Transcriber’s Notes

The cover image was provided by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Punctuation has been standardized.

In the main text, several of the topics are not listed in alphabetical order. These have been left as printed.

In the concluding Table of Contents, the alphabetical order of topics has been corrected, but no topics omitted by the author have been added.

The text frequently shows quotations within quotations, all set off by double quotes. The inner quotations have been changed to single quotes for improved readability.

This book was written in a period when many words had not become standardized in their spelling. Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged unless indicated with a Transcriber’s Note.

The symbol ^‡ indicates the description in parenthesis has been added to an illustration. This may be needed if there is no caption or if the caption does not describe the image adequately.

Transcriber’s Notes are used when making corrections to the text or to provide additional information for the modern reader. These notes are not identified in the text, but have been accumulated in a table at the end of the book.

COPYRIGHT BY
FREDERICK FRANKLIN SCHRADER
1920

PUBLISHED BY
CONCORD PUBLISHING COMPANY
INCORPORATED
NEW YORK, U. S. A.

“1683-1920”

The Fourteen Points and What Became of Them—Foreign Propaganda in the Public Schools—Rewriting the History of the United States—The Espionage Act and How it Worked—“Illegal and Indefensible Blockade” of the Central Powers—1,000,000 Victims of Starvation—Our Debt to France and to Germany—The War Vote in Congress—Truth About the Belgian Atrocities—Our Treaty with Germany and How Observed—The Alien Property Custodianship—Secret Will of Cecil Rhodes—Racial Strains in American Life—Germantown Settlement of 1683

And a Thousand Other Topics

by

Frederick Franklin Schrader

Former Secretary Republican Congressional Committee
and Author “Republican Campaign Text Book, 1898.”

PREFACE

With the ending of the war many books will be released dealing with various questions and phases of the great struggle, some of them perhaps impartial, but the majority written to make propaganda for foreign nations with a view to rendering us dissatisfied with our country and imposing still farther upon the ignorance, indifference and credulity of the American people.

The author’s aim in the following pages has been to provide a book of ready reference on a multitude of questions which have been raised by the war. It is strictly American in that it seeks to educate those who need education in the truth about American institutions and national problems.

A blanket indictment has been found against a whole race. That race comprises upward of 26 per cent. of the American people and has been a stalwart factor in American life since the middle of the seventeenth century. This indictment has been found upon tainted evidence. As is shown in the following pages, a widespread propaganda has been, and is still, at work to sow the seeds of discord and sedition in order to reconcile us to a pre-Revolutionary political condition. This propaganda has invaded our public schools, and cannot be more effectively combatted than by education.

The contingency that the book may be decried as German propaganda has no terrors for the author, and has not deterred him from his purpose to deal with facts from an angle that has not been popular during the past five years. What is here set down is a statement of facts, directed not against institutions, but men. Men come and go; institutions endure if they are rooted in the hearts of the people.

The author believes in the sacredness and perpetuity of our institutions. He believes in the great Americans of the past, and in American traditions. He is content to have his Americanism measured by any standard applied to persons who, like Major George HavenPutnam, feel prompted to apologize to their English friends for “the treason of 1776,” or who pass unrebuked and secretly condone the statement of former Senator James Hamilton Lewis, that the Constitution is an obsolete instrument.

Statements of fact may be controverted; they cannot be disproved by an Espionage Act, however repugnant their telling may sound to the stagnant brains of those who have been uninterruptedly happy because they were spared the laborious process of thinking for themselves throughout the war, or that not inconsiderable host which derives pleasure and profit from keeping alive the hope of one day seeing their country reincorporated with “the mother country”—the mother country of 30 per cent. of the American people.

It is to arouse the patriotic consciousness of a part of the remaining 70 per cent. that this compilation of political and historical data has been undertaken.

European issues and questions have been included in so far only as they exercised a bearing on American affairs, or influenced and shaped public opinion, prejudice and conclusions. To the extent that they serve the cause of truth they are entitled to a place in these pages.

THE AUTHOR.

New York City, January, 1920.

Allied Nations in the War.

Allied Nations in the War.—The following countries were at war with Germany at the given dates:

The following countries broke off diplomatic relations with Germany:

Alsace-Lorraine.

Alsace-Lorraine.—Dr. E. J. Dillon, the distinguished political writer and student of European problems, in a remarkable article printed long before the end of the war, called attention to the general misunderstanding that prevails regarding Alsace-Lorraine. He said that the two houses of the Legislature in Strasburg made a statement through their respective speakers which, “however skeptically it may be received by the allied countries, is thoroughly relied upon by Germany as a deciding factor” in the vexatious question affecting those provinces.

The president of the second chamber, Dr. Ricklin (former mayor of Dammerkirch, then occupied by the French), declared solemnly in the presence of the Stadthalter that the two provinces, while desiring modification of their status within the German empire, also desired their perpetuation of their present union with it.... “The people of Alsace-Lorraine in its overwhelming majority did not desire war, and therefore did not desire this war. What it strove for was the consummation of its political status in the limits of its dependenceupon the German empire, and that settled, to resume its peaceful avocations. In this respect the war has changed nothing in our country. We make this confession aloud and before all the world. May it be everywhere heard, and may peace be speedily vouchsafed us.”

“The speaker of the First Chamber, Dr. Hoeffel,” continues Dr. Dillon, “also made a pronouncement of a like tenor, of which this is the pith: ‘Alsace-Lorraine particularly has felt how heavily the war presses upon us all, but selfless sacrifice is here, too, taken for granted. Our common task has knit the imperial provinces more closely together than before, and has also drawn more tightly their links with the German Empire.’”

Under date of January 17, 1917, Mayor North, of Detweiler, was quoted in the press of that day: “Alsace-Lorraine needs no liberator.After the war, I am confident, it will know how to guard its interests without the interference of any foreign power. The sons of the country have not bled and died in vain for Germany.”

North is of old Alsatian stock, as is also Former Secretary Petri of Alsace, who said, when the issue of the war was still undecided: “In view of the military situation, the reply of the Entente to President Wilson’s peace note is simply grotesque. It could hardly have used other words if the French were in Strasburg, Metz, Mayence, etc.”

At the National Congress of United Socialists, March 24, 1913, Gustave Herve (quoting a dispatch from Brest to the New York “Times” of the day following), declared, “Alsace was German in race and civilization, and had been an ancient possession of Germany. One of the provinces naturally belonged to Germany and the other to France.”

Francis de Pressense, ex-deputy, declared: “Time has done its work. Alsace-Lorraine no longer wants to return to French rule.”

The last election to the Reichstag before the war showed that only 157,000 out of a total vote of 417,000 voted for “protesting candidates,” while 260,000 voted as Germans, not as separatists.

Though forced to live several generations under French rule, it must be observed that the people of Alsace-Lorraine never ceased to be Germans. The proper mother tongue of a people is that in which it prays. The most distinguished Catholic pulpit orator of Alsace in the last century, Abbe Muhe, who died in 1865, was able only once in his life to bring himself to preach in French; and Canon Gazeau, of Strasburg Cathedral, published in 1868 an “Essai sur la conversation de la langue Allemagne en Alsace,” in which, in the interest of religion and morals, he energetically resisted the attempt to extirpate German speech.

The population of Alsace, with the exception of the rich and comfortable, in its thoughts, words and feeling was thoroughly German.In a petition which was addressed in 1869 to the Emperor Napoleon by people of German Lorraine, we read as follows: “O, sir! How many fathers and mothers of families who earn their bread in the sweat of their brow impose upon themselves the pious but none the less heavy duty of teaching their children the catechism in German by abridging in the winter evenings their own needful hours of sleep.”

In 1869 a radical journal was established by prominent republicans of Muhlhausen in the interest of propagating agitation against the French empire among the laboring people. This paper appeared only in the German language, and justified this course in the following words: “Because the majority, yes, the very large majority, of the Alsatian people is German in thought, in feeling, in speech; receives its religious instruction in German; loves and lives according to German usages, and will not forget the German language.”

The boundary established in 1871 was the true national and racial boundary, which had been destroyed by Louis XIV when Germany, after the Thirty Years War, was too weak to defend it, but which remained the boundary in the hearts of those on both sides until the French Revolution, when executions, deportations and process of ruthless extermination finally broke the spirit of resistance in the population and made it succumb in order to save itself from extinction.

The attempt of the French to control the Rhine regions, though continued for centuries, has been a failure. “To one who has been through the documents,” writes Raymond D. B. Cahill, in “The Nation” for July 26, 1919, “an astounding thing is the French picture of their former experience in ruling the Rhinelands. The student of that period sees little which should encourage the French to attempt a repetition of that experiment. Indeed, he is impressed with the futility of the nation’s attempt to absorb a people of quite different culture. Although dealing with a people still unawakened by German patriotism, the French found eighteenth century Rhinelanders so different, so attached to their own customs and religion, that it took many years to overcome their resistance.”

It will again require the guillotine, the firebrand and the methods of violence employed during the French revolution to convert Alsace-Lorraine into a French possession. France has decisively declined to submit the question of the annexation to a plebiscite. The beautiful dream about the “redemption of our lost sons” has proved a delusion; hundreds of thousands of citizens have been transported by France in order to blot out the appearance that there was discontent. Abbe Wetterlé, once a member of the German Reichstag, and one of the leaders of the pro-French movement, in his lectures, compiled in his book, “Ce qu était l’Alsace-Lorraine et ce quelle cera; l’edition Francaise illustrée,” Paris, 1915, said: “Soldiers who had participated in the battles of 1914 and had invaded Alsace-Lorraine, returned painfully disappointed. They reported, and their stories agreed in establishingthem as reliable, that the civil population of the annexed provinces had betrayed them in the most outrageous manner.”

General Rapp, a descendant of Napoleon’s famous marshal, whose family has been a resident of the province for 600 years, in a manifesto signed by him as a member of the “Executive Committee of the Republic of Alsace-Lorraine,” and addressed to Sir James Eric Drummond, general secretary of the League of Nations, says: “We, the representatives of the sovereign people of Alsace-Lorraine, protest in the name of our people against the systematic ruin of our homeland. The French government has usurped the sovereignty of Alsace-Lorraine. The sovereign people of Alsace-Lorraine was not consulted concerning the constitutional status of the future. We, representing our people, personifying its sovereignty, assume the right to speak for the interests of the people of Alsace-Lorraine before the League of Nations. We are standing today at the parting of the ways in our history. The hour has come when the people are asking, ‘Shall it be revolution or self-determination?’ Before that question is decided we appeal to the good sense of the world, which must know that until the Alsace-Lorraine question is solved beyond the limits of our country, two great nations will never know peace.”

This manifesto, dated Basel, August 25, 1919, informs the world that millions of francs were taken out of the treasury of the French government to finance the reception committee of President Poincare and Premier Clemenceau in every city in Alsace-Lorraine, and for the payment of agents to inflame manifestations of joy, finding vent in shouts of “Vive la France;” that wagonloads of decorations for the receptions, French flags, banners and torches and Alsatian costumes especially manufactured in Paris, were imported for the occasion.

The meager dispatches which reach the public in spite of the iron hand of suppression which is wielded in Alsace-Lorraine teem with accounts of anti-French demonstrations and the arrest and deportation of citizens. The police in October were reported exercising a hectic energy in searching houses in Strasburg; all business houses were directed to discharge their German employes, by order of Commissary General Millerand. Hundreds of persons were arrested in Rombach, Hagendingen and Diedenhoefen. The people were taken in automobiles to Metz, and after passing the night in the citadel, were deported over the bridge at Kehl the next day.

A dispatch of October 27, 1919, says: “Another trainload of wounded Frenchmen has arrived at the main station at Mayence. They are said to come from the Saar Valley and Alsace-Lorraine. It is reported of the revolt in the Saar that the men sang, ‘We will triumph over France and die for Germany.’ The band which played ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘Deutschland Ueber Alles’ was subjected to a heavy fine, which was immediately paid by a leading industrial, in consequence of which the commandant was relieved of his office.”In Sulzbach, on the Saar, the French issued the following proclamation:

“‘Every person guilty of uttering shouts or grinning at a passing troop will be arrested and brought before a court martial for insulting the army. Every German official with cap or arm-emblem who refrains from saluting officers will be arrested and after an examination will be released. His name will be reported to general headquarters of the division.’”

In the new electoral orders, 30 per cent. of the population of Alsace-Lorraine is disfranchised. The voters are divided into three classes, consisting of persons of French birth or pure French extraction; second, of children born of mixed marriages. In this class those only have the franchise who are the sons of French fathers married to German mothers. The third class, consisting of voters having a German father and an Alsatian mother, are completely disfranchised.

France is proceeding in Alsace-Lorraine as the English did in Acadia. “The Nation” of September 6, 1919, indicates the measures in the following article:

Military measures for the punishment of troublesome French citizens of Alsace-Lorraine are quoted in the following extract from “L’Humanité” of July 16:

“Citizen Grumbach spoke on Sunday, before the National Council, of the order issued recently at Strasbourg by M. Millerand, a decree under which any citizen of Alsace-Lorraine who notably appeared to be an element of disorder would be immediately turned over to the military authorities.

“This abominable decree, whose existence Grumbach thus revealed, is now known in its entirety. It is to be found in ‘The Official Bulletin of Upper Alsace,’ No. 25, June 21, 1919. Its title is ‘Decree Relative to Citizens of Alsace-Lorraine in Renewable Detachment’ (sic). Order is given to the municipalities to draw up lists of citizens of Alsace-Lorraine in renewable detachment.

“And here is what Article 2 of this strange decree says:

“1. Every citizen of Alsace-Lorraine whose class has not yet been demobilized in France, and who notably appears to be a disorderly element, shall be immediately, upon the order of the Commandant of the District, arrested by the police and turned over to the military authorities.

“His papers will be sent by the Commandant to the commanding general of the territory, who, after inquiry, will command the return of the arrested man:

“To his old organization if he was a volunteer in the French army;

“To the Alsace-Lorraine depot in Paris if he is a former prisoner of the Allied armies, or a liberated German soldier.

“2. Citizens of Alsace-Lorraine whose class has been demobilized in France.

“Any of these men who notably appears to be a disorderly element shall be arraigned by request of the Commissaries of theRepublic before the Commission de Triage under the same classification as undesirable civilian citizens of Alsace-Lorraine.

“Strasbourg, 24 May, 1919.

“Commissary General of the Republic,

“A. MILLERAND.”

After this, who can be scandalized by the vehement criticisms directed at the National Council by Grumbach, against the state of siege and of arbitrary rule which the Government of the Republic imposes upon Alsace-Lorraine?Does M. Clemenceau, that “old libertarian” know the decree of Millerand? In any case it is important to know that this decree is not aimed at the Germans residing in Alsace-Lorraine, but at the citizens of Alsace-Lorraine of Category A, those indisputably French. Incredible, yet true!

Americans Not An English People.

Americans Not An English People.—Careful computation made by Prof. Albert B. Faust, of Cornell University, shows that while the English, Scotch and Welsh together constituted 30.2 per cent. of the white population of the United States of the whole of 81,731,957, according to the census of 1910, the German element, including Hollanders, made up 26.4 per cent. of the total, and constituted a close second, the Irish coming next with a percentage of 18.6.

According to this table, more than twenty-six Americans out of every hundred are of German origin and about thirty out of every hundred only are either of English, Scotch or Welsh descent. Recent writers, like Dr. William Griffis, and Douglas Campbell (“The Puritan in Holland, England and America”) have vigorously disputed the theory that the Americans are an English people. As Prof. Faust shows, only 30.2 per cent. of the mixed races of the United States are of English origin, while nearly 70 per cent. are of other racial descent.Dr. Griffis wisely declares: “We are less an English nation than composite of the Teutonic peoples,” and the great American historian, Motley, declared: “We are Americans; but yesterday we were Europeans—Netherlanders, Saxons, Normans, Swabians, Celts.”

“She (England) has a conviction that whatever good there is in us is wholly English, when the truth is that we are worth nothing except as far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism.” James Russell Lowell in “Study Windows.”

“Most American authors and all Englishmen who have written on the subject, set out with the theory that the people in the United States are an English race, and that their institutions, when not original, are derived from England. These assumptions underlie all American histories, and they have come to be so generally accepted that to question them seems almost to savor of temerity.... Certainly no intelligent American can study the English people as he does those of the Continent, and then believe that we are of the same race, except as members of the Aryan division of the human family, with the same human nature.”—Douglas Campbell. “The Puritan in Holland, England and America,” Chapter I.

“The Germans were among the earliest and the most numerous of American settlers. The Anglo-Saxons are the acknowledged masters of the earth. The bulk of the early immigrants were of these two stocks. Examine the matter from any angle, and it is apparent that the American people are the direct, immediate descendants of world empire builders.

“The American colonies were all settled by British, French, Germans, Spanish and other inhabitants of the north and west of Europe. The central and western Europeans played no part in the early history of the colonies. Colonial ancestry means the ancestry of the world’s conquering peoples.

“Immigration during most of the nineteenth century was from the same portion of Europe. The immigration records (kept only since 1820) show that between that year and 1840 the immigrants from Europe numbered 594,504, among whom there were 358,994 from the British Isles [including, of course, the Irish—Editor] and 159,215 from Germany, making a total from the two countries of 518,209, or 87 per cent. of the immigrants arriving in the 20-year period. During the next 20 years (1840-1860) the total of immigrants from Europe was 4,050,159, of whom the British Isles furnished 2,385,846, and Germany 1,386,392, making for these two countries 95 per cent. of the whole. Even during the 20 years from 1860 to 1880, 82 per cent. of the immigrants to the United States from Europe hailed from the British Isles and from Germany. During the most of the nineteenth century European immigration was overwhelmingly British and German.

“Nearly nine-tenths of the early immigrants to the United States came from these countries. They and the countries immediately adjoiningthem furnished practically all of the men and women who settled in North America from the earliest days of colonization down to 1880—the beginning of the last generation. The American race stock is built around the stock of Great Britain and Germany.”—Prof. Scott Nearing.

(See “[The German Element in American Life],” elsewhere.)

Whatever racial prejudice and political bias may attempt to do, philosophers and thinkers know that from the German race emanated the ideals of freedom and personal liberty which is the heritage of the whole world. To that great French thinkers, Montesquieu, Guizot and others have candidly testified, as have Englishmen, such as Hume and Carlyle. In describing the battle of Chalons in his standard work, “The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,” Prof. E. S. Creasy says:

In order to estimate the full importance of the battle of Chalons we must keep steadily in mind who and what the Germans were and the important distinction between them and the numerous other races that assailed the Roman Empire; and it is to be understood that the Gothic and Scandinavian nations are included in the German race.Now, in two remarkable traits the Germans differed from the Sarmatic as well as from the Slavic nations, and indeed from all those other races to whom the Greeks and Romans gave the designation of barbarians. I allude to their personal freedom and regard for the rights of men; secondly to the respect paid by them to the female sex and the chastity for which the latter were celebrated among the people of the North. These were the foundations of that probity of character, self-respect and purity of manners which may be traced among the Germans and Goths even during pagan times, and which, when their sentiments were enlightened by Christianity, brought out those splendid traits of character which distinguish the age of chivalry and romance. (See Prichard’s “Researches Into the Physical History of Man.”) What the intermixture of the German stock with the classic, at the fall of the western empire, has done for mankind may be best felt, with Arnold (Arnold’s “Lectures on Modern History”) over how large a portion of the earth the influence of the German element is now extended.

It affects more or less the whole west of Europe, from the head of the Gulf of Bothnia to the most southern promontory of Sicily, from the Oder and the Adriatic to the Hebrides and to Lisbon. It is true that the language spoken over a large portion of this space is not predominantly German; but even in France and Italy and Spain the influence of the Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Lombards, while it has colored even the language, has in blood and institutions left its mark legibly and indelibly. Germany, the low countries, Switzerland for the most part, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and our own islands, are all in language, in blood and institutions, German most decidedly. But all South America is peopled with Spaniards and Portuguese; all North America and Australia with Englishmen. I say nothing of the prospectsand influence of the German race in Africa and in India; it is enough to say that half of Europe and all of America and Australia are German, more or less completely, in race, in language, in institutions or in all.

It has been extravagantly modish to distort ethnological facts and set up new gods, but the assailants of the German race have not been able successfully to deny that tremendous influence which has given birth to the free institutions of the world, and there are not wanting among Americans of authority those who have been openly outspoken for the truth. President Garfield in his article on “My Experiences as a Lawyer” in the “North American Review” for June, 1887, p. 569, observed, alluding to a speech made by him on the death of his friend, Representative Gustav Schleicher of Texas in 1879:

“We are accustomed to call England our fatherland. It is a mistake; one of the greatest of modern historians writing the history of the English people has said that England is not the fatherland of the English-speaking people, but Germany. I go into that and say, ‘The real fatherland of the people of this country is Germany, and our friend who has fallen came to us direct from our fatherland, and, not, like the rest of us, around by the way of England.’ Then I give a little sketch of German character, and what Carlyle and Montesquieu said, that the British constitution came out of the woods of Germany.”

In a like manner Charles E. Hughes, while governor of New York State, in a speech at Mount Vernon in 1908, said:

Did you ever think that a very large portion of our people, despite their present distinction of home and birthplace, and even nationality, are descended from those common ancestors who a few years ago lived their life in the German forests? There were nourished the institutions of freedom; and if any one were to point to any place in the world to which, above all, we trace our free institutions, we would point, above all, to the forests of Germany.

Americans Saved from Mexican Mob at Tampico by German Cruiser “Dresden.

Americans Saved from Mexican Mob at Tampico by German Cruiser “Dresden.”—The destruction of the little German cruiser “Dresden” by the British in the neutral waters of Chili, in March, 1915, must call up sentimental memories in the hearts of certain Americans. For it was the gallant little “Dresden” under command of Capt. von Koehler, that saved the lives of hundreds of American refugees who were surrounded by a bloodthirsty mob of Mexicans at the Southern Hotel, Tampico, Mexico, April 21, 1914. These fugitives had gathered from all parts of Mexico, expecting to be protected by the American battleships in Tampico Bay. But by some criminal short-sightedness the American ships were ordered to withdraw, and the Americans at the Southern Hotel were exposed to immediate death by a raging mob, when Capt. von Koehler entered upon the scene and threatened to lay Tampico in ashes if the mob did not disperse in fifteen minutes. Hethen sent a squad of his blue jackets ashore and extricated the besieged people from their dangerous position. Two American yachts, hoisting the German and English flags, carried the refugees to a place of safety. Capt. von Koehler’s gallantry was publicly acknowledged by Secretary of State Bryan. A special dispatch to the New York “Times,” dated Galveston, April 27, stated that “the officers of the battleship ‘Connecticut’ said tonight that but for the action of the men of the German cruiser ‘Dresden’ there would have been bloodshed on Tuesday night.” And “the refugees arriving on the ‘Esperanza’ sent this cable dispatch to the German Emperor:

“To your officers and men we owe our lives and pledge our lifetime gratitude. We salute you and the noble men of your Empire.”

Armstadt, Major George.

Armstadt, Major George.—After the sack of Washington, the burning of the White House and the Capitol, in 1812, the British proceeded to attack Baltimore. This action brought into great prominence two Americans of German descent. General Johann Stricker, born in Frederick, Md., in 1759, was in command of the militia, and Major George Armstadt commanded Fort McHenry. He was born in New Market in 1780 of Hessian parents. “If Armstadt had not held Fort McHenry during its terrific bombardment by the British,” writes Rudolf Cronau in “Our Hyphenated Citizens,” a valuable little brochure, “our national hymn, ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ most probably would never have been written.”

American School Children and Foreign Propaganda.

American School Children and Foreign Propaganda.—The tendency in some directions to picture George III as “a German King,” in order to shift upon the shoulders of a historical manikin the responsibility for the American Revolutionary War, has gone so far as to attempt to blind the unthinking masses to the truth about our war of independence; but it should be remembered that if the responsibility rested wholly with this alleged “German King,” then Washington, Jefferson and Franklin deceived the American people and the Declaration of Independence was a lie. In that event we have lived 140 years of our history under a delusion and a fiction. It is eminently to the interest of English propaganda to create and strengthen this impression, and it is regrettable that no organized opposition has developed to the attempt to inculcate into the minds of our school children the conception that but for this German King we should still be a contented colony of the British crown.

How is this fiction fostered?

Largely through the medium of certain important book publishers, who print school books, though the public is ignorant of the fact that the majority of these publishing houses are financed either by British or American circles closely intermarried or financially related to English houses.

The movement to rewrite the history of the United States in the interest of England is so widespread and persistent that the chairman of the Americanization Committee of the Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce, in November, 1919, published an expose of his discoveries and conclusions as to the extent of the British propaganda, in which he said:

To work among aliens to build up respect and loyalty for the United States while a stupendous plot is under way to destroy the very thing which we are pleading with these aliens to preserve is wasted effort.

In view of the efforts to burden the shoulders of George III with the offenses that led to the Declaration of Independence while exonerating the English people of any guilt, by representing him as a “German King” to the uninformed minds of our school children, it is pertinent to quote Lord Macaulay’s description of George III:

The young king was a born Englishman; all his tastes, good or bad, were English.... His age, his appearance and all that was known of his character conciliated public favor. He was in the bloom of youth; his person and address were pleasing. Scandal imputed to him no vice; and flattery might without any glowing absurdity ascribe to him many princely virtues.

We find nothing in Macaulay to warrant the conclusion that George, a born Englishman in the third generation, was not complete master of the English language, as has been alleged; and, moreover, if he can reasonably be called a German, because of his German ancestry, it follows that the same allegation can be reasonably preferred against President Wilson, and that, because of his even nearer English ancestry, he is really an Englishman and not an American—an imputation which his partisans would declare an absurdity on its face.

A further proof of the vicious misrepresentation which describes George III singly and alone responsible for the cause of the Revolution is contained in the words of our forefathers themselves. They must have known whom they were fighting, who tyrannized over them and who were trying to subjugate them. And this is what they said to the world:

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated inquiry.... Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

American School Children and English Propaganda.

American School Children and English Propaganda.—The Encyclopedia Britannica says: “The notion that England was justified in throwing on America part of the expenses caused in the late war was popular in the country.... George III, who thought that the first duty of the Americans was to obey himself, had on his side the mass of the unreflecting Englishmen who thought that the first duty of all colonists was to be useful and submissive of the mother country.... When the news of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga arrived in 1777, subscription of money to raise new regiments poured freely in.”

It is not enough to disprove the absurd statement that the English people had no responsibility for the stamp act and the oppressions that were practiced against the American colonies, and that all these evils were the work of George III; it is vital for the American people to recognize the danger of the ultimate aim of the Anglo-American publishers who are supplying the public schools with histories in which the English are exalted and the Germans represented as our immemorial enemies, all contrary evidence notwithstanding. (See under “[Frederick the Great],” elsewhere.)

Edward F. McSweeney, of the Americanization Committee of the Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce, in tracing the baleful propaganda, calls attention to a Fourth of July demonstration in London in 1917, during which George Haven Putnam, himself a native of London, head of one of the largest book publishing houses in this country, made the following observations:

The feelings and prejudices of the Americans concerning their transatlantic kinsfolk were shaped for my generation, as for the boys of every generation that has grown up since 1775, on text books and histories that presented unhistorical, partisan and often distorted views of the history of the first English colonies, of the events of the Revolution, of the issues that brought about the War of 1812-15, and the grievances of 1861-1865.

The influence of the British element in our population has proved sufficiently strong to enable the English-Americans to bring it under control and to weld it into a nation that, in its common character and purposes, is English. Text books are now being prepared which will present juster historical accounts of the events of 1775-83, 1812-15 and 1861-65.

Americans of today, looking back at the history with a better sense of justice and a better knowledge of the facts than was possible for their ancestors, are prepared to recognize also that their great-grandfathers had treated with serious injustice and with great unwisdom the loyalists of New York and of New England, who had held to the cause of the Crown.

It is in order now to admit that the loyalists had a fair cause to defend, and it was not to be wondered at that many men of the more conservative way of thinking should have convinced themselves that the cause of good government for the colonieswould be better served by maintaining the royal authority and by improving the royal methods than by breaking away into the all-dubious possibilities of independence.

I had occasion some months back when in Halifax to apologize before the great Canadian Club, to the descendants of some of the men who had in 1776 been forced out of Boston through the illiberal policy of my great-grandfather and his associates. My friends in Halifax (and the group included some of my cousins) said that the apology had come a little late, but that they were prepared to accept it. They were prepared to meet more than half way the Yankee suggestion.

During the present sojourn in England I met in one of the Conservative clubs an old Tory acquaintance, who, with characteristic frankness, said:

“Major, I am inclined to think that it was a good thing that we did not break up your republic in 1861. We have need of you today in our present undertaking.”

The methods to be followed in the pursuit of the plan to induce us to repudiate our ancestors and their action are diverse and always devious. It begins with an agitation for “an orderly Fourth of July,” in order to wipe out the memories of 1776, and it finds expression in insidious attempts to discredit our national poets, notably Longfellow, for recording the rape of the Acadians in his “Evangeline,” and for writing “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

This foreign propaganda is supported by men like Putnam and even American writers like Owen Wister. For the Fourth of July issue of the London “Times” in 1919, Wister wrote an article in which he said:

A movement to correct the school books (in America) has been started and will go on. It will be thwarted in every way possible by certain of your enemies. They will busily remind us that you burnt our Capitol; that you let loose the Alabama on us during the Civil War; they will never mention the good turns you have done us. They would spoil, if they could, the better understanding that so many of us are striving for.

At the meeting of the House of Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church, at Detroit, October 11, 1919, a resolution was offered to exclude from the church hymnal “The Star Spangled Banner” and “America.” In some of the public schools in New York copy books are furnished the children with a picture of General Haig and embellished with the British flag, and for some time pictures of a flag combining the American Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack in one design were publicly exhibited for sale all over New York City.

We read in the Prefatory Note to the revised edition of “English History for Americans,” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Edward Channing (1904): “In the preparation of this revised edition, the authors have been guided by the thought that the study of English history in our schools generally precedes that of the United States.”

There is obviously as strong a Tory sentiment in the United States as there was in 1776, 1779, 1808 and 1812, and the words of Thomas Jefferson, in his letter to Governor Langdon, of New Hampshire, are as true today as they were then:

The Toryism with which we struggled in ‘77 differed but in name from the Federalism of ‘99, with which we struggled also; and the Anglicism of 1808 against which we are now struggling is but the same thing still in another form. It is a longing for a King, and an English King rather than any other. This is the true source of our sorrows and wailings.

Again we hear the prophetic voice of Abraham Lincoln as it is borne to us like an echo of his speech at Springfield, Ill., June 26, 1857:

The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be—as, thank God, it is now proving itself—a stumbling block to all those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of posterity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should reappear in this fair land and commence their vocation, they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.

England’s chief propagandist is Lord Northcliffe. He owns the London “Times,” and the latter, on July 4, 1919, clearly outlined in an editorial the method to be pursued in turning us from our ideals and making us forget the glorious traditions of the past. It said:

Efficient propaganda, carried out by those trained in the arts of creating public good-will and of swaying public opinion as a definite purpose, is now needed, urgently needed. To make a beginning, efficiently organized propaganda should mobilize the press, the Church, the stage and the cinema; press into service the whole educational systems of both countries and root the spirit of good will in the homes, the universities, public and high schools, and private schools.

It should also provide for subsidizing the best men to write books and articles on special subjects, to be published in cheap editions or distributed free to classes interested. Authoritative opinion on current controversial topics should be prepared both for the daily press and for magazines; histories and text books upon literature should be revised. New books should be added, particularly in the primary schools. Hundreds of exchange university scholarships should be provided.

In this manner the article continues, revealing, in defiance of all sense of delicacy and discretion, the English attempt to undermine the foundations of our national life by tampering with the children of the public schools and the young men and women in the universities.

The English campaign of propaganda invades the home, the school and the church; and has already assumed a degree of appalling boldnessin denying to America any substantial share in the issue of the World War. Protesting against a pamphlet, “Some Facts About the British,” said to have been published “at the suggestion of the War Department,” District Attorney Joseph C. Pelletier, of Boston, addressed Secretary of War Baker as follows:

I cannot believe that this pamphlet has come to your notice, for I cannot believe that you would suggest, far less authorize, any statement regarding the war which unduly lionized Great Britain and absolutely omitted any mention of the decisive share of the United States in the triumph of the Allied Powers.

If the sinister plot, with its ramifications in our churches and universities, our publishing houses and newspapers, is to be checked, it will be necessary to act so as to make it unprofitable for these interests to pursue their plans in quiet, and to seek by every means available to arouse something of the good old spirit of 1776 that prevailed throughout America until the advent of the late John Hay as the first American ambassador to forget the traditions of his country and its experiences at the hands of England.

How painful, how humiliating to every American, it should be to have the history of our national life for 144 years declared a forgery and to see it rewritten at the dictates of the champions of a foreign power who repudiate the stand of their forefathers. (See “[Propaganda in the United States].”)

Astor, John Jacob.

Astor, John Jacob.—“The inborn spirit of John Jacob Astor made America what it is,” is the judgment passed upon this famous German American by Arthur Butler Hurlbut. Popular conception of John Jacob Astor’s personality and work is based upon a collossal underestimate of his tremendous service in the cause of the commercial and economic development of the United States. More interest attaches to those things which appear adventurous in Astor’s life than to the genius which inspired all his undertakings in pursuing unsuspected aims and converting into accomplishments objects that seemed impossible of accomplishment. Many picture him as a sort of Leatherstocking with an eye to business, a hunter and trapper, boldly invading the wilderness and making friends of the Indians, and who finally amassed an immense fortune from the fur trade.

Truth is, only two millions represented the share of his fur trade in the total of twenty or thirty million dollars which constituted his fortune at the time of his death. The mythical John Jacob Astor was a creation of those who came after him; the real one appeared quite different to his contemporaries. His bier was surrounded by the leading statesmen, financiers and scholars of the first half of the nineteenth century, for they knew what today is either little known or forgotten, that his methods were those of a true pioneer and pathfinder.

None other than John Jacob Astor found the way of making American commerce independent of England by getting around the English middleman in New York for the disposal of his products and shipping direct to the London market. It was he who opened the ports of China, then the foremost trading country of the Orient, to the American ships, by securing this privilege direct from the East India Company. It was Astor who made possible trans-continental intercourse and who opened the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific by the founding of Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River. It was at the cost of a fortune, it is true, but, with a spirit of enterprise which remained unrivaled for sixty years after he had blazed the way. Knowledge is power; and Astor, equipped only with an education such as a village school afforded, had a genius for imbibing knowledge from every source and direction, and then to employ it to the full bent of his exceptional ability.

His life (“Life and Ventures of the Original John Jacob Astor,” by Elizabeth L. Gebhard, Bryan Pub. Co., Hudson, N. Y.) was crowded with anecdotal incidents of his ability and manner of gathering information, always in the form of confidential chatter, or a simple plying of questions. In this he was materially aided by a winning personality, an open manner and inherent modesty, characteristics which clung to him even after he had become one of the leading and most influential figures in the country, and which remained with him until his death. He was a man of natural nobility, who achieved great results during his life-time and left his descendants to complete what he had no time to complete himself.

The author quoted, who is a great granddaughter of the Rev. Dr. John Gabriel Gebhard, pastor of the German Reformed Church in Nassau Street, New York, during the Revolution, and who was driven out of his pulpit through the machinations of the influential Tories then in New York, and forced to preach in Claverack in Van Rensselaer County, on the Hudson, declares that however fondly attached Astor was to his adopted country, he never abandoned certain ideals instilled in him in the old German home and of which neither his experiences nor the radical changes surrounding one so young could ever divest him, ideals translated into German thoroughness, German love of industry and efficiency and German honesty, judgment and foresight, confidence and the guiding principle that knowledge is power.

He enjoyed the friendship of many eminent men, and was very intimate with Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene Halleck, at the suggestion of the former leaving $400,000 to found the Astor Library in New York City.

He was born in Waldorf, near Heidelberg, Germany, came to New York at the age of twenty with a few musical instruments, which he sold and the proceeds of which he invested in furs. He died March29, 1848. His descendants only in part remembered the racial origin of the founder of their fortune, and one of them expatriated himself and in December, 1915, was made a baron by the King of England in recognition of his loyalty to the British Crown.

Titled Americans.

Titled Americans.—The correspondent of the New York “Evening Post,” writing from Paris after the armistice, commented on the power of propaganda through the medium of decorations bestowed on Americans by some of the foreign governments. The war has assuredly added a long list to the roll of titled Americans, Knights of the Garter and of the Bath and Chevaliers and Commanders of the Legion of Honor. Except Secretary Daniels and former Senator Lewis, practically all accepted the dignities with which they were invested at the hands of royalty. The cross of the Legion of Honor was established by Napoleon and historically is an imperial decoration.

Prominent among those who had knighthood conferred upon them at the hands of the King of England were General Pershing, General Dickman, former Ambassador James W. Gerard, Oscar Straus, Col. C. Cordier, Brigadier General C. B. Wheeler and Major General George W. Goethals (Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George). Lieutenant General Robert L. Bullard was decorated by the King of Belgium with the Order of Leopold and made a Commander of the Legion of Honor. General Joseph H. Kuhn, former military attache at Berlin with the American embassy, was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor. James M. Beck, a famous Wall Street corporation lawyer, was made “a Bencher,” an honor never before bestowed on an American, and he also received the Order of the Crown from the King of Belgium; Alfred C. Bedford, chairman of the board of directors of the Standard Oil Company, was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor; Lieutenant Laurenc C. Welling of Mount Vernon received the order of a Chevalier of the Crown of Belgium; the Legion of Honor Cross was conferred on Dr. William T. Manning, rector of Trinity Church, New York; Otto H. Kahn was appointed by the King of Italy, Commander of the Crown of Italy, as was Major Julius A. Adler; J. M. Nye, chief special agent, in charge of King Albert’s train in the United States, was given the order of Chevalier of the Order of Leopold; Elizabeth Marbury was decorated with the Medal of Queen Elizabeth of Belgium “in recognition of services rendered to Belgium since 1914.”

Others named to be Knights Commanders by the King of England were Brigadier General George Bell, Jr., Major General William Lassiter, Brigadier General John L. Hines and Brigadier General Charles H. Muir; Commanders of the Order of the Bath, Brigadier General Malin Craig and Brigadier General Harry A. Smith; Commanders of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, Col. John Montgomery, Col. David H. Biddle, Col. William P. Wooten, Col. HoraceStebbins. Several American naval officers were “promoted” and nominated in the Legion of Honor.

Admiral Benson promoted to receive the Grand Cross of the Legion, while Admiral Mayo and Rear-Admirals Sims and Wilson are advanced to the grade of Grand Officer. Rear-Admirals Gleaves, Usher, Long, Griffin, Welles, Taylor and Earle become Commanders of the Legion.

Dr. Henry van Dyke, former American ambassador to the Netherlands, and Alexander J. Hemphill were made Chevaliers of the French Legion of Honor.

Companion of the Order of Bath—Major General William L. Kenly. Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George—Brigadier General William Mitchell, Brigadier General George S. Diggs, Colonel Walter Kilmer and Major Harold Fowler.

The widow of Col. Robert Bacon, who fell in action, was invested with the insignia on behalf of her husband of the order of British knighthood; Edward R. Stettinius was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor; the Order of the Crown was conferred on Elliot Wadsworth of Boston; Mrs. James Hamilton Lewis received a French decoration; Jacob A. Riis received the order of Danneborg from the King of Denmark. This list is only a partial one of Americans distinguished in the manner indicated, which prompted Arthur Brisbane in his column in the New York “American” to observe:

We shall have our little titled class in America, thanks to the British King’s action. General Pershing is now “Sir John”—in England, anyhow, and here if he chooses. Our General Dickman, commander of the Third Army, is made a Knight Commander of the Bath. He will be “Sir Joseph” and his wife “Lady Dickman.” Those that “dearly love a Lord” or a Knight are not all English.

In England such men as Gladstone, Carlyle and others refused any title, setting too high a value upon their own dignity. Some American soldiers have missed an opportunity to take democracy seriously.

Atrocities.

Atrocities.—It is easily conceivable that had Germany been invaded early in the war by the joint world powers, instead of the reverse, there would have been a decided sentiment in favor of Germany instead of an increasing hatred which in a short time was extended to people of German ancestry in the United States; it held them morally responsible for the alleged atrocities of the German armies in Belgium. When a paper like the New York “Sun” holds that “the Germans are not human beings in the common acceptation of the term,” it cannot avoid the responsibility which that verdict imposes on every person of German lineage in America. It is therefore a matter of duty to investigate the testimony of responsible persons whether the Belgian atrocities had any existence inthe light in which they were presented. The administration shares this responsibility in having steadfastly ignored demands for the publication of the report on Belgian atrocities made by the British government early in the war and transmitted to the State Department by Ambassador Page at London. These atrocities were alleged to consist of cutting off of hands of Belgian children, cutting off tongues, of mutilating the breasts of women, of outraging nuns and violating nurses, crucifying soldiers, etc.

Now and then a conscientious voice was heard out of the universal cry of accusation such as represented by the following self-explanatory letter addressed to the New York “Evening Post:”

To The Editor of the “Evening Post:”

Sir: Every man who has had a connection with the honorable British journalism of the past ought to thank you for your just and moderate rebuke of the pretended censorship which has passed off such a mountain of falsehoods on the public of both hemispheres. I suppose I am the Doyen of the foreign editors of London, and well I know that under Gladstone and Beaconsfield it would have been impossible to find either writers or censors for the abominable fictions which have been spread in order to inflame the British masses against their German opponents. The tales of German officers filling their pockets with the severed feet and hands of Belgian babies, and German Catholic regiments deliberately destroying French Catholic Cathedrals, would decidedly not have been accepted by any editors of the “Times” or “Morning Post” in the days of Queen Victoria.

The worst part of these infamous inventions has been that they have stirred up the blind fury of the English populace against tens of thousands of inoffensive and useful foreigners who have done nothing but good in a hundred honest professions, and who are now, in the midst of savage threats and insults, torn from their industrious homes and thrust into bleak and miserable prisons without a single comfort on the brink of the wintry season. The spectacle is a hideous one, and the military censorship which has spread the exciting calumnies has gained no enviable place in truthful history.

F. Hugh O’Donnell.

Formerly foreign editor on the “Morning Post,” “Spectator,” and other leading journals.

Melville E. Stone, general manager of the “Associated Press,” in an address before the Commercial Club of St. Louis, early in 1918, as reported in the St. Louis “Globe-Democrat,” of March 25, 1918, among other things made the following statement:

One of the many rumors which I have investigated since the beginning of the war is that “the hands of Belgian children have been cut off.” This is not the truth. Aside from all other proof, a child whose hands had been cut off would die if notgiven immediate medical attention; any surgeon or physician will bear me out in this.

The rumor was given currency by pro-Germans in this country, I believe, because it was so easy to deny it; they could assume on the strength of the proof of that denial that all other atrocities, of which there were innumerable instances, could be denied.

I have investigated forty or fifty of such stories, and in every case have found them untrue. One of these statements came from the wife of a leading banker in Paris. She was asked where she had seen the child, and mentioned a certain railway station. Asked if she had seen the child, she replied she had seen a little girl with her hands wrapped up. She did not know the little girl. In reply to another question she admitted she had been told the child’s hands had been cut off by Germans by a woman who stood on the platform near her. She had never seen the woman before or after, and did not know her or know her name.

“There is a little band of Catholic priests,” he said, “who have been going into Belgium and Holland and hunting out children who have lost one or both parents or in the great excitement have become separated from their parents. They informed me in a letter that they had taken between 5,000 and 6,000 children from these countries and found homes for them, and that they never had seen such a case and didn’t believe they existed.”

On December 16, 1917, the Rev. J. F. Stillimans, a pupil of Cardinal Mercier, director of the Belgian Propaganda Bureau in New York, made a similar statement, singularly assigning the same reasons for the currency of the reports, namely, that they were inspired by “Germans.” He said:

I believe that the rumors as to mutilated children being in this country are started and circulated by the Germans themselves for the sake of being able to declare them erroneous and to claim victoriously, though illogically, that all other accusations are to be judged untrue, since in this particular case no proof is forthcoming.

Because the proof was not forthcoming, the campaign was abandoned, thus leaving in the lurch a great many supposedly honorable persons who had sworn to “the truth of what they had seen with their own eyes.”

B. N. Langdon Davies, an Englishman, speaking at Madison, Wis., as reported under date of December 5, 1919, said among other things, that the public had been fed on a great deal of misinformation, and that most of the German atrocities were manufactured by Allied press agents for the purpose of stirring up hate.

The London “Globe” of November 1, 1915, said:

In regard to the stories about German war atrocities, which are as mythical as the Russians in France, the “Globe” hasreceived numerous letters. Those who have until now given credence to these stories must realize that reports concerning atrocities which were never committed will tend to shake confidence in the accuracy of reports concerning innumerable barbarities which have been committed. These reports are still credited in many circles, and what is the result when investigations are instituted? It can be expressed in one sentence which an official of the Committee on Belgian Refugees stated to a reporter of the “Globe” today:

“We have not seen a single mutilated Belgian refugee in this country, nor have we found anyone who had ever seen one.”

The following extract is from the “Universe,” London:

A correspondent writing from Amsterdam states that a friend of his, a Catholic, who has visited many convents in Belgium with the object of testing stories of ill-treatment of nuns, makes the following statements. After careful examination it is evident that, with the exception of one or two isolated instances of rough treatment, Catholic nuns have nowhere suffered violence; on the contrary, this witness cites many examples of humane and excellent behavior on the part of the Germans, both officers and men. It is not to be assumed from the above that the gentleman quoted has made an exhaustive examination of all the convents in Belgium, but his evidence is noteworthy since he explicitly denies, on the authority of the nuns themselves, the stories of violence that were spread abroad regarding two convents, one of which was at Malines and the other at Blaunpal.

John T. McCutcheon, special war correspondent of the New York “World” and Chicago “Tribune,” made this declaration in September, 1914:

In that time from Louvain to the French frontier at Beaumont, there has not been a single instance of wanton brutality which has come under my observation. The widely disseminated stories of German atrocities were found to be groundless, and I am sincerely convinced, after my association and the observation of the officers and private soldier of the German columns with which I have traveled, that no army could go through a hostile country with fewer exhibitions of brutality.

In a special dispatch to the New York “Times,” dated London, October 16, 1914, Irvin S. Cobb, writes:

In all my travels in the theater of war I have seen no atrocities committed by either side. I have seen men led away to execution, but only after thorough and ready justice of a drumhead court martial had been administered. Germany is full of stories of German Red Cross nurses with their breasts slashed by Belgians.

A highly important witness in this connection is Emily Hobhouse, the well-known English philanthropist and writer. In October, 1916, Miss Hobhouse wrote an article for a British periodical, giving herimpressions of her visit to Belgium. She emphasized her astonishment at seeing so little of the terrible devastation which she had been led, by English newspaper reports, to expect. From her experience in the South African war she was well aware that soldiers rule with fire and sword, but she found nothing in Belgium to compare with the devastation of South Africa. While but 15,000 houses out of a total of 2,000,000 had been destroyed in Belgium, the houses of 30,000 farmers had been destroyed in the Boer war out of a relatively much smaller total, and whole cities and towns with their schools and churches had been made level with the ground. Even in cities like Liege and Antwerp, where the fighting had been fierce, she could discover no evidence of any extraordinary destructiveness on the part of the Germans, and the conditions in Louvain, which she had pictured as a place of ruins, fairly astounded her.

In May, 1915, on his return from Europe, Ex-Mayor and Ex-Representative McClellan of New York, gave out a statement correcting the view so prevalent in American circles that Belgium was devastated.

The following correspondence will speak for itself:

Rev. J. F. Matthews, Glossop Road Baptist Church, Sheffield.

Dear Sir:—A correspondent informs us that on Sunday morning you stated in the course of a sermon delivered in Wash Lane Church, Latchford, Washington, that there is a Belgian girl in Sheffield with her nose cut off and her stomach ripped open by the Germans and that she is still living and getting better. I am anxious to investigate stories of German atrocities and should be grateful if you could send particulars to me by which your statement could be authenticated. Faithfully yours,

A. FENNER BROCKWAY,
Editor of “Labor Leader.”

The Editor the “Labor Leader.”

Dear Mr. Brockway: I enclose our consul’s letter, which I have just received. I am writing a letter to my old church at Latchford, to be read on Sunday next, contradicting the story which I told on what seemed to be unimpeachable authority. I am glad I did not give the whole alleged facts as they were given to me. With many thanks for your note and inquiry, I am, yours sincerely,

JOHN FRANCIS MATTHEWS,

March 12, 1915.

(Enclosure.)

Dear Mr. Matthews: Replying to your letter of the 9th inst., enclosing a letter which you have received from the “Labor Leader,” although I have heard of a number of cases of Belgian girls being maltreated in one way or another, I have on investigation not found a particle of truth in one of them, and I know of no girl in Sheffield who has had her nose cut off and her stomach ripped open. I have also investigated cases in othertowns, but have not yet succeeded in getting hold of any tangible information. Yours very truly,

A. BALFAY,

Consulat du Royanne de Belgique.

District War Refugee Committee for Belgians.

March 11, 1915.

Horace Green, a war correspondent, who spent many weeks in Belgium during the early stages of the war, in his book, “The Log of a Noncombatant,” issued by the Houghton Mifflin Company, devotes the last chapter to a discussion of atrocities. Concluding that the stories of atrocities have been exaggerated a hundred fold, Mr Green says:

The reports of unprovoked personal atrocities have been hideously exaggerated. Wherever one real atrocity has occurred, it has been multigraphed into a hundred cases. Each, with clever variation in detail, is reported as occurring to a relative or close friend of the teller. For campaign purposes, and particularly in England for the sake of stimulating recruiting, a partisan press has helped along the concoction of lies.

In every war of invasion there is bound to occur a certain amount of plunder and rapine. The German system of reprisal is relentless; but the German private as an individual is no more barbaric than his brother in the French, the British, or the Belgian trenches.

In the “Atlantic Monthly” for October, 1917, Prof. Kellogg, of the American Belgian Relief Commission, while severely arraigning Germany’s treatment of Belgium, expressly states that he came across no instance of Belgian children with their hands cut off or women with breasts mutilated.

Ernest P. Bicknell, Director of Civilian Relief, American Red Cross, in an article in “The Survey” in 1917, writes as follows:

The world is familiar with stories of the atrocities charged against the German army in Belgium. In our travels in Belgium many of these stories came to our ears. In time we came to feel that a fair consideration of these reports required a careful discrimination between the conduct of individual German soldiers, and those operations carried on under the direction of army officers in accordance with a deliberately adopted military policy.

Approaching this subject in accordance with this idea, we should classify the stories of mutilations, violations of women, killing of women and children, etc., as belonging in the category chargeable against individuals of reckless and criminal character, who when opportunity offers, will gratify their lawless passions. The stories of individual atrocities in Belgium, which have shocked the world, we found difficult to verify. While it is probable that such atrocities were occasionally committed, I personally came in contact with no instance of that character during my travels about Belgium; nor did I discuss this subject with any person who had himself come in contact with such an instance.

In my opinion the verdict of history upon the conduct of the German army in Belgium will give little heed to these horrifying stories of individual crime.

Testimony along the same line is furnished by Father Duffy, chaplain of the 165th Infantry; the War Refugee Committee in London, George Bernard Shaw, General Pershing, General March and many others of equal standing, and furnishes an array of evidence that is strangely opposed to that of Mrs. Harjes, the wife of the partner of J. P. Morgan, that she personally saw Belgian children with their hands cut off, and of Cardinal Mercier, who stirred the heart of humanity when he declared that “forty-nine Belgian priests were tortured and put to death by the Germans during the occupation.” It is a matter of record, however, that General Bissig, Governor General of Belgium during the occupation, forbade the Belgians to keep song birds that had been bereft of their eyes to make them sing better. The order concludes: “The wilful blinding of birds is an act of cruelty which I cannot under any circumstances tolerate.”

Five reputable American correspondents on September 6, 1914, after tracing the German army in its invasion of 100 miles, sent a message to the American people that “we are unable to report a single instance (of atrocities) unprovoked.... Everywhere we have seen Germans paying for purchases and respecting property rights as well as according civilians every consideration.... To the truth of these statements we pledge our professional and personal word.” The statement was signed by James O’Donnell Bennett and John T. McCutcheon, of the Chicago “Tribune;” Roger Lewis, of the Associated Press; Irvin S. Cobb, of the “Saturday Evening Post,” and Harry Hansen, of the Chicago “Daily News.”

It has been said that Lord Bryce signed the official atrocity report and that his honored name raises it above suspicion. Lord Bryce is an old man and it is inferred that he signed the report in good faith without, however, having looked into the truth or falsity of the statements himself, accepting the word of others who were using him for their nefarious purpose, the intention being to incite American public opinion to action in behalf of the Allies. For Lord Bryce is flatly contradicted by the following cable message from London, taken from the daily papers of September 15, 1914:

(Lord Bryce subsequently modified his position by a denial of the truth of the report as presented.—Ed.)

London, Sept. 14, 3:23 P. M.—Premier Asquith told the House of Commons today that official information had reached the Ministry of War concerning the repeated stories that German soldiers had abused the Red Cross flag, killed and maimed the wounded, and killed women and children, as had been alleged so often in stories of the battlefields.

Joseph Medill Patterson: The Hague, September 11—To the Chicago “Tribune:” I firmly believe that all stories put out by the British and French of tortures, mutilations, assaults, etc., of Germans are utterly rubbish.

A flat denial of the atrocity stories was furnished by a Washington dispatch to the New York “World,” five months after the invasion of Belgium. The report contained the substance of an official finding by the British government and was turned over to Ambassador Walter H. Page for transmission to Washington upon the request of the American government. When Dr. Edmund von Mach subsequently requested the State Department for information about the finding, after returning one evasive reply, Secretary Lansing left Dr. von Mach’s letters unanswered and the report has never been made public. Following is the Washington report referred to:

Washington, Jan. 27. (Special to the “World”)—Of the thousands of Belgian refugees who are now in England not one has been subjected to atrocities by German soldiers. This in effect is the substance of a report received at the State Department from the American Embassy in London. The report states that the British government thoroughly had investigated thousands of reports to the effect that German soldiers had perpetrated outrages on the fleeing Belgians. During the early period of the war, columns of the British newspapers were filled with these accusations. Agents of the British government, according to the report from the American Embassy at London, carefully investigated all of these charges; they interviewed alleged victims and sifted all the evidence. As a result of the investigation the British Foreign Office notified the American Embassy that the charges appeared to be based upon hysteria and natural prejudice. The report added that many of the Belgians had suffered severe hardships but they should be charged up against the exigencies of war rather than the brutality of the individual German soldier.

According to advices from Switzerland, under date of July 9, 1916, the paper “Italia” printed the following:

“Assisted by the Papal state department, the congregation of Catholic church officials instituted a searching inquiry into the reported German atrocities in Belgian convents, first among the Belgian prioresses resident in Rome, next among the Belgian nuns passing through, all of whom unanimously deny having any knowledge of the alleged atrocities. Bishop Heylen, of Namur, who was among those examined, declared that the reports referred to were lacking in every essential of truth. Possibly an isolated case had occurred without his knowledge, but certainly nothing beyond this. Cardinal Mercier, who was also interviewed, spoke of three cases based upon hearsay. The Congregation deplored the spread of exaggerated reports lacking all semblance of truth and expressed its satisfaction with the results of the investigation.”

To the last it was a favorite pastime to charge the Germans with wanton destruction of towns. Ample contradiction could easily be offered if space permitted. Thus William K. Draper, Vice Chairman of the New York County Chapter of the American Red Cross, is quoted in the New York “Times” of July 13, 1919: “A pitiful part of this destruction is the realization that much of it was caused by French artillery, the troops being forced to demolish the towns while being occupied and used by the Germans.”

The whole web of lies and the conditions underlying the scheme are conclusively exposed in “The Tragedy of Belgium,” by Richard Grasshof, (New York: C. E. Dillingham Co.)

The Belgian atrocities were purposely conceived and exaggerated for two reasons:

1. To camouflage the fact that against all rules of civilized warfare, the Belgians of Louvain and several other towns, claiming protection as civilians, awaited an opportune time to institute a massacre of German soldiers who had entered and been stationed there approximately a week in apparently good relations with the population.

2. It was expected that Germany and Austria would be surely invaded under the joint impact of the forces of Russia, France, Belgium, Servia, Montenegro, England and Japan. In that event the world would hear no end of Cossack, Servian and Montenegran atrocities committed on German women and children, as in the Balkan campaign. England had called into the field the Indians, Maoris, Zulus and other savage blacks and yellow skins; France had called the Moroccan natives and the Senegalese tribesmen, blacks who hang around their necks strings adorned with the ears and noses of their fallen foes.

Forseeing that the ravages of these uncivilized warriors would excite the anger of the world against the Allies, if they ever crossed into German territory, that their deeds would bring the curses of the universe upon England’s head, it was resolved to anticipate all possible criticism and reproach by being the first to charge atrocities against their enemies and thus to negative all counter charges, or to say that they were merely retaliatory measures adopted in reprisal for barbarous acts committed against their own men. The Allies never crossed the German lines, save in East Prussia, nor the Austrian-Hungarian border save in Galicia, and here the Cossack reign, short as it was, proved the shrewd wisdom of English and French foresight; 700,000 homes were wantonly destroyed in Galicia alone. Its lawlessness beggars description; but humanity was not staggered because the mind of the world had been drugged by fatal infusions of falsehood about Belgian babies and women maimed and brutalized by “German barbarians.”

Prof. John W. Burgess, Charles Carleton Coffin (“The Boys of ’61”) and others have shown that precisely the same hysterical lies were circulated throughout England and the world by Englishmen during the American Civil War, the same kind of atrocities being charged against the Union Army.

No paper has been more aggressive in charging the Germans with atrocities than the New York “Times.” In its issue of April 17, 1865, it said:

“Every possible atrocity appertains to this rebellion. There is nothing whatever that its leaders have scrupled at. Wholesale massacres and torturings, wholesale starvation of prisoners, firing of great cities, piracies of the crudest kind, persecution of the most hideous character and of vast extent, and finally assassination in high places—whatever is inhuman, whatever is brutal, whatever is fiendish, these men have resorted to. They will leave behind names so black, and the memory of deeds so infamous, that the execration of the slave-holders’ rebellion will be eternal.”

The late James G. Blaine quoted Lord Malmesbury of date February 5, 1863, as accusing the Union troops guilty of “horrors unparalleled even in the wars of barbarous nations.”

All efforts to counteract the avowed campaign of misrepresentation were denounced as the acts of men in the pay of the Kaiser or irreclaimable pro-Germans determined to lend aid and comfort to the enemy, and subjected any one attempting them to the penalties contained in the Espionage Act. In interpreting the act, as applied to the liberal press, Postmaster General Burleson was quoted as follows:

“There are certain opinions and attitudes which will not be tolerated by the Post Office Department. For instance, such papers have sought to create in the minds of our citizens of German birth or descent the impression that Germany is fighting a defensive war; that the accounts of Belgian atrocities ... are all English or American lies.”

To gainsay such an edict was to risk imprisonment for a term of twenty years.

Bancroft, George—Treaty with Germany—Vancouver Boundary Line.

Bancroft, George—Treaty with Germany—Vancouver Boundary Line.—The very cordial relations which subsisted between the United States and Germany from the days of Frederick the Great were carefully nurtured by the great men succeeding the establishment of the republic, as shown elsewhere by the comments of President Adams on the treaties with Prussia, and were strongly cemented by the aid extended the Union by Germany during the Civil War, as acknowledged by Secretary Seward and prominent members of the United States Senate. One of the most active promoters of this friendship was America’s foremost historian, George Bancroft, Secretary of theNavy under President Polk, and father of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, minister to Great Britain and subsequently to Prussia and Germany (1867-74).

It was through his efforts and friendly personal relations with Bismarck that a memorable agreement came into existence which established the right of immigrant German Americans to renounce their old allegiance and accept an exclusive American citizenship, exempting them from performing military service should they return to their native land. The effect of this agreement was more important than appears, as it was the first time that by a formal act the principle of renunciation of citizenship at the will of the individual was recognized. Beyond this, it led to a complete change of policy on the part of Great Britain by upsetting the old doctrine, “once an Englishman, always an Englishman.” The immediate good result was the renunciation by England of her claim to indefeasible allegiance, and to the right to impress into the British service a former British subject who had become an American citizen, a claim which had contributed to bring about the War of 1812.

Nor was this all that Bancroft accomplished. The Northwestern boundary, having been settled by treaty, Bancroft, while United States Minister in Great Britain, had perceived an incipient effort of a great English interest to encroach on the territory which had been acknowledged by the treaty to be a part of the United States.

By and by the importunities of interested persons in England, who possessed a great party influence, began to make themselves heard, and the British government by degrees supported the attempt to raise a question respecting the true line of the boundary of the Northwest and finally formulated a perverse claim of their own, with a view of obtaining what they wanted as a compromise.

The American administration had of course changed, and the President and his cabinet, having had no part in the negotiations, agreed to refer the question to an arbiter. They made the mistake of consenting that the arbiter, if there was uncertainty as to the true boundary line, might himself establish a boundary of compromise. The person to whom the settlement of the dispute was to be referred was the president of the Swiss Republic.

The American Secretary of State chanced to die while the method of arrangement was still inchoate. Bancroft at once wrote to the new Secretary, urging him not to accept a proposal of compromise, because that would seem to admit an uncertainty as to the American title, and to sanction and even invite a decision of the arbiter in favor of a compromise, and would open the way for England, under an appearance of concession, to obtain all that she needed.

Being at the time minister to the court of Prussia, he advised the government to insist on the American claim in full, not to listen to aproposal of compromise, but to let each party formulate its claim, and to call on the arbiter to decide which was right, and urged it to select for that arbiter the Emperor of Germany.

The Department of State at once consented that the arbiter should be the Emperor of Germany, and left the whole matter of carrying out the American argument to Bancroft. The conduct of the question, the first presentation of the case, as well as the reply to the British, were every word by him, and the decision of the Emperor was unreservedly in favor of the United States. (Prof. William M. Sloane, in “The Century,” for January, 1887.)

Bancroft has been pronounced one of the greatest historians of the past century; he was one of the most distinguished statesmen of his time, and as former minister to London and a student at Göttingen and minister to Germany, he was qualified as no other famous American to form an appraisal of German, French and English policies, especially in regard to ourselves. We may be pardoned, therefore, in taking more than a cursory interest in some expressions which occur in a letter of Bancroft’s, addressed to Hamilton Fish, then Secretary of State, and written at Berlin during the Franco-Prussian war.

In summing up his reasons for preferring Germany over England and France, he says: “If we need the solid, trusty good will of any government in Europe, we can have it best with Germany; because German institutions and ours most resemble each other; and because so many millions of Germans have become our countrymen. This war will leave Germany the most powerful State in Europe, and the most free; its friendship is therefore most important to us, and has its foundation in history and in nature.” (“Life and Letters of George Bancroft,” by M. A. De Wolfe Howe, II, 245.)

Baralong.

Baralong.—An English pirate ship commanded by Capt. William McBride, which sailed under the American flag, with masked batteries, and sank a German submarine which had been deceived by the Stars and Stripes and the American colors painted on both sides of her hull. On August 19, 1915, the “Nicosian,” an English ship loaded with American horses and mules and with a number of American mule tenders aboard, was halted by a German submarine about 70 miles off Queenstown. The men took to the boats and the U-boat was about to sink the “Nicosian” when a ship flying the American flag came alongside. Without suspecting anything, the submarine allowed the ship to approach, when suddenly the American flag was lowered and the English ensign hoisted, and a destructive fire was opened on the U.The latter soon sank. Half a dozen German sailors swam alongside of the “Nicosian” and clambered on deck, concealing themselves in the holds and engine rooms as the English followed them aboard. They were dragged out and murdered in cold blood. The German captain swamtoward the “Baralong” and held up his hand in token of surrender but while in the water was first shot in the mouth and then repeatedly hit by bullets aimed at him by the English, and killed without compunction. The story of the “Baralong” is one of the most brutal in the history of the seas and illuminates the inhuman character of English warfare toward a weaker foe in the most glaring light.The history of the tragedy first came to light through a letter written by Dr. Charles B. Banks, the veterinary surgeon aboard the “Nicosian,” to relatives in Lowell, Mass., giving some of the gruesome details as follows: “A number of German sailors were swimming in the water. Some swam to our abandoned ship and climbed up to the deck. Shots from the patrol boat (the ‘Baralong’) swept several from the ropes. We were taken aboard the patrol boat, and then the boat steamed slowly around our ship while the marines shot and killed all the Germans in the water. As we had left three carbines and cartridges aboard the ‘Nicosian,’ we had reason to believe the Germans had found them. So marines went on our ship and killed seven men there. We were then towed to port.” The infamous wretch who performed this murder, Capt. McBride, later wrote a letter to the captain of the “Nicosian,” warning him not to speak of the affair, and requesting that the Americans aboard especially be cautioned to keep the matter from the public. But one of the American mule tenders made an affidavit to the truth at Liverpool and forwarded it to the American Embassy in London and three others made affidavit to the same facts on their return to New Orleans. The affidavits were sent to the State Department, but neither President Wilson nor Secretary Lansing complied with the request of the German Ambassador to demand an inquiry into the misuse of the American flag, and the cold-blooded murder of German sailors. Dr. Bank’s letter was published in the N. Y. “Times” of September 7, 1915, but that paper was among the most active in preventing an investigation.

Berliner, Emile.

Berliner, Emile.—One of the most important inventors in the United States, distinguished for his improvements of the telephone; born at Hanover, Germany, May 20, 1851; came to the United States in 1870. Invented the microphone and was first to use an induction coil in connection with the telephone transmitters; patentee of other valuable inventions in telephony. Invented the Gramophone, known also as the Victor Talking Machine, for which he was awarded John Scott Medal and Elliott Crosson Gold Medal by Franklin Inst. First to make and use in aeronautical experiments light weight revolving cylinder internal combustion motor, now extensively used on aeroplanes.

The Boers—England’s Record of Infamy.

The Boers—England’s Record of Infamy.—The success in causing the surrender of the Boers by exterminating their women and childrenby slow starvation and disease is the incentive which prompted the British nation to violate international law by stopping the shipment of non-contraband goods, Red Cross supplies and milk for babies, to Germany and contiguous countries. The number of deaths (in the Boer concentration camps) during the month of September, 1901, was 1,964 children and 328 women. There were then 54,326 children and 38,022 women under Kitchener’s tender care. The “Daily News” on November 9, 1901, said: “The truth is that the death rate in the camps is incomparably worse than anything Africa or Asia can show. There is nothing to match it even in the mortality figures of the Indian famines, where cholera and other epidemics have to be contended with.” “Reynold’s Newspaper” (London) of October 20, 1901, spoke of “the women and children perishing like flies from confinement, fever, bad food, pestilential stinks and lack of nursing in these awful death traps,” with a rate of 383 per 1,000. The “Sydney Bulletin” said: “The authority granted by Lord Roberts to Red Cross nurses to attend our camps has been withdrawn.” The English wanted the women and children to perish for want of Red Cross supplies, as in the case of Germany. President Steyn of the Orange Free State, in a letter of protest to Lord Kitchener, dated August, 1901, among other things said:

Your Excellency’s troops have not hesitated to turn their artillery on these defenseless women and children to capture them when they were fleeing with their wagons or alone, whilst your troops knew that they were only women and children, as happened only recently at Graspan on the 6th of June near Reitz, where a women and children laager was taken and recaptured by us, whilst your Excellency’s troops took refuge behind the women; and when reinforcements came they fired with artillery and small arms on that woman laager. I can mention hundreds of cases of this kind.

On December 16, 1913, the Boers, in the presence of immense throngs, dedicated a monument at Blomfontein with the following inscription:

This Monument is Erected by the Boers of South Africa in memory of
26,663 WOMEN AND CHILDREN
who died in the Concentration Camps during the War 1900-1902

No better evidence can be desired than is contained in a speech which the present British Premier, Lloyd George, made in 1901, charging that the English army had burned villages, swept away the cattle, burned thousands of tons of grain, destroyed all agricultural implements, all of the mills, the irrigation works, and left the territory a blackened, devastated wilderness. Then the women and childrenwere herded, in winter, in thin, leaky tents, surrounded by barbed wire fences, where thousands died of unnecessary privations. He said:

Is there any ground for the reproach flung at us by the civilized world that, having failed to crush the men, we have now taken to killing babies?

“Illegal, Ineffective and Indefensible Blockades.”

“Illegal, Ineffective and Indefensible Blockades.”—The World War has evolved principles of warfare, upset practices and sanctioned acts that place war in a new aspect, present it as a new physical problem, like the discovery of a new planet. So many laboriously achieved understandings, agreements and principles of international law were swept overboard that the world must begin its efforts all over, if humanity is to regain the rights which it had slowly wrested from reluctant power during four or five centuries.

The outstanding fact is the recognition of the right of a belligerent power to compel another to surrender by the starvation of its civil population.

If this object were obtainable by direct blockade of the nation to be starved there would be some latitude for discussion; but when attainable only by so controlling the food supply of neutral nations as to leave them no alternative but to starve themselves or to help starve the power to be coerced, a new problem is created which will recur to vex those who sanctioned it.

During the Civil War we sent food to the starving mill operatives of England who were exposed to famine by the war, although English-built and equipped privateers were destroying our commerce, and England was actively supporting our enemies in other ways. Germany sent us food, chemicals, goods, shoes and necessary supplies in one of the most needful stages of the war, for non-contraband supplies were recognized as immune from seizure or destruction.

A blockade is illegal unless it is effective in blockading the point named. The blockading of a whole nation and the rejection of the immunity character of non-contraband supplies intended for the civil population, down to the furnishings of the Red Cross, is an English expedient and a product of the late war, though the same policy was tentatively tried in England’s war against the Boer republics.

We held that such blockade was illegal, for in the note of October 21, 1915, our State Department said: “There is no better settled principle of law of nations than that which forbids the blockade of neutral points in time of war,” and we reminded the British government that Sir Edward Grey said to the British delegates to the “Conference assembled at London upon the invitation of the British government,” that:

A blockade must be confined to the ports and coasts of the enemy, but it may be instituted at one port or at several ports orat the whole of the seaboard of the enemy. It may be instituted to prevent the ingress only or egress only, or both.

And because England had violated these and numerous other principles, agreements, covenants and pledges we said to her:

“It has been conclusively shown that the methods sought to be employed by Great Britain to obtain and use evidence of enemy destination of cargoes bound for neutral ports and impose a contraband character upon such cargoes are without justification; that the blockade upon which such methods are partly founded is ineffective, illegal and indefensible.... The United States, therefore, cannot submit to the curtailment of its neutral rights by these measures, which are admittedly retaliatory, and therefore illegal in conception and in nature, and intended to punish the enemies of Great Britain for alleged illegalities on their part.”

But the State Department surrendered to the contentions of England.We submitted to countless outrages (see extract from Senator Chamberlain’s speech under “[England Threatens United States]”); we made it unpleasant for native Americans who determined to send non-contraband goods across the seas; approved England’s assumption of dictatorial control of the commerce of Holland and Scandinavia and held that Germany was equally our enemy as England’s on the ground that in using her submarines to sink merchant vessels feeding England she had violated our rights to the free use of the seas.

In thus abandoning cardinal principles which made us a great nation and recognizing as effective, legal and justified, England’s blockade of neutral nations, her right to confiscate non-contraband goods, to search and deprive Red Cross surgeons of their instruments, rifle our mail, remove American citizens from neutral vessels and incarcerate them, prevent Red Cross supplies from reaching the civil population and to do all the things we said she should not do, we have surrendered to Great Britain rights, powers and privileges that can hardly be justified unless we are about to dissolve our political institutions and merge ourselves with England as one people—two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.

The point is that future wars will not be decided by the usual engines of war, but by the starvation of the civil population; this invests the nation having the largest fleet with a terrible weapon of annihilation; it makes England the arbiter of nations—it compels us to compact our own terrible power of destruction, for in making food the sine qua non of victory, fate has given us a factor of far-reaching importance. And how will a nation menaced with extinction by famine retaliate? Will the inevitable consequence be that the nation so threatened will meet starvation with the subtle poison germs of a malignant plague?

Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

Brest-Litovsk Treaty.—It is an approved trick of political strategy to raise a hue and cry over one matter in order to divert attention from another, and by this token to accuse one’s enemies of treachery, baseness and all the sins in the calendar with a professed feeling of righteous indignation. Thus the Brest-Litovsk treaty between Germany and Russia, when the former was in a position to impose her terms as conqueror upon its beaten foe, was made to appear as an act of unexampled oppression. In the light of the terms ultimately imposed upon Germany by the Paris Peace Treaty, it is interesting to examine the cardinal features of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Under its terms as revised by the three supplementary agreements signed in Berlin in August, 1918, several weighty concessions were made to Russia which insured her routes of trade and free ports in the Baltic provinces which were given their independence in accordance with century-long aspirations and revolutionary movements. Germany dropped her Caucasus claims and demanded that Russia should recognize the independence of Georgia, Finland, Ukrania, Poland, Esthonia and Livonia. Russia, desiring to assure herself of the rich territory with the naptha fields of Baku, Germany supported the wish on condition that Russia pledge herself to place a portion of the oil production at the disposal of Germany and its allies. The total indemnity levied was 6,000,000,000 marks ($1,500,000,000) which Russia undertakes to pay, all sums lost by Germans up to July 1, 1917, through revolutionary confiscatory legislation being included. Independent courts were provided for the adjudication of claims and one-sixth of the indemnity was shifted to Finland and the Ukraine jointly. This was reputed to be the oppressor’s toll unheard of in history—no milch cows, no horses, no surrender of the instruments of industry, no seizure of strictly Russian territory, independence for all states that had been struggling for independence through long centuries, no occupied zones.

“Bombing Maternity Hospitals.”

“Bombing Maternity Hospitals.”—Nominally a favorite occupation of the enemy throughout the war. The following was written by the late Richard Harding Davis in the Metropolitan Magazine for November, 1915: “So highly trained now are the aviators, so highly perfected the aeroplane that each morning in squadrons they take flight, to meet hostile aircraft, to destroy a munition factory, or, if they are Germans, a maternity hospital. At sunset, like homing pigeons, in safety they return to roost.”

Creel and the “Sisson Documents.”

Creel and the “Sisson Documents.”—George Creel, a Denver politician, was appointed head of the Committee of Public Information pending the war, and was practically in control of the American press and the propaganda work. Exercising almost unlimited authority and directing general publicity at home and in Europe, includingthe presentation of war films, many of the oppressive measures against the liberal press are justly charged to his account, at the same time that numerous measures inaugurated under his direction attracted widespread notoriety. Among others, the bureau issued to the American press the notorious “Sisson documents.” They consisted of a series of documents to prove that Lenine and Trotzky, heads of the Russian Soviet government, had taken German money and were, first and last, German agents. The New York “Evening Post” was quick to discern the forgery—they are said to have been written in London, translated into Russian in New York by two Russians and sent to Russia, where they were “discovered.” For pointing out the internal evidence of their incredibility contained in the papers Mr. Creel charged the paper with being guilty “of the most extraordinary disservice” to the government of the United States and the nation’s cause; claiming that it had impugned the good faith of the government and exposed itself to “the charge of having given aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States in an hour of national crisis.” The ultimate end was that the famous Sisson documents were proved to be clumsy forgeries and Mr. Creel subsequently claimed for them no more than that they made a good story.

The Creel bureau cost the government about $6,000,000, and its affairs were found to be in hopeless confusion, according to official reports made to Congress, Creel being charged with gross negligence in handling the government’s funds. In June, 1919, frauds in the handling of war films, involving huge sums of money and “the complicity of high officials” were charged in Congress. Mr. Creel’s connection with the Sisson documents places him in no flattering light. In reply to a letter of protest against the publicity of the Sisson documents and the use made of them, he wrote: “Of course, you are entitled to your opinion, but I warn you it seems to border on sedition.” While this bureau flagrantly compromised the reputation of the government and the American people by a piece of wicked fiction, to deny the authenticity of the Sisson documents was sedition.

Cromberger, Johann.

Cromberger, Johann.—A German printer who as early as 1538 established a printing office in the City of Mexico.

Custer, General George A.

Custer, General George A.—Famous American cavalry leader in the Civil War, and the hero of the battle of the Little Big Horn, Dakota, in which he and his command were destroyed by the Sioux Indians, June 25, 1876. Of German descent. Frederick Whittaker in “A Complete Life of General George Custer” (Sheldon & Co., New York, 1876) says: “George Armstrong Custer was born in New Rumley, Ohio, December 5, 1839. Emanuel H. Custer, father of the General, was born in Cryssoptown, Alleghany County, Md., December 10, 1806.The name of Custer was originally Kuster, and the grandfather of Emanuel Custer came from Germany, but Emanuel’s father was born in America. The grandfather was one of those same Hessian officers over whom the Colonists wasted so many curses in the Revolutionary war, and were yet so innocent of harm and such patient, faithful soldiers. After Burgoyne’s surrender in 1778, many of the paroled Hessians seized the opportunity to settle in the country they came to conquer, and amongst these the grandfather of Emanuel Custer, captivated by the bright eyes of a frontier damsel, captivated her in turn with his flaxen hair and sturdy Saxon figure, and settled down in Pennsylvania, afterward moving to Maryland. It is something romantic and pleasing, after all, that stubborn George Guelph, in striving to conquer the colonies, should have given them the ancestor of George Custer, who was to become one of their greatest glories.”

Cavell, Edith.

Cavell, Edith.—An English nurse shot by the Germans as a spy at Brussels in October, 1915, an episode of the war which supplied the English propagandists in the United States with one of the principal articles in their bill of charges of German atrocities. Colonel E. R. West, chief of the legislative section of the Judge Advocate General’s Department, before the American Bar Association’s Committee on Military Justice, declared that the execution was entirely legal. S. S. Gregory, chairman of the committee, and Judge William P. Bynum, of Greensboro, N. C., before the Bar Association, (Baltimore, August 27, 1919), rendered a minority report of the same import. Col. West said:

“We have heard much of the case of ‘poor Edith Cavell.’ Yet I have become rather firmly convinced that she was subject to her fate by the usual laws of war. Certainly the French have executed women spies.”

Col. West agreed with the Chairman that it would be only consistent with the Anglo-Saxon attitude on the Cavell case to exempt women from the death penalty, but he added:

“I believe that a woman spy deserves the same fate as a man spy. Otherwise we would open the gates wide to the most resourceful class of spies that is known.”

In his report Mr. Gregory said: “A careful consideration of the case of Miss Edith Cavell, one of the most pathetic and appealing victims of the great war, whose unfortunate fate has aroused the sympathy and excited the indignation of two continents, has led me to the conclusion that she was executed in accordance with the laws and usages of what we are commonly pleased to refer to as civilized warfare. This being so, it has seemed to me quite inconsistent with our condemnation of those who thus took her life to retain in our own system of military justice those provisions oflaw which were relied upon by the German military authorities in ordering her execution. For us to take any other course, it seems to me, is to impeach our sincerity and good faith in criticising the German authorities in this regard, and to warrant the suggestion that such criticism is inspired rather by the fact that they, our enemies, were responsible for it, as well as sympathy for a good and worthy woman, than any well-considered judgment in the case.” The three majority members declared that “they could not concur in the suggestion of Mr. Gregory that there should be a provision prohibiting the death penalty in the case of women spies.”

It was proved that Miss Cavell was an English professional nurse employed only by people well able to pay for her services. She imposed upon the German officials for a long time in the character of a devout Christian who was taking a disinterested share in the relief work for the good of humanity until it was discovered that she was the head of a widespread organization which assisted hundreds of English and Belgians to escape from the country and enter the armies of Germany’s enemies. Her activities are described in the New York “Times” of May 11, 1919, by her friend and co-agent, Louise Thuliez, who was condemned with Miss Cavell but pardoned. In court she admitted all charges and contemptuously shrugged her shoulders when the presiding judge asked her if she wished to make any statement that might influence the verdict. She was confined in prison about ten weeks before her execution. Her case gave rise to much comment in the press, endeavoring to show that it was a case of exceptional harshness. The Paris “Galois” admitted the shooting of 80 women spies by the French. The Germans presented proof that two German women, Margaret Schmidt and Otillie Moss, had been shot by the French in March, 1915, on similar charges, and this was admitted later by the French authorities. Miss Schmidt was executed at Nancy and Miss Moss at Bourges. (Associated Press dispatch from Luneville dated March 25.) Julia Van Wauterghem, wife of Eugene Hontang, was executed at Louvain, August 18, 1914, for treason. Felice Pfaat was executed at Marseilles, August 22, 1916, for espionage. Later the beautiful Mata Hari was executed by the French.

Miss Cavell’s case is very similar to that of Mrs. Mary Surratt, the American woman, found guilty in 1865, by a military commission consisting of Generals Hunter, Elkin, Kautz, Foster, Horn, Lew Wallace, Harris, Col. Clendenin, Col. Tompkins, Col. Burnett, Gen. Holt and Judge-Advocate Bingham, of receiving, harboring, concealing and assisting rebels; she was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead, which sentence was approved by President Johnson.

Concord Society, The.

Concord Society, The.—Born during the latter part of the war of a desire on the part of a few Americans of German origin deeplyimpressed by the events of the times to have an organization that would stand for the promotion of good fellowship and friendship between them and their kin as individuals, and to encourage the study of the share of their race in the founding and development of the United States. The society takes no part in politics or affairs of state or church. Its sole aim is the fostering of good relations between all citizens of the German race for social and educational purposes. The active membership will be limited to 500.

The name is derived from the good ship “Concord,” which brought the settlers of Germantown to these shores in 1683. This historic event will be commemorated by an annual banquet of members of the society in one of the larger cities. All activities on the part of the society have been deferred until the state of war is finally ended. Address Frederick F. Schrader, Secretary, 63 East 59th Street, New York, N. Y. (See “[Germantown Settlement].”)

Christiansen, Hendrick.

Christiansen, Hendrick.—Soon after Hendrick Hudson discovered the noble river which bears his name, a German, Hendrick Christiansen of Kleve, became the true explorer of that stream, undertaking eleven expeditions to its shores. He also built the first houses on Manhattan Island in 1613 and laid the foundations of the trading stations New Amsterdam and Fort Nassau. “New Netherland was first explored by the honorable Hendrick Christiansen of Kleve.... Hudson, the famous navigator, ‘was also there.’” (“Our Hyphenated Citizens,” by Rudolf Cronau.)

DeKalb.

DeKalb.—Major General Johann von Kalb, who gave his life for American independence in the Revolutionary War, was a native of Bavaria. Fatally wounded in the battle of Camden, he died August 19, 1780. A monument to his memory was erected in front of the military academy at Annapolis, which states that he gave a last noble demonstration of his devotion for the sake of liberty and the American cause, after having served most honorably for three years in the American army, by leading his soldiers and inspiring them by his example to deeds of highest bravery. Kalb was one of a number of efficient German-born officers who came over with the French to serve with the French troops under Lafayette.

Declaration of Independence.

Declaration of Independence.—The first paper to print the Declaration of Independence in the United States was a German newspaper, the “Pennsylvania Staatsboten” of July 5, 1776. It is also claimed that the first newspaper in Pennsylvania was printed in the German language. Benjamin Franklin at one time complained that of the eight newspapers then existing in Pennsylvania two were German,two were half German and half English, and only two were printed in English.

Dorsheimer, Hon. William.

Dorsheimer, Hon. William.—Lieutenant Governor of the State of New York; born at Lyons, Wayne County, 1832. His father was Philip Dorsheimer, a native of Germany, who emigrated from Germany and settled at Buffalo; he was one of the founders of the Republican party and in 1860 was elected Treasurer of the State.

Dutch and German.

Dutch and German.—In the history of early American colonization the terms Dutch and German are often confounded, as the English had little first-hand acquaintance with the people of the continent save Dutch, French and Spanish. Hence many have inferred that the Pennsylvania Germans were somehow misnamed for Pennsylvania Dutch, because the latter designation is the more frequently employed in describing the most important element of the population concerned in the settlement of Penn’s Commonwealth. Many of the first settlers of New Amsterdam were Germans and almost as many Germans as Swedes were concerned in the earliest European settlement of Delaware.Peter Minnewit, the first regular governor of New Amsterdam, was German-born, and it was he who, having entered the Swedish service, in 1637, with a ship of war and a smaller vessel, led a colony of Swedes with their chaplain, to the Delaware River region, between Cape Henlopen and Christian Creek. They bought land of the Indians and called it “New Sweden.” A second company of immigrants from Sweden came over in 1642, under Colonel John Printz, likewise a native of Germany. Among these first settlers of Delaware a considerable number were Germans. The latter however, are more often confounded with their nearest of kin, the Hollanders. “At that time,” says Anton Eickhoff (“In der Neuen Heimath”) “the distinction between Hollanders and Germans was not as pronounced as nowadays. The loose political union which had never been very close, between Holland and the German Empire, was formally severed by the Peace of Westphalia. But though politically it was no longer a German State, Holland continued to be regarded as such in public mind. The common language of the Hollanders and the Low Germans was Plattdeutsch.” Dr. William Elliot Griffis (“The Romance of American Colonization”) refers to the confounding of Germans with Dutch. “The Isthmus of this peninsula was called ‘Dutch Gap,’ after the glass makers who set up their furnace here in 1608,” he writes. “Most Englishmen then made and uneducated people now make, no distinction between the Dutch and the Germans, who are politically different people.”

Dual Citizenship.

Dual Citizenship.—It was frequently alleged before and during our entrance into the war that a native German might under the lawsof Germany become a citizen of another country without thereby being released from his obligations to his native country, and the attempt was made to make it appear that naturalized Germans could still be regarded as citizens of Germany, or as possessing dual citizenship.

It is true that the German law (Reichs-und-Staatsangehorigkeits-Gesetz) of July, 1913, says: “Citizenship is not lost by one who, before acquiring foreign citizenship, has secured on application the written consent of the competent authorities of his home State to retain his citizenship. Before this consent is given the German Consul is to be heard.” But this section is under no circumstances applicable to the United States, because in Section 36 the law says: “This law does not apply as far as treaties with foreign countries say otherwise.” Now the treaty of the United States with the Northern German Confederacy which was concluded 1868 (the Bancroft treaty) provides that Germans naturalized in the United States shall be treated by Germany as American citizens. This provision applies now to the natives of all the German States, and was so interpreted by the State Department.

Earling, Albert J.

Earling, Albert J.—President of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway Company and one of the recognized authorities on modern railway economics. Son of German immigrants.