
The Price of Peace—The First Days After the Armistice—Ferocious Treachery of Germany in this Country—The Test of the Citizen—The New America.
To the merely morbid mind, the white faces of the starved, the moans of the maimed, the black habiliments of those who mourn, may be thought parts of a drama whose terrible appeal has found no counterpart in the human emotions. For the average man, soon to settle back to the grim struggle of making his living, perhaps even these scenes will fade, the world turning from them because the world can endure no more. But someone must make the peace, must bind up the wounds. Someone must point out the future to the staggering peoples, dizzy from their hurts. And it is not alone Europe which has a future to outline. Our own history is not yet written; our own problems lie before us still.
What shall a just peace be? If it must be tempered with mercy, to whom shall we show mercy—to the foe whom we have beaten, or the coming generation of Americans whom that foe has done all he could to betray and ruin? Shall we fight this war through now until it actually is done; or shall we face an indeterminate future, with possible further yet bloodier and more appalling wars?
Now the dead arise and demand their justice. The world leans over the rail of the arena, cold-faced, thumbs down, pitiless of the armed bully who lies vanquished and whimpering. A race which would fight as Germany has fought, and for such reasons, will fight again when possible. Such a race understands nothing but force. Mercy is mistaken with a people which knows not the meaning of mercy. Britain has a huge war bill against Germany; that of France is larger still. What of our own bill? And what of the total of all these sums, added to that which the war has cost Germany herself? If the Germans should be serfs for centuries, they could not pay the reckoning in silver and gold alone. But that is not the great question. What of the silent dead, demanding also their due before Almighty God?
Germany never can pay her bill. So long as her language is spoken, it will be the tongue of a debtor race whose account never will be paid and never can be. And why should the world forgive that debt or that debtor, even should it find it impossible to collect the debt. What outlaws such a debt in the just belief of the world? Shall continued arrogance and treachery serve to outlaw that unpaid debt? Shall a continuance in America of the old German ways in America serve to outlaw her awful and eternally unpaid debt?
Why does such feeling as this exist in the minds of the most chivalrous of foes against whom Germany ever fought? Why should America and France and Britain feel an implacable hatred against a helpless enemy? In other wars the sign of submission has arrested the wrath of warriors. But not in this war. The world looks on beaten Germany to-day with cold scorn and with no feeling of relenting. It is the way that she fought—it is the spying that she did, the brutality that she showed, which has awakened the ice-cold wrath of the world to-day. That wrath means to exact its pound of flesh from the heart of Germany itself. What of the dead who died unfairly? What of the innocent and the unarmed dead? Only in her own tears of blood could Germany learn the humble and the contrite heart. She has not yet learned her lesson. It must be taught her for a century yet and more.
More and more as the facts shall come from Europe, uncovering the real Germany, showing her ferocious treachery all over the world, her utter insensibility to any feeling of responsibility, her abysmal ignorance of such a term as honor, shall we be ready to make fair conclusions; for these must be our only premises.
It is only those who really know Germany’s methods in America—those who know her treachery, her duplicity, her efforts to undermine our country—who can make up a fair judgment as to how Germany should be treated in the future.
The members of the A. P. L. have drawn aside the masks and found hundreds of thousands of two-faced “citizens” amenable to no sense of honor and fair play, hating the flag they have sworn to honor. America does not need those people. America needs only the facts about them. The judgment thereon will be written in the next two generations of American history.
The plea of Germany for food after the Armistice was only part of her old propaganda. Her attempts to split this country away from the Allies is now carried on only as a part of her old systematic propaganda. It behooves us to be well aware of such methods, since we once have known them. Germany will not be allowed at the peace table. She will not be allowed in the League of Nations. Why? Because she has lost the right to shake the hand of honorable soldiers. How about honorable citizens?
There is not so much bitterness as cold and relentless reason in all such statements. But you may get a trace of bitterness from the press of Europe, suffering as Europe has all these years under the ruthlessness of German war. There is indeed “every reason for belief that other pledges would be as treacherously shattered did not the victors control the only agency which Germany understands—sheer material force. There can be no compassion based on any code of sound morality for people so despicable as to snivel for help in the midst of an orgy of cowardly iniquity. Germany in this last and most loathsome of her ugly roles should excite about as much legitimate sympathy as a hungry snake.”
The murders of Liebknecht and of Rosa Luxemburg have excited certain strange comment in the German press. “What will the world think of us?” asks the German paper Vorwaerts, “if we commit murders such as this?”
That certainly is a purely German question! It is a trifle academic. What in Germany is the murder of one woman or one man? The seventh of May, 1915, was proclaimed a national holiday in Germany. On the seventh of May in 1916, 1917, 1918, the German people closed their shops and their factories, and in holiday attire paraded the streets to celebrate that glorious German victory when a submarine sank an unarmed vessel and murdered more than a thousand persons, many of them women and children. And now Germany asks what the world will think of her for killing one or two of her own people!
The whole truth will never be known, but more than 100,000 citizens of Belgium and France were put to death on various pretexts; thousands of women made the sport of violent beasts who wore the Kaiser’s uniform; thousands of little children maimed and tortured and every conceivable barbarity and infamy committed upon them. And yet Germany apologizes for killing two more persons! And Dr. Dernburg counts upon the future friendship of America!
It must be the just men and brave men of America who shall constitute the court to determine the treatment of the foreign element in America. All of those men within our gates who retain their sympathy for Germany are enemies of this country after the war as much as they were during the war. They must share then in the defeat of Germany and must pay the losses of the loser. The victor decides. “We are the victors. Let the foreign element reflect on that—we are the victors, not they, in this fight which they elected. It is only the man who makes the dollar his Ten Commandments who will feel toward Germany in America after the war as he did before.”
What we Americans need is not so much a League of Nations as a League of Americans. The soul of the American Protective League—renamed, rechristened and reconsecrated—must go marching on even though the League be disbanded, its unseen banner floating no more over a definite organization. As citizens we must unite in a common purpose, or the war will have been lost for us no matter what shall be the treaty at Versailles. If we open our hearts and homes again to the former traitors at our own table, then we have lost this war. It is of little consequence what is done with the Kaiser—he is too pitiable a figure to be able to pay much, even with his life. But Kaiserism in America, still growing, still reaching out in the old ways—that is a different thing. We were leagued against that once, and must be leagued against it forever.
It is accurate enough to say that this war was no lofty thing in any phase. It was much like any other war, based on the biological impulse of nations to go to war almost rhythmically, almost periodically. Commercial jealousy brought out the war, and that it was “forced on” Germany was never anything but a pitiable lie. Germany wanted to control the Suez Canal, to enlarge her possessions in East Africa, to obtain the rich Indian possessions of Great Britain. All this was to follow her defeat of England and France, her absorption of Belgium, Denmark and Holland, her consolidation of Middle Europe, her subjection of the mujik population of Russia, already suborned and bought and beaten by German propaganda. It was indeed a grandiose scheme of world conquest. Nothing that Alexander planned could have paralleled it. But it failed!
In our own country, we of the A. P. L. have seen treason weighed and bought like soap or sugar, and the price was ready in German gold, no matter how high. Our morale was continuously assailed. Through our colleges, our schools, our churches, Germany always intended to undermine America and to break down her patriotism. On the list of men of intellect whom Germany had bought, there are, besides a long list of college professors, fifty other names, including judges, editors, priests, men of large affairs. The German satyrs of diplomacy juggled huge figures carelessly in a cold-blooded commerce which dwelt in hearts and souls and honor. That was done merely in the hope to divide and conquer the United States, all in good time. German-American citizens? Why, no. Why use even that hyphen? If they were not Americans during the war, they are not Americans now. They are no more demobilized than Germany’s army is demobilized. Their hearts are no more changed than the heart of Germany has changed. If they were not at one time above prostituting the most sacred offices in the world, they are not above that now.
Let the dead speak at the peace table! Let them tell of the simplicity and worthiness of the German character, the German “love of liberty.” We are often told about Germany’s part in our Civil War. We are not fighting that war now—we are fighting this war. We are asked to distinguish between the German rulers and the German people; but the obvious truth was that Germany was more united for this war than we were united for it, more than Great Britain or France was united for it. She planned it as the 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!”
But we are not at peace. Our dead stand at the table with all those other gallant dead, to demand their hearing through all time. We must be done with foresworn citizenship in America. We could forgive a soldier; but we cannot forgive a naturalized German who foreswore himself when he took the oath of allegiance to our country. That treachery is one thing which must go—that is one thing which shall never be forgotten or forgiven in America. Such men as these lost their war. There is no injustice, no unfairness in any of these words, which sound so harsh. They set lightly on the innocent, heavily on those who have guilt in their hearts.
It is for every man of foreign blood to know his own heart—we cannot know his heart for him. He alone knows whether he is German or American. He knows which he wants to be. We know that he cannot be both. That is the one test—the impossibility of a man being both a good German and a good American. Let him choose. Let him read his own heart. And let him remember that he is not the victor but the vanquished in this war.
One great American—I fancy even his enemies will allow him that title now—wrote as his final message to America the real answer to this war as it applies to us in America. Colonel Roosevelt’s last plea was for Americanism. It was read at an All-American Benefit Concert by a trustee of the society, because of the Colonel’s indisposition:
I cannot be with you, and so all I can do is wish you Godspeed. There must be no sagging back in the fight for Americanism merely because the war is over. There are plenty of persons who have already made the assertion that they believe the American people have a short memory, and that they intend to revive all the foreign associations which most directly interfere with the complete Americanization of our people.
Our principle in this matter should be absolutely simple. In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant, who comes here in good faith, becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace or origin.
But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in fact an American and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin, and separated from the rest of America, then he isn’t doing his part as an American.
There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any flag of a nation to which we are hostile.
To that doctrine, and to that alone, can the dead at the peace table nod their voiceless assent. By that doctrine only, continually kept alive, continually enforced, can their deaths ever be justified and made glorious indeed. Under that doctrine and for that purpose, we, who have our war to fight out here in America for a generation and more, can continue the battle, knowing that it is for a good cause, and knowing that we shall win.
The old oath of the American Protective League exists no more. The silent army has disbanded. But now it remains the privilege of each of those men, and their sons and brothers, to enlist again in a yet greater army, and to swear a yet greater oath, each for himself, at his own bedside, gravely and solemnly:
THIS is my country. I have no other country. I swear to be loyal to her always, to protect her and to defend her always, and in all ways. In my heart this is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help me God!
THE END