OCR Text |
Show HUNS MADE IN GERMANY. Whatever else may be said of the imperial German government, even its bitterest enemies will admit that it was thorough and painstaking. When it set about to make a nation of Huns out of a naturally hospitable, loving, kindly, though stubborn and domineering, domineer-ing, people, its methods woro such as to produce nothing less than a nation of thoroughgoing Huns. Their own kith and kin, looking on at tho transformation trans-formation from the vantage point of free America, have testified to their sorrow and amazement as the change took place. The terrible fruits of a quarter century 's misguidance were realized in China, in Africa, in Belgium, Bel-gium, in France, in the Balkans, in Russia, on the 8ea -wherever the Hun moved in his accursed power. It is almost inconceivable that normal , human minds could have carried out i such a diabolical design as the ex-1 kaiser and his fellow conspirators wrought upon their people. Trucklers took up the war lords' mania; a class of military "authorities," lickspittle; preachers and pseudo-philosophers gave it respectability and currency; munition j makers, reaping a golden harvest, spread the doctrine; tho kaiser and the crown prince were indefatigable in their propaganda. And a tragical feature of the whole business was the appearance of verity they were able to throw over it by reference to the Russian peril and England's jealousy. If tho dispensers of this poison really believed it was fit medicine for the imaginary ailment which they at least pretended to think threatened the German Ger-man people, they had the satisfaction of seeing it slowly but surely make a Hyde, of their Jekyll. The old spirit was debased and brutalized; suspicion and truculcnce ruled the heart and mind of the empire. It was forty years ago that Mark Twain made "A Tramp Abroad" and recorded this or that ' ' kindly trait ' ' of the Germans. "Where and how did we get the idea that the Germans are a stolid, phlegmatic race?" he asked, and continued: "In truth, they are widely, removed from that. They are warm-hearted, emotional, impulsive, enthusiastic, their tears come at the mildest touch, and it is not hard to move them to laughter. They are the very children of impulse. Wo are cold and self-contained, compared to the Gennans. They hug and kiss and cry and shout and dance and sing; and where we vuse one loving, petting expression ex-pression they pour out a score. Their , language is full of endearing diminutives; diminu-tives; nothing that they love escapes tho application of a petting diminutive neither the house, nor the dog, nor the horse, nor the grandmother, nor any other creature, animate or inanimate. inani-mate. ' ' Granting that Mark Twain 's observ ations a-tions were approximately accurate, what a fertile soil was there for the propagation of the noxious growths of kniscrism! "The very children of impulse," im-pulse," warm-hearted, emotional, prone to sentimental tears, they had been 1 long schooled to unquestionable obedience. obedi-ence. Children did not dream of disputing dis-puting the authority of parents, nor parents the mandates of the state, and the kaiser was tho lord of all. There was no waiting for minds to form their own convictions. Plastic youth was provided with standards of belief and action cast in the molds of tho autocracy, autoc-racy, from the first day's geography lesson, les-son, when it was taught that Germany was a state entirely surrounded by enemies. ene-mies. The Teutonic Herr Hyde today is administering ad-ministering the democratic potion that will, let the world hope, restore his degraded moral nature to at least an appearance of decency and normality. |