IT is well sometimes, despite all that has happened since, to turn back to Belgium and remember the rape, rapine, and arson of 1914. There will be plenty of time to let bygones be bygones when might and right are found on the same side and Justice, who is using her sword just now, resumes her impartial scales; but until the Central Nations experience a defeat of magnitude sufficient to penetrate to the hearts and heads of their people, we may continue to keep in the forefront of our minds the story of Belgium under Germany’s heel.

That tale of brutal tyranny is not even yet told, for, short of selling the deported Belgians as slaves, Germany would seem still to be doing all that Hun and Vandal ever accomplished. But Raemaekers gives us a glimpse from the past, when conquest was still in progress and the German obsession of franc-tireurs reached its height. How far they pretended this fear to excuse their own murder of the defenseless, or how far they really felt it, matters little; for it has been shown that the cry was deliberately excited—by fabrication and circulation through Germany of countless “fearful” falsehoods. Soldiery about to pass from the Fatherland to Belgium were inflamed, as with drink, by lies of the horrible treatment they must expect and endure from civil populations and non-combatants. They were warned by calculated propaganda at home that their eyes would be gouged out, their legs sawn off, their wounded men murdered, with fiendish details of suffering by the Belgians.

German valets of the type of Houston Chamberlain and Sven Hedin spread these stories; Pastor Conrad wrote a little book and sold it to the school children that they, too, might read about their fathers’ gouged-out eyes in Belgium.

The result was certain when German soldiers found themselves with a free hand among unarmed women and their little ones; for Germany in Belgium and Poland, and Austria in Serbia, have not been content to destroy the manhood of weak nations: they have striven to stamp out their virginity and their childhood also.

NOWHERE has the caricaturist proved more effectively his command of caustic satire.

It is characteristic of the Kaiser and his family to claim Christian sanction for all his sinister schemes.

None of the many goals which the Kaiser confidently set out to win in this war has he yet secured. The triumphal progress through the capital city of Constantinople loomed large in his early programme. His vaulting ambition still seeks the hegemony of the Mahomedan world no less than of the Christian world.

The Kaiser habitually appeals to religious authority. He garbles Scripture to serve his turn. Nothing that the world regards as sacred is safe from his profanation. His miscalculations are so colossal, his hopes are so tangled, that the blasphemous dream which the artist depicts may well have visited the imperial couch. The pious Mahomedan might possibly find some specious compensation for submission to the Prussian yoke were the Kaiser to enter the Turkish capital at the head of his barbarian hordes flaunting in triumph the banner of the crescent, while Christ rode on an ass at the imperial side, in bonds and wearing the crown of thorns. It is a revolting piece of pictorial imagery, but it is a legitimate interpretation of the imperial megalomania, which enlists blasphemy in the service of the imperial propaganda.

ONLY historic interest now attaches to the activities of German diplomacy which sought, by misplaced flattery, to prevent Italy from joining the Powers of the Entente in the Great War. Prince von Bülow for many months employed all his wiles to distract Italy from the pursuit of a hostile policy. He had some good cards in his hand, and, after the manner of all German diplomatists, he overestimated their strength, while he underrated the skill and enthusiasm of the players against him. The influences of German finance worked on his side, but characteristically he ignored the spiritual forces of the Italian national sentiment, on which bribes and blandishments could make no impression. Italy’s traditional hatred of Austria was only speciously held in check by the conventions of the old Triple Alliance. The perils which Austria invited by engaging in the present war were bound to set ancient memories fully aflame. It is a mangled unity of which Italy can boast so long as the Italian peoples of the Trentino and Dalmatia live under Austrian sway.

The cry of the Trentino for release from a foreign servitude overcame all those predilections for peace, which some material considerations fostered in Italy in the early stages of the war. Von Bülow undertook a thankless task when he sought by pretty speeches to deafen Italian ears to the piercing appeals of Italy’s compatriots under alien sway. He may cherish the delusion that he scored a minor success by postponing for a season Italy’s declaration of war on Germany. For a short while Italy was content with her defiance of Austria alone, but even this small triumph on the prince’s part proved a phantasm. To-day all the prince’s diplomatic adventures are seen to be empty mockeries and snares.

WE may pause to wonder whether Germany ever considers her relations with the weak neutral nations after the war.

In the case of America, she preserves some show of explicit courtesy, while performing actions of implicit insult. Where it matters not, she conforms; where it does matter, she ignores; but she has no desire to quarrel openly with the United States and has long since found that she can do pretty much what she pleased without risking more than verbal remonstrances. In the case of Norway and Sweden, Denmark and Holland, she is not even at the pains to be civil; but treats them with her usual indifference to all things physically weak. Sometimes she will add insult to injury, as in the case of this cartoon, and needlessly pretend an innocence that would not deceive a child; more often, as in her pirate procedure against Holland, she cares nothing what the weak may have to say while her own strength is paramount.

But the war will end and what sort of relations will these insulted and outraged kingdoms seek with Germany when the bully is beaten? One might ask them another question. Is it beyond the power of the Northern neutrals to assume a more hortatory tone and courageous attitude? Might they not sensibly forward all rational hopes of civilization by taking a stronger line with the enemy of Europe? Whining and grumbling serve no good purpose; but a somewhat stronger and cleaner-cut expression of opinion before the insulting scorn poured upon their protests would increase general respect for Holland and the rest.

Why are they so frightened? Is it from force of habit? They might surely begin to perceive with sufficient distinctness that the Power that sank the “Tubantia” and “Blommersdijk” is on the way herself to be sunk. Why then this abject attitude? It is easy to guess.

Meantime Holland’s recent protest to America was hardly worth making. She may well ask what would have happened had the sinkings off Newport, on the American coast, occurred off Ymuiden, on her own. But she will receive no satisfactory reply to that question. Nor does it help civilization to hear Holland say, “Submarine warfare cannot go on any longer.” Germany laughs. She knows how much of her gold has crossed into Holland of late, and that our Dutch friends doubtless have more to gain in wealth than lose in honor by “taking it lying down.”

RAEMAEKERS is never more pungent in his satire than when he deals with the efforts of Germany to penetrate the conscience and persuade the will of Holland. In the cartoon opposite we see the typical German propagandist—half-professor, half-merchant, and wholly the servile ambassador of his Government—exhibiting to the equally typical Dutch peasant the recommendations and persuasions of Germany. These are printed in Dutch for his behoof, and they declare that it can be proved by the testimony of the Ninety-Three Intellectuals that all men who are not enthusiastic about German Kultur and all who are rash enough to accuse German statesmen of breaking their word or behaving like barbarians are worthless persons of no character. He tells the Dutchman that “We Germans are fighting for the liberty of the sea, guaranteed as Prussian.” Another belt of propaganda offers advice gratis to smugglers, and urges the Dutch, in exchange for aniline dyes, to supply the German Government with tin, oil, fat, leather, india-rubber, and other such “peaceful” articles. The lowest line assures the Dutchman that the book called “J’Accuse”—which is phonetically spelt “Sjakkuus” that the Dutchman may have no doubt about it—is a vulgar production. The “Toekomst”—a virulently pro-German newspaper, subventioned from Berlin—is a genuine expression of Dutch feeling.

Thus the fat missionary in spectacles volubly attempts to seduce the grave and rather sardonic Dutch peasant, whose face is a triumph of non-committal. He holds him long in conversation, while from behind steal up the German soldiers and sailors waiting for the attention of the peasant to be wholly absorbed in the propaganda, suddenly to capture and to bind him, beyond all power of self-release. Here the satire of Raemaekers is directed against the intrigues of German diplomacy at The Hague, and the rumors which have of late been rife concerning a party of politicians in the Dutch State who have been persuaded into recommending a studied neutrality now, indeed, but a secret agreement with Germany that shall not come into force until after the declaration of peace. The draftsman warns his countrymen that they are not, in their simplicity, capable of holding their own against a combination of Teutonic violence and Teutonic guile. It may be that these Dutch disciples of Wilhelmstrasse have not the naïveté which Raemaekers sees proper to attribute to them. Their attitude has something more ignoble than simple, and they remind us not a little of the particularists of the seventeenth century, whose selfish and senseless anti-Orange policy left the Dutch without a friend in Europe. But we can confidently believe that general public opinion in Holland to-day will be too wholesome and too intelligent to pursue the suicidal path which the “Toekomst” and its German inspirers indicate.

HERE Raemaekers draws aside from his fierce mood of indictment of the aggressor and, touched with a neutral’s pity, tries to express something of the agony that comes impartially to those who fight for and those who fight against the right. The candid critic must confess that this mood has not the interest of his satire and invective. But it is natural for the imaginative artist to be deeply moved by these, as it were, impartial horrors and good for us stay-at-homes to be helped to realize them.

In the early days of the war, waged as it was over the most intensively cultivated soil in Europe, the mortality from this dread horror, Tetanus, was very great. The skill of the bacteriologist and the surgeon has indefinitely reduced the mortality. And perhaps those of us who are bowed down by the thought of all the needless pain and incalculable waste may take a crumb of comfort from the thought that out of all the suffering and death grow knowledge and skill that will relieve suffering and prevent death in the future. So the eternal courage and resourcefulness of man always recapture the citadel he seems to have lost in the first onset.

FOLLOWING out this truly Teutonic line of reasoning, there is no reason why Beethoven should not be claimed as English, and surely Christopher Columbus was Russian—or French, or Norwegian. A sense of humor would have saved Germany from this absurdity of claiming the whole world’s genius as her own, but that sense is the one thing that Germany lacks above all others, and from the deficiency has arisen this war and all its evils.

For a sense of humor—or a sense of proportion, which is precisely the same thing—would have given Germany to understand that in these days no nation may aspire to domination over other and different races; it would have given her to understand that there are other forms of culture besides her own Kultur, which, after all, is merely order and discipline, and not a finer perception or a greater development of intellect; it would have given her to understand that which the world’s history has failed to teach her, that aggression does not pay, and that essays in tyrannic dominance inevitably fail.

Raemaekers’ satire is unerring, for though no German has yet stated that Shakspere’s plays are based on the work of a poet who lived two centuries later, yet the professors and pedants of Kultur have attempted equal absurdities, even to showing Germany as a country of simple, kindly people, who abhor a war that has been forced on them. One is tempted to quote from the world-poet who, in this cartoon, faces his antithesis with such an air of gentle incredulity, but the temptation, if yielded to, would lead too far.

Germany has not only claimed Shakspere, but she has claimed control of all the Western world; one claim is as likely to be conceded as the other.

THE Huns have hugged this conviction to their obscene souls. And it is not the least of a series of preposterous and ridiculous blunders. Throwing as rubbish to the void the Tables of the Law, they have cherished what they believe to be the last and greatest commandment: Thou shalt not be found out.

And “found out” they have been!

For the moment this fact does not oppress them too seriously. Indeed, to the commander of the submarine who sank the Lusitania the Iron Cross has been awarded. We wonder whether he will wear it, if he happens to find himself after the war at some great function in any neutral country?

To the psychologist this Hun attribute, shared with the ostrich, of hiding his head and believing that the rest of his person is unseen, provokes some interesting hypotheses. Inter alia, it serves to remind us that birds, however big, stand next to reptiles in the scale of creation. Hun methods are distinctively reptilian. The Hun, when fully gorged, becomes lethargic and stupid. In this cartoon, the Hun Eagle, appropriately emblazoned upon that portion of the Hun body of which we may confidently hope to see more and more in the near future, reminds me of that loathsome beast—the Turkey Buzzard. In California, where I first made his acquaintance, this horrible vulture would have been exterminated long ago had he not been protected by the law, which recognized his peculiar usefulness as a scavenger. Hungry, these buzzards are almost unapproachable; after a carrion meal a child can despatch them with a stone.

May we not assume that the Huns, however clever and cunning when hungry, become as boas and buzzards after a surfeit? To-day they are boasting of what they have absorbed on the map of Europe. Do they realize yet the dead weight of these temporary conquests? Germania, like some monstrous viper, has swallowed her own young. Unlike the viper, she cannot disgorge them alive.

Such reflections are not intended to minimize the task that still confronts the Allies. But what the Hun has done by land and air and sea will be the measure of his undoing.

Nobody sees me and I can always deny it.

Everybody sees him; and if his acts are enough to make angels weep, his denials of them move the world to inextinguishable laughter.

ONE of the objectives of the present war was to secure Germany’s command of the Near East. A railway from Berlin to Bagdad had long been treated as a primary article in that creed of German Welt-politik which the war was to make prevail. For a time the plan promised excellently. The Turkish alliance with the Central Empires seemed to bring Asia Minor securely under German sway. The railway route was saved.

The Kaiser and his advisers prematurely regarded Russia as an extinct volcano, which was incapable of thwarting their Oriental policy. Disillusionment came quickly. The German tourist who foresaw an unimpeded road through Prussia to Persia was suddenly confronted with an impassable barrier. The Russian Army of the Caucasus swept through Armenia and occupied the Turkish citadel of Erzerum, which commanded the line of travel at its most critical point. Small are the chances of retrieving the lost foothold. The whole design is doomed beyond recall.

It is the habit of our arch-foe to count his chickens before they are hatched.

IN this cartoon the artist symbolizes with drastic irony the powerlessness of Holland to claim respect for her rights or to maintain her national prestige. If the fair Dutch flag stands in the way of the Teutonic bully, he just tears it down and tramples it underfoot. In the view of Germany the time is long past when a little community of human beings could sustain independent existence if its policy interfered in the smallest degree with the convenience of the great German tyranny. This is at once the humiliation of countries like Holland, and their claim on the active sympathy of the Allies. What can the nice little boy in the picture do to protect himself against the fists and the boots of the huge man in a Prussian helmet? Manifestly, nothing! His only chance is that his big brethren may succeed in thrashing the selfish, powerful brute as he deserves.

The attitude of Germany toward the little sovereign states of Europe was laid down two years ago, with ineffable assurance, by Herr von Jägow. He said: “In the transformation of Europe to the profit of the Teutonic Powers, the little surrounding States must no longer presume to lead the independent existence which at present feeds their vanity. They are all destined to disappear in the orbit of the German Empire.” In other words, as the rest of Germany has been subjugated by Prussia, so Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Montenegro, and Serbia must make up their minds to be melted into the Central Empire of Kultur. Not one of them is rich enough to maintain its existence. In the meantime, if Prussia finds it convenient to sink a Bloomersdijk, so much the worse for Holland, who would do well to swallow the injury in silence. And all that the civilized and cultured little countries can do is, through the tears of their exasperation, to cry aloud to God, “How long, O Lord, how long?”

THERE is a grim persistency with which Raemaekers pursues the power which, in the first terrible weeks of the war, he recognized as the enemy of European civilization. Time has not lessened the intensity of that vision, which came to him—a neutral—with no prepossessions in favor of England and her allies, and which is, indeed, the whole significance of the fine work he has done for our cause throughout the world. Less steadfast folk of our own blood begin to wonder if, after all, it be quite worth while, seeing that the burglar is so strong, to go on with our opposition to him; and whether it would not be better to hand our valuables—freedom, mercy, and other trifling gewgaws—into his safe keeping.

Raemaekers sees in this relatively mild adventure of German frightfulness, the torpedoing of unarmed ships in the American zone under cover of American warships which, by saving the jettisoned crews, were able to keep the pirate within the letter of his pledge—he sees this as what it is, an act of intolerable brigandage and insolence. The insolence, indeed, is so colossal as to be almost admirable. Officers of the fleet do not talk for publication; but it would be illuminating to hear the comments of the American naval messes on the retriever work to which they were set by our friend the enemy.

THE cartoonist has devoted several of his drawings to the work of exhibiting to the world at large and the pacifist in particular the egregious folly of “peace talk” and “gentleness toward the Huns” while a world war is being waged, and as yet all the ideals for which we are fighting in company with our Allies hang in the balance.

How necessary such cartoons really are is shown by the mere fact that there can be found men and women who are anxious on every possible occasion to “mouth wordy platitudes concerning peace,” and even to sacrifice to the Moloch of Prussianism the ideals and the amenities of national conduct upon which the basis of happiness and peace in reality rests.

The old legend of St. George and the Dragon has been skilfully and effectively adapted by Raemaekers to the purposes of the lesson he would teach. The peace woman is shown on her knees before the dragon of Prussianism, not in terror at the fate which is impending for her, but obsessed by the idea that the dragon is not so bad as it has been painted and that it may be wicked to kill dragons. I confess that I have not been able to penetrate the labyrinth of distorted ideas which has produced the attitude of mind toward the Hun adopted by the pacifist, male and female. But the most charitable among us may be forgiven, perhaps, if we assume that this state of mind has been brought about by a wrong-headed conception of the facts and the Hun himself, rather than by any original liking for bloody deeds of rapine, the slaughter of innocents, and wholesale and wanton destruction of beautiful, holy, and gracious things.

There are many who believe that the peace woman, who will be more and more evident as the war drags along, is no imagined menace. It is well therefore that this cartoon should have been drawn and published and that its message, “to save the peace women despite themselves,” should be driven home.

The spirit of St. George of England and of the saints of God, who fought tyrants and died in past ages that the fragrant and essential truths should live, is not dead, and while this can be said there is hope for the world, for surely God Who had these in His keeping is yet in His heaven.

THIS ranks as one of Raemaekers’ happiest cartoons. That wolf’s mask is a clever travesty of the “All-Highest’s” best studio face. Better still is the quip, “’Tis time all this bloodshed should cease,” as a summary of all the peace suggestions which with discreet persistence have been floated out from Berlin since the great game, as envisaged by the challengers, was seen to be up.

It would not readily occur to the German mind that the time when the shepherds were just coming over the hill with axe, bill, and bludgeon was the most appropriate time for the wolf to suggest that nothing should be said of the unfortunate mistakes of the past.

“See!” quoth the wolf, “there are already three corpses. Is that not enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty? Why drag in a fourth? Surely even you who have not our advantages can see so plain an argument?” The answer is in the negative. But let no one ever again accuse the Teuton of not being a humorist.

It is worth noting that it is a bonneted Highlander that here wields the British club. Compensation at last to the sensitive Scot who so desperately hates being lumped in with the English!

THE historian of the future will attempt, probably, to deal adequately with the complex questions which inform every line of this cartoon. It is, indeed, a passionate note of interrogation. In a stupendous fight upon the clearly defined issues of Right and Might, how comes it to pass that any self-respecting nation remains neutral? Why, for example, did not Uncle Sam sever diplomatic relations with the Huns the very moment that Belgium was invaded and outraged?

Americans, true citizens of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, have raised this question already and some have answered it. Other Americans have answered them cleverly and speciously. Time alone will decide upon the merits and demerits of all and sundry. We owe much to the States euphemistically styled “United.” They have supplied us in our hour of sorest need with a never-ceasing stream of munitions percolating everywhere; they have sent us money, sympathy, and advice. But the fact remains—Uncle Sam was too proud to fight! And yet, each day it is becoming more and more certain that every stout blow struck by the Allies, every gallant life that is sacrificed, is a contribution to the cause of Civilization and Christianity. We are fighting desperately for our own salvation, and that salvation includes the salvation of Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United States. At the beginning of the war the Neutral Countries missed a tremendous opportunity. Together, acting under the ægis of Uncle Sam, with his hundred million children, they could have protested in no uncertain terms against Prussianism and the violation of every principle dear to and honored by them. Prompt action, upon the heels of such a protest, would have ended the war in three weeks. Germany, swollen with insolence and beer, has perpetrated blunders in strategy and policy of which she now is reaping the fruits, but with all her crass, pig-headed, brutal assurance she would not have fought a whole world in arms against her.

It is not for us to throw stones at others. We are far too busy hurling shells at our enemy. But the question will be answered some day:

“Why were the Neutrals too proud to fight?”