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Show THOUGHTS FOR MEMORIAL DAY. This coming Memorial Day should bo ono of tho most impressive since tho close of the great civil war. Decorating the graves of our soldier sol-dier dead will be a reminder that wo are being summoned once more to dedicate our lives to the same cause for which the veterans fought, namely that a government and civilization based on human rights and liberties shall not perish from the earth. If tho Germans win in this mighty conflict, tho American people will feel the lash of German masters. This is not a figure of speech, but a plain statement of what will occur. Within With-in the past month, or since the United States has entered the war, tho American Amer-ican correspondents who saw tho first great clash of arms in Belgium, havo felt free to unbosom themselves and not less than three of them have told of horrible mistreatment of the inhabitants inhab-itants brought under German dominance. domin-ance. Irvin S. Cobb is one of the writers writ-ers and he predicts that American cities will suffer the same vandal ism and American citizens the same brutality inflicted in Belgium, if Germany Ger-many Is victorious. In his last letter to tho press, Cobb says: "I was an eyewitness to crimes which, measured by the standards of humanity and civilization, Impressed me as worse than any individual excess, ex-cess, any individual outrage, could ever have been or can ever be; because these crimes indubitably -were instigated insti-gated on a wholesale basis by order of officers of rank, and must havo been carried out under their personal supervision, direction and approval. It seemed to mo then, and it seems to mo now, a most dangerous thing for all the peoples of the earth, and a most evil thing, that Into tho world should como a scheme of military government govern-ment so hellishly contrived and bo exactly ex-actly executed that by tho flirt of a colonel's thumb a thousand men may, at will, bo transformed from kindly, courageous, manly soldiers Into relentless, re-lentless, ruthless executioners and Incendiaries; and, by another flirt of that supremo and arrogant thumb, bo converted back again into decent men." Brand Whitlock confirms Cobb's statement, so does Hoover, and other Americans who were in the devastated territory. Cobb explains how it is possible for a civilized nation to be turned barbarous. "In peace the mental docility of tho German, his willingness to accept an order unquestioningly and mechanically mechanical-ly to obey it, may be a virtue, as wo reckon racial traits of a people among their virtues; in war this same trait becomes a vice. In peace It makes him yet moro peaceful; in war it gives to his manner of waging war an added sinister menace." If, against tho possibility of this country being turned over to tho baseness base-ness of militaristic brutes, this nation does not rise equal to the courago of a man of soul who seeing a child abused by a bully, interferes even at his own peril, then America is not the America which rallied to tho heroic Lincoln. |