The spider's web stretched out over a flower bed with a great fat spider at the centre and the threads along which the spider runs to thrust its poisoned sting into the enmeshed b.u.t.terfly is nature's most accurate symbol of the vast web of espionage lying over North and South America with secret threads that vibrated to the touch of the spider at the centre named Berlin.

In that web thousands of German-Americans were enmeshed. The records of our Secret Service concerning these German enemies of the American Government read like a book of a.s.sa.s.sinations or like a history of the black arts. When the whole story comes to be told it will horrify the world.

The quality of the German-Americans that Berlin bribed is set forth in the reminiscences of Witte when he says that the Kaiser and the Foreign Department paid Munsterberg of Harvard University $5,000 a year salary and that Munsterberg was the most successful and efficient spy that the German system had ever developed.

In the long list of German agents are to be found the names of German-American bankers who received secret decorations and medals from the German Government; of German merchants who were partners in this country of firms in the Fatherland and were bribed by a ribbon and an invitation to the Potsdam Palace; of German newspaper men who were under German pay, and, most amazing of all, among the papers seized in the office of a German Consul was found a commission appointing this Consul in an American city to the office of Governor-General of one of the greatest States of Canada as soon as Canada became a German colony.

Many of the threads from Berlin ran into the various cities of Mexico. A German head office was set up under the general direction of Zimmermann in Berlin and of von Bernstorff in Washington. Certain large inst.i.tutions that did business in Mexico, working in the same field, were quietly elbowed out of Mexico, and an American company, ostensibly American, but controlled by Germans, took over the business of the other firms under special arrangement with Mexico. Pledges were given Mexico that as soon as Germany had reduced Canada and the United States to the position of German colonies, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California should be handed back to the Mexicans.

Millions were spent by the German Foreign Office as ordinary men spend dollars. The German spies, like Boy-Ed and von Papen, arranged to blow up American munition factories and held dinners waiting for a telephone message saying that the magazine had just exploded or the depot had taken fire or a scow had been sunk, after which they drank the health of the man who lighted the match.

German agents burned up wheat elevators with hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of wheat; they fired warehouses, blew up bridges, wrecked munition plants, destroyed shiploads of food, dynamited the House of Parliament in Ottawa, sank the _Lusitania_ near Ireland, spread glanders among the horses in Sweden, poisoned the food in Rumania, sank the ships of Norway, plotted against the Argentine Republic. Their spies, dynamiters, secret agents, were in every capital and country because it was their purpose to make Berlin a world capital, Kaiser Wilhelm the world emperor and to Germanize the people of the whole earth.

The web had as its centre the Potsdam Palace, but its black lines ran out into all the earth.

5. German Burglars Loaded With Loot Are the More Easily Captured

It seems that Germany has published, for the Spaniards, a list of treasures she has won. In the long calendar the reader finds that eight States--Belgium, France, Poland, Rumania, Russia, Serbia, Armenia, Italy--have all been looted.

The Germans claim they have spoiled over three hundred first cla.s.s cities, several thousand secondary cities and towns; they add that they have destroyed seventy-three cathedrals and looted them of their priceless treasures of statues, paintings, stained gla.s.s, vessels of silver and gold.

With brazen audacity the German pamphlet tells the Spaniards that they have seized so many hundred thousand watches, so many hundred thousand rings, so much treasure of diamonds and jewels, so many paintings from rich men's houses, and the long boast ends with the statement that they "obtained nearly five billions of loot out of western Russia and have a.s.sessed two billions more upon the farmers, villages and cities of Ukraine."

But the boast is an idle and empty boast. It is true that no army of the Allies has crossed the German frontier to permanently hold a city. But let no man think that Germany has succeeded because of the richness of her loot. There is a success that is failure. There is a victory that is defeat.

Macbeth killed Duncan and went to live in the palace of the dead king, but did Macbeth succeed? Was not his palace a brief halting place in his journey towards remorse, insanity and the day when Duncan's friends in turn slew Macbeth?

The rich judges of Athens succeeded and Socrates failed. They went home to drink wine and feast, while Socrates went to the jail to drink a cup of poison. But who succeeded? The judges whose names are written low down and bespattered with dirt--or Socrates, whose name fills the sky and who has become the thinker for the world?

What if the Kaiser does boast of his successes to-day? So boasted Nero--sending Paul to his rags, crusts and the dungeon preparatory to the headman's axe. But it is Nero that lost out, and it is Paul who reigns a crowned king.

The chief priests celebrated their victory; at the close of the day, after they had succeeded in crucifying Jesus; but after nineteen centuries the murderers are unknown and almost forgotten, while that young carpenter rules over His Empire of Love.

To-day the Kaiser claims to have won the victory of "a superman." In that he has carried murder, arson, lying, rapine, l.u.s.t up to the _nth_ power, let us concede his claim. Not otherwise two hundred years ago the Indian, with his scalping knife, his war-whoop and his tomahawk, was "a superman" in terms of savagery. Not otherwise the Spaniards under b.l.o.o.d.y Alva were "supermen" in terms of rack, thumbscrew and instruments of torture.

But what savages once did in the little, the Kaiser and his men now do in the large. But because the Kaiser can publish a long list of wealth gained--by breaking his treaties, by murder, arson and l.u.s.t--let no man think that he is successful.

The two Biddle brothers looted the Bank of England, but they became outcasts upon the face of the earth, and always the dungeon yawned for them, just as the Kaiser and von Hindenburg never sleep at night without a vision of an oak tree, a long bough and a hemp rope dangling at the end, for the hemp is now twisted that will one day choke to death the murderous Kaiser and his War Staff.

Let no patriot, whether he lives in Spain, Russia or the United States, forget that ours is a world ruled by men who were defeated.

To-day on the thrones of the world are the heroes, like Paul and Demosthenes; the martyrs who were burned with Savonarola in Florence or poisoned with Socrates in Athens.

To-day, the soldiers of Marathon and Marston Moor, Gettysburg and the Marne now rule the world.

The treasure of the burglar and the brigand dissolves like snowflakes in a river.

Long ago the Hebrew poet said: "I have seen the wicked flourish like a green bay tree, and then I lifted up my eyes, and, behold! he was not."

And when a little time has pa.s.sed all lovers of liberty and humanity will exclaim: "During four years I have seen the Kaiser and von Hindenburg flourish as the green bay tree, and I lifted up mine eyes, and, behold! they were not. For the breath of His nostrils had slain them."

6. Germans Who Hide Behind the Screen

Two thousand years are a long time in terms of history.

Many d.a.m.nable tools have been invented during these twenty centuries.

The rack, the thumbscrew, the tomahawk, the f.a.got belong among these devilish instruments.

Cruelties so terrible have been devised that old scholars often felt unwilling to believe that men were so low in the scale as to have been the authors of these methods of fiendishness.

In the hope, therefore, of keeping respect for man many scholars transferred all responsibility unto devils. They called in Satan and made him to be the father of hate and cruelty. They could not believe that Nero, Judas or Torquemada could conceive such wickedness. They therefore made the devil with his cloven feet and his long tail to whisper these cunning suggestions in the ear of the traitor. Thus the responsibility for unwonted cruelty was divided between the murderer and the devil who counselled the black crime.

Perhaps the most d.a.m.nable thing that was ever suggested by the devil in two thousand years is this little object called the German soldier's token. Never did an object so small send forth cruelties so large and manifold.

The little disc is stamped out on thick paper for German privates and upon aluminum for the officers. At the top of this cardboard is the portrait of that awful being called by the Kaiser "our good old German G.o.d."

Look at his white hair, the long beard and the great sword in the right hand, with the suggestion that since G.o.d uses the sword the German soldier must cut men to pieces also.

Beneath you see flames gushing up, suggesting to the German soldier that he is quite right in burning the houses of France and Belgium after he has looted them, and for flinging the dead bodies into the blazing rafters. Now read the words written beneath the face of the being the Germans call G.o.d.

"Strike them all dead. The Day of Judgment shall ask you no questions."

Strike dead old men and women! Dash the children's brains out against the stone wall! Violate young girls! Mutilate their fair bodies so that they will be unseemly when they are found by the husband or father.

Burn, steal, kill--but remember that your Kaiser and the War Staff have promised to stand between you and G.o.d Almighty and the Day of Judgment!

Even if Jesus did say, "Woe unto them that offend against my little ones," you must remember that your Kaiser and officers have promised you immunity on the Day of Judgment.

That is what is meant by the sentence on page thirty-one in the German handbook of "War on Land": "That which is permissible to the German soldier is anything whatsoever that will help him gain his goal quickly."

Nothing better ill.u.s.trates the total collapse of manhood in the Germans than this soldier's token.

A coward by nature, the German is afraid to kill and steal, and so he invented a screen behind which he could hide and named it "the soldier's token."

Going into a French village the Germans collect the women and children, order them to march in advance, shoot a few to terrorize the rest, and then, hiding behind this living screen, the Germans march forward. In this way they protect themselves.

The whole history of the human race contains no chapter of atrocity like the atrocity of the Germans. The history of the world contains no story of cowardice so black and d.a.m.nable as the cowardice of the Germans. Out of cowardice the soldier's token was born.

And so the Kaiser and the War Staff invented this round piece of cardboard, with the representation of G.o.d as going forth with His sword to kill men and with His flames to burn them and with the motto: "Strike them all dead, for the Day of Judgment will ask you no questions."

Therefore among the instruments of cruelty, called the rack, the f.a.got, the thumbscrew and the tomahawk, let us give the first place to the German soldier's token, the most d.a.m.nable weapon that has come out of h.e.l.l during the last two thousand years.

7. Must German Men Be Exterminated?

A singular revulsion of sentiment as to what must be done with the German army after the war, is now sweeping over the civilized world. Men who once were pacifists, men of chivalry and kindness, men whose life has been devoted to philanthropy and reform, scholars and statesmen, whose very atmosphere is compa.s.sion and magnanimity towards the poor and weak, are now uttering sentiments that four years ago would have been astounding beyond compare. These men feel that there is no longer any room in the world for the German. Society has organized itself against the rattlesnake and the yellow fever. Shepherds have entered into a conspiracy to exterminate the wolves. The Boards of Health are planning to wipe out typhoid, cholera and the Black Plague. Not otherwise, lovers of their fellow man have finally become perfectly hopeless with reference to the German people. They have no more relations to the civilization of 1918 than an orang-outang, a gorilla, a Judas, a hyena, a thumbscrew, a scalping knife in the hands of a savage. These brutes must be cast out of society.

Some of us, hoping against hope, after the reluctant confession of the truth of the German atrocities, have appealed to education. We knew that Tacitus said, nearly two thousand years ago, that "the German treats women with cruelty, tortures his enemies, and a.s.sociates kindness with weakness." But nineteen centuries of education have not changed the German one whit. The mere catalogue of the crimes committed by German officers and soldiers and set forth in more than twenty volumes of proofs destroys the last vestige of hope for their future. Think of the catalogue! Babies nailed like rats to the doors of houses! Children skewered on a bayonet midst the cheers of marching Germans--as if the child were a quail, skewered on a fork! Matrons, old men and priests slaughtered; young Italian officers with throats cut and hanging on hooks in butchers' shops; the bombing of Red Cross hospitals and nurses and the white flag; everything achieved by civilized man defiled and destroyed--reverence for childhood and age, the sanct.i.ty of womanhood, the standards of honour, fidelity to treaties and all destroyed, not in a mood of drunkenness or a fit of rage, but on a deliberate, cold, calculated policy of German frightfulness.

The sense of hopelessness as to civilizing the German and keeping him as an element in the new society grew out of the breakdown of education and science in changing the German of the time of Tacitus. Plainly the time has come to make full confession of the fact that education can change the size but not the sort. The German in the time of Tacitus was ignorant when he took the children of his enemy and dashed their brains out against the wall; the German of 1914 and 1918 still butchers children, the only difference being that the butchery is now more efficient and better calculated, through scientific cruelty, to stir horror and spread frightfulness. The leopard has not changed its spots.