AMERICA
IN THE WAR

AMERICA
IN THE WAR

BY

LOUIS RAEMAEKERS

EACH CARTOON FACED WITH A PAGE
OF COMMENT BY A DISTINGUISHED
AMERICAN, THE TEXT FORMING AN
ANTHOLOGY OF PATRIOTIC OPINION

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1918

Copyright, 1918, by
The Century Co.

Published, October, 1918

List of Cartoons

AMERICA
IN THE WAR

The Stars and Stripes in the
Service of Humanity

“WE have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been as secure as the faith and the freedom of the nation can make them.”

From President Wilson’s Message to Congress, April 2, 1917.

“When I was a Child, It was
You who Saved Me”

WHETHER it is that an invigorating climate has given our Anglo-Saxon blood a piquant Gallic flavor or because Europe sent us for ancestors only those light-hearted and adventurous souls with a spirit akin to that we admire in the French people, true it is that Americans have always had an especial liking for France and the French. They were our first allies as they are the latest. From Lafayette and Rochambeau to Joffre and Viviani, a host of Frenchmen have won the affectionate regard of Americans and are numbered with our national heroes.

But our relation to the French has a deeper foundation than admiration for a courageous and accomplished race which for centuries has made generous contribution to the sum of the world’s knowledge and achievement. The French were early settlers on this continent; LaSalle and Champlain were the forerunners of a host of French explorers and settlers whose descendants are today taking active and honorable part in the life of community and nation.

Before the war one of the foremost French statesmen said to me, with a certain note of sadness, that in the course of two thousand years of advancing civilization his countrymen had lost something of their initiative: that he believed it would not now, for instance, be possible to build up in France vast industrial organizations like those which are so effectual in establishing the commercial prestige of the United States.

If that were true before the war, it can scarcely be credited now. France has never failed to provide effective military organization for the protection of western civilization against the repeated attacks of her enemies from the east. She defeated the forces of Mohammedanism and saved Christianity. Time and again through the Middle Ages she beat back the invading Huns and kept them from overrunning Europe. The victory at the Marne which definitely stopped their latest irruption is only the latest and greatest of many such victories by which France has laid mankind under lasting obligation. And the industrial organization which supplies the armies of France with the products of farm and factory, and even produces a surplus for her allies, including the United States, is additional proof that the genius of the French race is neither decadent nor limited, but as broad as all human activity and as ardent today as when Joan of Arc inspired kings and peasants alike with her mystic fervor.

With their French allies Americans can work in most cordial understanding and sympathy. That subtle spirit of unselfish dedication to country which has won for the French the admiration of the world consecrates the alliance of the peoples who are giving their sons in common sacrifice to save liberty to the world. Out of the heat and turmoil of war bonds are being forged between the Allied nations which time and circumstance can never sever. On that alliance the hope of civilization depends; from it may come, in God’s good time, some great forward step in the march of progress which began at a manger in Bethlehem.

MYRON T. HERRICK.

Cleveland, Ohio,
March, 1918.

The Hun: “Keep Neutral”

EVERY great event is an occasion for the moral education of the world. Froude, in his essay “On the Science of History,” says that the value of history is that it sounds across the centuries the eternal note of right and wrong. Along with the unbelievable calamities that have come in the train of the war that in August, 1914, was shamelessly, dishonorably and with malice aforethought precipitated by the Kaiser and his fellow highwaymen, there stands out one colossal good: it has made the world increasingly ethical. The flaunting by the German military party of all that we associate with fair play, chivalry, democracy, humanity, even Christianity itself, has aroused the Allied peoples to the fact that the foundation principles of happiness are at stake.

’Tis for the holiness of life

The Spirit calls us to the Cross.

The brutality of the Teutons—Austrians and Germans alike—their willingness, in order to win, to throw away everything we think admirable in conduct, created a reaction in America by arousing us from our laissez-faire attitude to the conviction that there can be no neutrality between right and wrong. The opportunity should not be lost to enforce this lesson upon the young, who should be taught to hate the devilish spirit by which the Teutons are obsessed. In due time, when their defeat is accomplished, a reaction will set in among themselves. The cost is appalling, but I believe that nations, like men, can

“rise on stepping-stones

Of their dead selves to higher things.”

Meantime, with what pride we realize that—as eventually even German historians will admit—our own part in the war is on a higher plane of disinterestedness than we have ever reached before, a level of altruism that has rarely, if ever, been attained by any other nation!

ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON.

February 22, 1918.

Peace Plots Revealed in America and France

MR. RATHOM, Editor of the “Providence Journal,” whose exposure of von Bernstorff’s plots seemed to show a gift of necromancy, states that his information came to him through men and women (often Bohemians and Slavs) “who not only took grave risks in the work—for they were braving German vengeance—but gave up their time and in many cases their own funds, without a dollar of compensation from the ‘Journal’ or anyone else, in order to give us the facts which would prove to the American people the manner in which they were being tricked and fooled.”

If this cartoon of Mr. Raemaekers shall serve to make the native American take seriously a situation which is serious in the extreme, it will not have been made in vain. Whenever an American hears or overhears any one in any station of life uttering treasonous language, he should report the matter and give the name of the culprit immediately to the Secret Service,—not content himself with repeating the words at the club as a good story.

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN.

Belgium, 1918

YOU, who on the tree of shame show forth again the Sacrifice of Calvary: you for whom scourge and thongs and the mockery of dull beasts are the circumstance of martyrdom: you who freely offered yourself that man might be saved, “yet so as by fire”:—Belgium! in the depth of your agony and the long torment of a red martyrdom, remember that the Cross of your own Passion endures only until the Resurrection that comes after the third day.

God, in mercy Incarnate, as Man suffered the shameful death of the Cross that the world might be saved from the penalty of its sins. The Tree of Scorn is raised up on Calvary, becoming the instrument of shame and of death, yet “the leaves of that Tree shall be for the healing of the Nations.”

Nails and spear, scourge and thongs, crumble and fall away; the obscene mockers “that watched Him there,” and watch you, O Belgium, go hence to that place prepared for them by Eternal Justice, but with the sun of Easter morning, behold a great wonder! The Cross, that was a dead engine of death, is transformed by Divine miracle. It lives, it throws out branches and leaves; it is now the Tree of Mercy, “and the leaves of that Tree shall be for the healing of the Nations.”

RALPH ADAMS CRAM.

“We will not Wear Convicts’
Stripes, Wear Them Yourselves”

[Mr. Raemaekers refers in this cartoon to the insulting proposal of the German Government, just before the entrance of the United States into the war, that American ships at the rate of one a week would be permitted to pass the submarine “blockade” if they were painted in stripes in a specified manner.]

WHEN Attila laid Rheims in ashes, cut the throats of his hostages, tortured his prisoners, and thus earned fame as the Scourge of God, he found priests and professors to justify his acts and to predict the speedy Hunnification of the world. Attila is to-day popular in Prussia—mothers have their babes called Etzel and when William II sends forth his armies he bids them be worthy of their illustrious namesake.

Attila was the first of the great Junkers. His army was largely German and he held court in the centre of Thuringia. He is the hero of Germanic song and legend; and his spirit animates the Hymn of Hate, the murder of Edith Cavell, the sinking of the Lusitania and above all the hired criminals who have been operating in America in the disguise of patriotic citizens.

POULTNEY BIGELOW.

Malden-on-Hudson.
Washington’s Birthday, 1918.

The Final Argument

IN the now happily distant days of August, 1914, the people of the United States found themselves facing an opaque wall of neutrality. But we are an emotional people; and the rape of Belgium had hit us emotionally. Though we were asked not to applaud the pictures of Allied soldiers that flashed across the screen in every motion-picture theatre of the country, we did clap our hands; and, what is more, we valiantly hissed the Kaiser when he strutted before our view. Let the American people ever rejoice that in those first tragic days they had eyes of the heart. Oh, those months of shame for us who felt that the cause of England and France and Belgium was the cause of the United States of America! They have passed now, thank God; and the man of vision who first brought home to us what Belgium’s sorrow meant, was Louis Raemaekers. Each line he drew was a full platoon of soldiers advancing toward Berlin. His vivid, ironic pencil was a gun thrust at Prussian autocracy. His art opened the door in that opaque wall I have spoken of; and it was a garden that we looked upon—though a garden filled only with red flowers: the poppies of everlasting sleep; crimson blooms that spoke of the blood so nobly shed in the name of national honor; fiery blossoms that burst upon our gaze through the smoke of German guns; dark passion-flowers that breathed pain, but never despair. The sad garden of Belgium—this it was that one man of genius revealed to us, in all its pity and sorrow. And America looked, and wept, and sent messengers into that place of desolation. For never for an instant had we been neutral, never had we really dreamed of standing by and letting this agony go on. Had we done so, the years to be would have held only grief for us. We could not have lifted up our heads in the world of nations if we had not seized our splendid opportunity.

Who has ever doubted the integrity of the American people? As one man we rose when war was at last declared, and as one man we will fight, in the name of Democracy, in the name of Humanity, until the Prussian yoke is lifted from the Belgium we love and reverence. A task lies before us of unbelievable magnitude. But we shall not falter, we shall not fail; for if we fail, life itself must crumble in ashes on the hearthstone of the world. With a triumphant Kaiser, existence would be unbearable. The pacifists lay all the emphasis on mere living. They forget that most of us do not wish to live on a Prussian-ruled earth. Surely it is not much to die for a principle that is higher than the stars.

Louis Raemaekers, you have opened a door on life. You have brought news to thousands who had not heard and seen. And great is your reward.

CHARLES HANSON TOWNE.

The End of the Hindenburg
Line

THE Hindenburg line is a menace to every courthouse in America. In my recent journeys through the West I have never seen a courthouse tower printed against the sky without relating it to the great world conflict. We are fighting for all that is embodied and expressed and safeguarded in these citadels of democracy. A little while ago I looked with reverence at a log hut preserved at Decatur, Illinois, the first courthouse of the county. In that little room Abraham Lincoln appeared as attorney for pioneer citizens who understood perfectly the promise of American democracy. The laws invoked to preserve their rights were a crystallization of the thought and the hope of liberty-loving peoples, and no settler in wilderness or prairie, no matter how humble, but felt himself a partner in the benefits of American institutions and the great tradition of English law. Every American courthouse is founded upon Magna Charta. If we are indebted for anything in our democracy to the Teutonic-Turkish combination I am unaware of it. Dull of wit indeed, the Hohenzollern BEAST, to think his mailed fist could ever splinter the door of one of these American courthouses! The price our forefathers paid for their liberty was too great for any yielding to a devil gone mad and attempting to bestride the world. During the Civil War Lincoln once remarked to Seward, speaking of Weems’ “Life of Washington” which he had read before the fireplace in his father’s cabin in Spencer County, Indiana, “It occurred to me that it must have been something pretty fine those men were fighting for.” It was; and it is for that same fine thing that America has again drawn the sword.

MEREDITH NICHOLSON.

“Something’s Wrong. She
Doesn’t Seem to Inspire
Confidence”

IT is Germany’s “Kultur,” her spiritual code, that is responsible for America’s entrance into the war; her gruesome sacrifice to Moloch of all which distinguishes humanity from the brute and the savage. It is her philosophy which has made us her horrified but resolute foe.

The fruits of her spirit stand forth alike in her speech and acts. “Kultur is a spiritual organization of the world, which does not exclude bloody savagery. It raises the daemoniac to sublimity. It is above morality, reason, science,” so wrote a Teutonic expounder in the first year of the war. “We have become a nation of wrath; we think only of the war. We execute God Almighty’s will, and the edicts of His justice we will fulfil, imbued with holy rage, in vengeance upon the ungodly. God calls us to murderous battles, even if worlds should thereby fall to ruins,” so wrote one of Germany’s poets. “Whoever cannot prevail upon himself to approve from the bottom of his heart the sinking of the Lusitania, whoever cannot conquer his sense of the gigantic cruelty to unnumbered perfectly innocent victims—and give himself up to honest delight at this victorious exploit of German defensive power—him we judge to be no true German,” so wrote one of her pastors. And for hideous, ruthless deeds which violate every sanctity and deify falsehood we need but cite her slaughter of children and the aged, her poisoning of wells, her shooting of nurses, her sinking of hospital ships, her brutal deportations and all the revolting sinuosities of her spy system.

It is this catalogue of crimes committed in the name of moral superiority that has incensed the American people. It is to combat “Kultur” which Germany extols as the quintessence of civilization, this gospel which constitutes military might the only inviolable law, that we have pledged our precious sons, our abundant resources, our supreme, indefatigable energies. If Prussian arrogance be not rebuked, Christian civilization fails. Hence the growing and embattled sentiment that a world in ruins yet free for man would be preferable to the sway of Satanic Teuton efficiency.

ROBERT GRANT.

Angels of the War Zone

I HAVE sometimes wondered if it is really possible to hate a country for which one has such unbounded contempt and disgust as one has for Germany. It is quite possible to fear without hate; one would not hate a rattlesnake or a shark, even at close quarters. On the other hand it is conceivable that you might hate a fearsome but still noble beast like the lion, if you were camping on the desert and he sat persistently in front of your tent, alternately licking his chops and shaking your soul with his loud anticipatory roars.

Usually we do fear what we hate. But the Germans have overshot the mark. They have been so dully and unchangeably brutal, that many of us have come to feel for them the same mental condition of loathing we should feel for an obscene, flat-headed giant running amok, while doing our best to hit him in a vulnerable spot. Even if they reached these shores and went automatically about disciplining the natives I feel sure we should continue to despise them and to find them ridiculous.

It is possible that if they had won the war in three months we should feel differently. Then we might have hated them for devastating France, but she it would have been who received our contempt. Her course in history would have been run; she would have been as degenerate as the Germans so fondly hoped. We might have hated Germany for subjugating so vast and potential a country as Russia, but we should have respected her might, the magnificence of her great army. We should have hated her roundly, and the hate would have done us all good, for it would have been a great emotion provoked by a great cause.

But Germany as a fighting machine is a failure. She has been defeated where she has been compelled to depend upon force of arms alone. Her only striking successes have been won by hitting below the belt, cowardly underhand methods, sneaking propaganda, millions expended upon buying human tools, and furnishing them with other millions necessary to work wholesale destruction, and sacrifice the helpless proletariat.

In the Death House at Sing Sing the robust murderers have no sympathy for the poisoner, refuse to admit him to that last tragic companionship. So it is with Germany. She is the poisoner, the Medici, among nations. From strangling her enemy with gas to bombing unfortified towns, torpedoing passenger ships and firing on the life boats, or sinking hospital ships, often carrying her own wounded to ease and plenty, she has merely shown herself the super-snake, supercharged with venom, not the lion, who proudly stands in the open spaces and challenges his enemy to battle. The bewildered expression on the faces of these German clods in the act of being rescued by British women nurses, while a home torpedo burrows in the vitals of the ship, is a fair portent of the minds of the German people after the war when they learn that they have been fooled, and martyred, and crushed, not by the enemy but by their own unregenerate rulers in Berlin. If they annihilate that caste and set up a Republic they may win back the respect of the world. Otherwise not. We sometimes forgive those we hate, but only a miracle forces a man to respect where he has both instinctively and thinkingly despised.

GERTRUDE ATHERTON.

As Thou Sowest, so Shalt Thou
Reap

CREEPING behind a mask—stooping, cringing and cowardly—the planter of sedition sows his seed in the dark. The masks behind which he hides are numerous and of great variety. No sooner is his identity disclosed than he assumes another disguise. Behind “Freedom of Speech,” “Liberty of the Press,” “Conscientious Objector,” and “Pacifism” he hides. He makes his masks similitudes of virtue. Whispered rumors, distortion of truth, appeals to fear, and appeals to prejudice are mixed with even the grosser seeds he sows. When other disguises are torn away he may fashion a mask of spurious patriotism. Most dangerous of all traitors is he who keeps just within the law of trespass while scattering afar his seed of sedition throughout the Land of Liberty.

A. S. BURLESON,

Postmaster-General of the United States.

“Don’t Stop, Old Chap,
Keep It Up!”

“CHEER up, Willie, the worst is yet to come. Don’t view me with alarm and suspicion. Don’t avert your eyes from my smile. It may be sardonic, but I cannot control my facial expression. I must look as I think. I am not like you, Wilhelm, looking God and thinking devil. Oh, but you are a cute one, friend of mine! I love you for a thousand things you have done, but don’t fool yourself, friend of my heart,—I beg pardon, I forgot, I have no heart. In that and some other aspects, Willie, we are as alike as two peas in a pod. Willie, we are so close in our method of working that I am going to give you permission to call me ‘Du’ hereafter.

“How in the world could or can you, for all these years, make the German people believe that the firm name of their Empire is ‘Me and God.’ You and I know that God withdrew His Name, His Goodness, His Honor and His Capital from the firm when you signed up as Emperor. God is a one-price God. God never adulterates His goods; God never advertises one quality and sells another. Since you have been Kaiser, Wilhelm, a multitude of firm names could be exhibited on the sign board; none of them, I imagine would rate high with Bradstreet, but they would be truthful. ‘Me and Ambition,’ ‘Me and Power,’ ‘Me and Ruin’ are a few I would suggest. Of course, your people would have shunned you just as a mother shuns a house with a Board of Health sign on it, had you given the real name of the firm. You are the most worried looking potentate I have ever met, Wilhelm. Yes, Wilhelm, there will be Hell to pay when your people awake to the fact that you have no partnership with God, but are simply a vassal of mine. I’d be scared out of my wits if I were in your place. While you are thinking of the horrible mess you have made of your manifold opportunities be good enough to note a deadly parallel. Once I was a prince, a prince in a vast and beautiful Empire where all was tranquillity, peace, holiness and bliss. I was called Lucifer, Son of the Morning—I had an all-absorbing ambition to rule or ruin. I revolted and seduced some restless spirits to ally themselves with me, fellows like your von Tirpitz. I rebelled against the King and Kingdom of Heaven. The King of Heaven still reigns and the Kingdom of Heaven still retains all its tranquillity and beauty. After the row was over I found myself in Chaos. From there I was rushed to Pandemonium, and it is needless to tell you that I am now in Hell—and it lives up to its name. Note the deadly parallel, Wilhelm, and while you are getting it into your noddle, I will whistle the music of our national Hymn of Hate so you can memorize it. Try it on your piano. The words are—

“‘Strafe Hope. Strafe Manhood. Strafe Womanhood. Strafe Everything

But
ME.’”

JOHN PHILIP SOUSA.

“So We Are Only a Dollar-making
People, are We?”

IT has for many years been a favorite gibe of thousands of foreigners, living for the most part upon inherited wealth, and taking the customary snobbish attitude of the consumer toward the producer, that Americans are “only a dollar-making people,” as Mr. Raemaekers has it in his forceful cartoon. Barring the word “only” perhaps the indictment is true—I hope it is. One of the fondest of my many fond wishes for my fellow-Americans is that they may all become successful dollar-makers, since he who makes his own dollars is able always to maintain his independence, to look his creditors large and small squarely in the eye, and live by grace of his own powers, and not by favor of potentate or patron.

There is nothing disgraceful about a dollar, and it may be said on its behalf that it differs from the Sovereign Incarnate of the Germans in that it is redeemable always at par, being worth the full one-hundred cents that it calls for; in that it rings true; in that whether it be of gold, of silver, or of paper, that which it promises it fulfills, and has never yet been known to dishonor itself. It may occasionally be seen in bad company, but it never falls below the level of its evil associations, and is genuine to the core. Loose thinkers sometimes speak of the “tainted dollar,” but there is no such thing. If any taint lingers near it is not in the dollar itself, but in the holder. So excellent, indeed, and so immune to the effects of evil association is the character of the dollar, intrinsically, that any one of Uncle Sam’s many billions could pass from the pocket of a Burglar into that of a Bishop, and be worthy of its latter estate.

I have yet to meet an American who confounds this true and honest servant of his well-being with his God, but, alas, I have met countless Germans who call it our American King, and themselves bow ignobly down to a Lord and Master whose assumption of a divine relationship has made of his life a prolonged blasphemy; a King whose deeds of savagery are a complete negation of his hypocritical pretensions to the possession of lofty ideals; whose ring is the ring of a brazen counterfeit, and whose word has been so dishonored by himself that it has become the synonym for worthlessness throughout the world.

If Kings or Masters of any sort must be endured who would not rather abase himself before the American Dollar, true and honest to the core, than debase himself by bending the knee to a Kaiser who by his infamies has made an Attila appear to be an Angel of Peace, a Bill Sykes a Gentleman, and the word of an Ananias a Bond of Faith?

JOHN KENDRICK BANGS.

“No, Thanks, I Know These
Princes of Yours Too Well.”

ON November 5, 1916, Poland was “restored” by Germany and Austria-Hungary to her old place as an independent member of the family of nations. High hopes were aroused in the hearts of the Poles. They had suffered for over a hundred years, and in this war of liberation, which was to form the Society of Nations, the Austro-German proclamation was the first recognition of their aspirations. The Entente Powers had committed the serious blunder of refusing to encourage the Poles for fear of offending Czarist Russia. But very soon the Poles realized that the Central Empires were playing them false. The “independence” was for to-morrow and not for to-day, and even for to-morrow it was contingent upon “being good.”

At the beginning of 1917, which was the year of national rebirth, hatred of Russia and resentment against the policy of expediency of France and Great Britain, as well as the necessity to accept the de facto Austro-German occupation, influenced most of the Poles to trust—in defiance of history and experience,—the good faith of Germany and Austria-Hungary. At the beginning of 1918, they had learned the lesson Raemaekers’ pencil eloquently depicts—not to put their trust in German princes. At Brest-Litovsk, “independent” Poland was refused a place in the peace negotiations. Answering President Wilson and Premier Lloyd George, Chancellor von Hertling impudently asserted that the future status of Poland concerned only her conquerors.

The cartoon, drawn to illustrate the scepticism of the Poles, should drive home a truth to the Americans. We must realize that camouflage is not confined to military operations. Its use to deceive armies is not so dangerous as its use to deceive the nations behind armies. From bitter experience the Poles are learning that behind the prince put forward as ruler is hidden German militarism and German imperialism.

This form of political camouflage is as dangerous for the United States as for Poland. Peace proposals may come to us—they will come to us—in plausible and appealing form. They will have the appearance of fairness and justice. What is behind them? What inspires them?

Our mission in this war is sanctified by its goal. To attain that goal we have consented to make sacrifices unprecedented in the history of our nation. From a purely military standpoint, no camouflage can possibly obscure the path to the goal, and the method of reaching the goal. The German armies, as yet unconquered, stand in front of us, defending the loot of German imperialism, won by German militarism. We must dispossess these armies of their loot, and punish them for having looted. But—alas!—diplomacy is at work in 1918 to attempt to save by wile what cannot indefinitely continue to be held by force. Every means of diplomatic camouflage will be used by our enemies. Our inspiration, our determination to pursue the struggle to the bitter end, will be kept alive only if we see, through various forms of camouflage, the spiked helmet hidden behind them. To make peace with Germany wearing the spiked helmet would mean to consecrate the success of her imperialistic policy.

HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS.

Speeding Up

Uncle Sam: “I think I had better speed up and build a ship or two!”

The building of the “Tuckahoe,” April-May, 1918, at Camden.

Toward the Valley of Decision

THEY shall go down to the Valley of Decision, multitudes of young Americans from East and West, from North and South, some slow to have gone into the war but none ever to go out until a Decision shall have been reached.

Into the Valley of Decision,—for a Decision final and irrepealable we are battling. Not a Decision as to the victor in the war, but a Decision that shall give us victory over war, its defenders and glorifiers! For the German Empire which wars made this war shall unmake.

We go down to the Valley of Death for a Decision whether the world shall be ruled by Germany or by civilization, be subject to Prussianism or master of its own fate and freedom.

And America knows the cost, which it refuses to count,—knows its sons must be slain if liberty and justice are to live.

To the God of Justice, America lifts its heart in prayer, beseeching not security for its beloved sons but vowing that the sun shall perish out of the heavens ere we and our Allies surrender our liberty, the freedom of the least of men, to the barbarism of force and the forces of barbarism.

Out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death shall emerge the Decision,—Never again. The war against war has brought freedom to nations, and secured peace to them that seek public right as the law of mankind.

STEPHEN S. WISE, Ph.D., LL.D., Rabbi of the Free
Synagogue, New York.

Wake Up, America!

This was done to Canadians by the Huns

AMERICA wakes! The White Christ has called her;

She has seen the devils abroad in His world;

Evil vaunting himself has appalled her;

To the War-wind of Heaven her flag is unfurled!

America wakes—with his murder and lust

Let the Hun take the path he has carved into hell.

No longer blaspheming the Cross with his trust.

America wakes, the sick world shall be well.

America wakes—God’s last peace-lover,

God’s fighter to death, when her peace is assailed.

Shout, sing, fling out the flags, War is over;

When America battles, right has prevailed!

MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN.

There are Plenty of Lamp-posts!

THERE are creatures that to be hated need but to be seen.

The sight of the serpent awakens all the dead, old body-memories of ancient ages, when that reptile was man’s ever-present, mortal enemy.

The domestic horse, made unafraid by a thousand generations, when he smells his ancient enemy, the bear, will rear and plunge to break and run for his life.

The face features a man’s character, his eyes window his soul. There are faces that instantly beckon all our better nature and bind us in loving thrall. There are other faces that repel us as the snake repels. There are human tongues voiced with the serpent’s hiss. There are persons about whom hangs an odor of the reptile that wakens all the dead old memories of primal hate.

The poet is born the poet. Genius is an inheritance. Human character is a summation of ancestral traits. So the traitor-spy is an atavic embodiment of all that is reptilian in a line of ancestry back to the serpent of Eden.

Though after-acquaintance may camouflage him to our eyes, still the first sight, the first impression of the traitor-character has in it the temper of aversion. One who has in him the heart and taste for atrocious conduct, one who has in him the grass-lurking viper’s soul, wears a warning in his face for the safety of others.

The true caricaturist—and Raemaekers is one—sees and accentuates what God has placed in the face of the scoundrel, the traitor, the spy, for our protection.

Great occasions are great opportunities for great genius. War exacts the supreme from all men and all women. Only the superlative poet can give the inevitable expression to master deeds on the stage of war, and only the supreme artist can picture them with the due and true inevitable expression, which is more aptly and more truly given in caricature than in any other form, because in caricature that and only that which is supremely characteristic is portrayed. Of all the artists of this world war, none has, better than Raemaekers, given in clean and lucid unit view, the true character of what he has pictured.

HUDSON MAXIM.

“We Don’t Seem to Inspire
Enough Confidence”

THE one memorable contribution to art produced by the great war is to be found in the cartoons of Louis Raemaekers. It is not necessary here to analyze the qualities of his fine and powerful drawings as art. They must be apparent to everyone who looks at them with considerate eyes. But Raemaekers’ cartoons also have a high literary and historic quality. I do not mean by this that they tell or suggest stories, which are used generally as an attraction for very commonplace pictures, but that they have that quality of enduring literature which awakens the deepest feelings and points to the loftiest ideals which are as enduring as the history of the race in its striving to reach the heights of achievement. Hogarth was one of the few men in the history of art who possessed these qualities, but great as Hogarth was, Raemaekers has always been upon a higher level. Raemaekers has the poetic imagination and we can feel in his work the

“prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.”

In his cartoons we find the appeal to all that is best in human nature, to the finest impulses of man, to his deepest passions and his noblest emotions.

All Raemaekers’ work is marvellously effective, but I take one single example, not perhaps the most important—his treatment of the rulers of Germany and Austria—in order to show his genius. By the power of his cartoons Raemaekers has fixed in the public mind a truer and deeper conception of the two emperors and the German crown prince than endless pages of print could possibly produce. The brutality, the over-weening arrogance, the hideous religious cant of the Emperor of Germany, with the touch of lunacy upon him, will live forever in Raemaekers’ portraits. The feeble senility of the late Emperor of Austria—joined as he frequently is with the Sultan and the King of Bulgaria, kindred spirits—a senility marked by the drivelling insensibility of extreme old age—those unlovely attributes are all there. As for the Crown Prince, he is known through these cartoons to millions who have never seen him and never will see him and will have only this image of him graven in their minds. As depicted by Raemaekers, he has a figure and face of low dissipation in which degeneracy and ferocity contend for mastery. And yet all these figures harmonize with the rest of the cartoons in teaching the one overpowering lesson as to the meaning of German victory. The barbarism, the belief in might as against right, the faith in brute force, the absence of human feeling,—these cry out to us through the pencil of the great artist that a world in which Germany should be dominant would be a world of slaves in which no free man could wish to live.

HENRY CABOT LODGE.

German Submarines Fire on
Open Boats

LORD GOD made the earth and its wonders,

The sea and the land.

The rain of delight and the thunders

Fall alike from His hand,

To gladden His children,—and warn them

Who will not understand.

And the Lord God cried in His anger:

“Who has poisoned My sea?

Who has made it a desert of danger

For My ships sailing free?

I am God! and ye who have done it

Shall account unto Me.

“I have planted the wasteland of water

For My folk to find food;

And ye sow it with whirlwind and slaughter,

Ye Devil’s dark brood.

So now shall ye reap in full measure

The harvest of blood.”

ALICE BROWN

Hill, N. H.

July 18, 1918.

Not This Time!

Raemaekers the Prophet

“FOR twenty years I have clearly foreseen Germany’s present attack on the world. For twenty years I have been drawing and publishing the same type of cartoons which have attracted so much notice since the war. Seven years before the war I was already being called ‘ein feind Deutschland’ by the German press. I cannot possibly express to you the unhappiness which I felt at being absolutely certain of the impending doom, and at the same time being incapable of making people foresee and believe it. My friends used to call me ‘the man who can see ghosts even in sunshine.’ Yet it was I, not they, who really knew the beasts as all the world knows them today; I was born in the little town of Lemberg near Roermond, at a distance of only a few miles from the German frontier, and have known the beasts all my life, not only in my own country, but also in theirs, which I have visited many times. I might almost say that I have visited it every year of my life. In Holland we have a saying that ‘even the best German has stolen a horse.’ I do not believe that there is any German who is not a pan-German. All of them suffer from this national and nation-wide megalomania.”

—From a conversation with Raemaekers reported in Eric
Fisher Wood’s “Note-Book of an Intelligence Officer.”

The President to the Workers:

“If you are with me, I am with you.”

“IF we are true friends of freedom—our own or anybody else’s—we will see that the power of this country, the productivity of this country, is raised to its absolute maximum and that absolutely nobody is allowed to stand in the way of it. When I say that nobody is allowed to stand in the way, I don’t mean that they shall be prevented by the power of the Government, but by the power of the American spirit. If we are to do this great thing and show America to be what we believe her to be, the greatest hope and energy of the world—then we must stand together night and day until the job is finished.”

From President Wilson’s speech before the American Federation
of Labor, November 12, 1917.

“Well Done, Fellows! Keep the
Home Fires Burning!”

THIS cartoon brings home to us the imperative necessity of putting our own house in order and keeping it in order. If the world is to be made safe for democracy, our own conspicuous example of democracy must be made safe for those who dwell under its protection. If we cannot conquer and control the enemy within our gates, we will be but impotent instruments of conquest over him abroad. Both at home and abroad we must rid ourselves of all hampering and distracting illusions and stare the facts in the face. The facts are that we are at war,—the grim and grimy business of killing or being killed.

The issues involved in this war have been appealed to the sword, and he who lives by the sword must die by the sword. The time for doubt, debate, discussion or diplomacy is past. The only thing left to do is to fight,—fight for all that is in us,—fight as long as we can and as hard as we can, and until there is no fight left in our enemies. Then and not until then is it worth while to consider other aims,—so-called war aims. The only real war aim now is victory. We must not let anything distract us from that essential aim.

LINDLEY M. GARRISON.

(Popular song of Tommy in France)
Well done fellows! “keep the home-fires bur-ning,”

A Bit of the Hindenburg Line

THESE fellows are hot on
the trail. Let us follow
suit.

Wherever you find a Hun you
find an enemy. Get him!

DAVID BISPHAM.

The Rats in Our Home Trenches

REALLY, the great question of the war is: What kind of people are the Germans?

Can they be reformed, or are they incurable?

All Germans are not alike. There are those who distinguish between North and South Germans, and tell us that the Saxons, in particular, have in them the making of excellent people. Doubtless all Prussians are not alike; doubtless all Bavarians are not of the type of the “Black Bavarians” whose exploits in the war have had unfavorable mention. But what has come to be the image that “German” calls up in the mind? It is an image of ruthlessness, of frightfulness, of poison gas and traceless sinkings; of murder, pillage, spies and lies; of a black and formidable ambition for mastery on any terms and at any cost; of treachery; of a tireless industry that gets up early to fetch away by work or wile whatever in the world is worth taking from any one who has it! The current image of the German is an image of an enemy—a savage enemy. Since 1914 German descent has been terribly prejudiced. As to every man of German blood the observer asks himself: What manner of man is this?

The Hohenzollerns did not invent the Germans. They found, acquired, trained and used them. For centuries—a thousand years at least—the Germans have had a known and demonstrated rating for brutality and brutishness. They have been cruel in war and destructive and greedy in pillage beyond most other nations that were their neighbors. When one hears it said that the trouble with Germany is Germans, there comes to mind abundant basis for that suggestion.

Yet the Germans are far too many and too useful to exterminate, and even if that were possible, no nation but Germany could seriously entertain the idea of exterminating a whole people.

So what do we come to?

To this: that Germany’s fate rests in the hands of the Germans. Their qualities will determine their destiny. Along with their abilities go enormous disabilities. They must do according to what is in them. They must obey the demon that drives them until, out of the extreme of suffering, they gain the courage to expel it. They must destroy, and so invite destruction, until their racial propensity has wrought its own correction. They must keep on accumulating enemies, exasperating neutrals, alienating allies, until blind and wicked policies have perfected their work.

What the German has most to fear is what is inside of him. By current estimate the worst that can happen to Germans has happened already, in that they are Germans. The world is not going to adjust itself to their misfortune in this particular. It is they who will have to adjust themselves to the world. They will not be able to make the world an overgrown Germany in which the other peoples will have to live under German direction. No. They will have to live in a world largely populated and managed, as now, by folks who are not Germans and don’t want to be, and whose primary concern for as long as is necessary will be to keep Germans in their place.

E. S. MARTIN.

Seeing Stars

Canadian: “And you’ll soon see the Stars and Stripes.”
German: “Saw some already, sir.”

THIS is the voice that he hears from Germany:

“We Germans are God’s chosen people, His special favorites, and God is German Himself. God rules over us in the person of our Kaiser, whom He has appointed for that purpose. We are better than all other peoples of the earth; we are wiser and purer and nobler and more industrious and more learned and stronger and cleverer and kinder and braver and more spiritual and more warlike than all others.

“We are so much greater than they that whatever we do to advance our own interests, at the cost of theirs, is right and praiseworthy. If we kill a great many of them, those who survive will in the end be improved, because they will work for us and learn something by observing us. Any deceit is proper and morally correct if it benefits us; and when we practise a policy of terror upon those who oppose us it is really philanthropy and shows how gentle we are, because the survivors learn through our cruelty that it is useless to oppose us, therefore they the sooner submit their wills to ours. We can not do wrong, no matter what we do, so long as all that we do is for our own benefit. By our bright swords we will take possession of the earth which ought to belong to us, because we are Germans. We believe in the heaviest possible breeding of babies, that they may grow up and be trained to carry liquid fire and poison against any opposition to us. All the same, we are the only real peace-lovers in this malign and prejudiced world, which, except for us and the Austrians and the Bulgarians and the Turks, is composed exclusively of stupid ruffians who were so jealous and envious of us that they forced this war upon us, hoping to make some money out of us by annihilating us. We love peace, and are fighting for our mere existence—that is, the right to adjust our frontiers so that they will include the countries which we have conquered by the sword. We must never AGAIN be threatened by those rascals of Belgians!”

BOOTH TARKINGTON.

The Two Giants

Germany: “I destroy!”
America: “I create!”

UNCLE SAM has given the Germans three surprises.

It was believed in Germany:—

1st—That America would not break diplomatic relations;

2nd—That America would never fight;

3rd—That America could not fight.

Forced to it, in self-defense, we are now giving all our energies to war, led by a President, whose vision meets the extent of the calamity brought on the world by the selfish ambitions of material Germany.

American built ships will end the menace of the slinking U-boat.

And after the war the flags of the American Merchant Marine once more will float on every sea.

JAMES W. GERARD.

New York, July 12, 1918.

“Will They Last, Father?”

THE four greatest events in history; the advent of Christ, the discovery of America, the Reformation, and the French Revolution, are all we can compare with the days in which we are living—and dying.

In a cyclone of desolations surpassing the terrors of the insane, the world, so far from recoiling, rolls forward into vast and irrevocable changes that seemed but yesterday the remotest goals of laborious evolution; rolling up the precipitous steep of custom in all the fury with which we should look to see it roll down. And the unique wonder of this fifth and last of these supreme events is that only it has sprung primarily from an evil design and can attain its true end only by that design’s everlasting overthrow.

So speaks the matchless hand of Raemaekers. The vastest murderer the race has ever borne and, at his heels, his most remorseless waster of blood together watch the glass of time, abhorring every upward plunge of a maddened world and daily hounded by one implacable question, one four-headed dog of hell: Will their treasury, will their sinking of ships, will their delusion of their own people, last?

No. One or another will presently fail, and when one fails all fail and the world, refined by fire, will be, shall be, saved.

GEORGE W. CABLE.

“The Ugly Talons of the Sinister
Power”

THE attitude of scorn, of contempt and of defiance with which Raemaekers in his cartoon, “America’s Choice,” represents Uncle Sam as he confronts the treacherous Kaiser, bearing the olive branch in his talons, well expresses the attitude of the United States towards Germany at the time we entered the war, and this attitude will probably continue for a generation or two after the war ends.

“The Intolerable Thing,” which President Wilson so aptly named the irresponsible German Government, can never disguise itself so that we will not detect the terrible menacing claws with which Raemaekers portrays the Kaiser. It will continue to be an Intolerable Thing until the horrors of this war are forgotten.

The German philosophers brazenly justify their nation’s course in this aggressive war with all its attendant horrors, by an appeal to the Darwinian doctrines of the struggle for existence, and the consequent survival of the fittest, which play such a prominent part in biological evolution.

Germany must be taught the lesson that while man is the product of evolution like all other creatures, yet in his case new factors come into play—he is a part of the animal kingdom, but is a new kind of animal, and new factors, not operative in the orders below him, have played leading rôles in his development. These factors are his reason, which gives him a sense of the true and the false, and his conscience, which gives him a sense of right and wrong. These faculties subordinate the rule of might to the rule of right, and they have resulted in the establishment of conduct for individuals, for communities, and for organized governments that do not exist in the lower animal orders, and only in a limited sense in the lower human orders.

Amid a national rejoicing, a waving of flags and ringing of bells, such as are evoked by a great national festival, the Germans celebrated the Lusitania murders—the entire nation suddenly slumping into a barbarism worse than that of their ancestral Huns. The Hun was again triumphant, gloating over his unspeakable crimes, his plunders and piracies, his orgies of crime and lust—a spectacle to make the Genius of Humanity veil her face and weep tears of blood.

It is a comfort to know that the Allies have killed or rendered harmless several million of these modern barbarians, and that many of their carcases have gone to enrich the soil of France and Belgium. In this way a dead Hun may help to undo some of the evil which a living Hun has wrought. If two or three of their bodies could be planted in every shell hole which their guns have made in France and Belgium, though the inoffensive soil might sicken, yet in the course of years the poison of the Hun would disappear, rendered innocuous by the beneficient alchemy of Nature.

JOHN BURROUGHS.

Tryon, N. C.
February 12, 1918.

Restitution and Reparation

IT is with good reason the Prussian covers the thick bone of his head with a helmet, for into it ideas of right and justice can only be battered with a club. The tough, club-resisting helmet is the arch-symbol of Prussianism. From its earliest days Prussia has taught its neighbors the Prussian theory of right and justice by means of a club. When the Prussian wishes to educate his neighbors to an appreciation of Prussian ethics he puts on his helmet, picks up a club and slugs the neighbor on the head.

The Prussian theory of right and justice is this: “What is mine is mine. What is yours is also mine if I want it.”

This idea is deep buried beneath the thick bone of the Prussian head. He holds it with stolid stupidity and deep, prehistoric crudity, like a pig or an idiot. He cannot understand that there are any rights higher than Prussian greed. “If I want it, it is mine because I want it.” It is the logic of the primitive human animal, the cave-man.

Cornered and accused of his thefts he clings to his loot like the pig that has stolen a carrot. When asked to disgorge he is shocked by the suggestion. “But they are mine! I wanted them, so they are mine!” he says. Right and Justice answer, “They are not yours; you stole them.” “Maybe so!” says the Prussian. “But just the same they are mine—I stole them a long time ago.”

The logic of the Prussian fills ten thousand volumes. It is written in hundred-line paragraphs and six-inch words. It can be condensed into two short words—piggish greed: piggish because it knows neither right or justice, greed because it is greed.

ELLIS PARKER BUTLER.

The Only Possible Position for
Traitors

WHILE the submarine controversy was at its height, a Hun high in authority in his nefarious land said that it was impossible for the United States to enter the war, because there were a half million German reservists in our country. “That is true,” replied the American to whom this contemptuous remark was addressed; “but there are also a half million lamp-posts.”

Since the German reservists have failed to fulfil the expectations of the Fatherland, the lamp-posts of the United States are as yet unadorned with their lifeless bodies. But history has shown that while Americans are an easy-going race, when once their anger is aroused there is no withholding it; therefore let the traitors in our midst take warning from the cartoon upon the opposite page.

One may pardon a murderer who kills in a moment of passion, one may even revere a military spy who penetrates an enemy’s lines to gather information needful for victory; but for the skulking traitor who whispers sedition within the land which harbors him and seeks to hamper the efforts of its government by a stealthy means, no punishment seems too severe, since of all crimes his is the most despicable.

It is not to the half million German reservists alone that Mr. Raemaekers’ warning is addressed; for, inconceivable though it be, there are native-born traitors aplenty to shame the land which gave them birth. For these, the only position which will seem possible to Uncle Sam, when once his anger, ever slow to rise, bursts forth in righteous indignation, will be the one which Mr. Raemaekers has depicted. Let these traitors remember that there is an abundance of lamp-posts in the land as well as a goodly supply of hempen rope.

H. C. CHATFIELD-TAYLOR.

“Do You Mean to Make a Real
War?”

“GERMANY has once more said that force, and force alone, shall decide whether justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men, whether right as America conceives it or dominion as she conceives it shall determine the destinies of mankind. There is, therefore, but one response possible for us: Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall make right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.”

—From President Wilson’s Message on the First Anniversary
of the Declaration of War, April 6, 1918.

Justice!

THE woman figure called Justice in Raemaekers’ cartoon has a Greek name. She is Themis, consort of Zeus, Themis, who sits by his side on the judgment seat. The scales are the scales of Ægina, in her day a great money centre, whose talent was the standard of value then, as the American dollar is to-day. Ægina was the mother of Æacus, one of the three great judges of the lower world, and be it remembered, it was Æacus that administered justice. Ægina is called by one of the greatest Greek poets the place where Themis is worshipped more than anywhere else on earth, and he tells us further that there was much weighing in Ægina, the Merchant State. Heavy weights there were in either scale. Much care was needful in the weighing, no little balancing doubtless. So there were many in our Ægina who felt the draw of kindred, of friendship, of fellowship. But this is the Day, the Day of Decision, the Day of Lord Æacus. After the knife edge of the balance comes the knife edge of the guillotine.

BASIL LANNEAU GILDERSLEEVE.

Another Peace Proposal

THE artist has depicted a spectacled Old Gentleman wearing a triple crown and a pontifical mantle, who is offering a proposal of peace to a heroic young woman, torn, bleeding, thorn-crowned, but dauntless, who spurns it with scorn. The spectacled Old Gentleman is the Pope; the heroic young woman is, I take it, outraged Justice.

Since Justice is our cause, we must try to be just. The Pope is not lying on a bed of roses. He is in a position of the utmost difficulty. He has faithful adherents on both sides, he dislikes war, and finds his perplexities, great enough in time of peace, now magnified an hundred-fold. He is not a hero; he is old, he is a lover of ease, and would dearly like to wear a King’s crown and hear multitudes in St. Peter’s cry out “Papa-Rè, Papa-Rè.” Let us be just. The first Pope (according to Roman Catholic reckoning), received the grace of a great opportunity to be true to his Master, but he denied Him thrice. Why should we be surprised to find Benedict XV denying his Master? Fate has held out her hand to him, as she held it out to St. Peter, and offered him his opportunity to be greatly true. In the old happy days when all the world cried “hosanna” to Justice, the Pope also had professed himself a disciple of Justice. But now Justice has been taken by bloody-minded men to be crucified, and the Pope has stayed afar off. Many witnesses have remarked, “This man also was a professed disciple of Justice.” And now the Pope denies it vehemently. He has put forward a series of humiliating proposals that Justice—heroic, bleeding Justice—should hold out her hand to the murderers of Belgium and confer, as if there had been equal error on both sides, upon the crafty schemes of peace by which Germany hopes to dominate the world.

Poor Old Gentleman! Timidity, love of ease, fear of Austria, and fantastic ambition, have induced him to deny his Master. The cock will crow, and he will weep bitterly. Poor, pitiable Old Gentleman.

HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK.

The Fine American Spirit

WHO are these, watching from ancestral doors

The instant passing of our youth to France?

Henceforth, a chapter of the world’s romance

Their eyes have seen; it fills their native shores

With an undying moment; now it pours

On silent breasts, o’erawed, the voice, the glance,

The last, fond gleam of each loved countenance,

And the heart trembles, while the spirit soars.

The generations draw immortal breath

That breathe a nation’s soul. From sire to son

The glory of the fathers entereth

The children’s hearts, and maketh all as one:

Bright, at time’s touch, breaks out the holy flame,

And to all lands doth freedom’s blood proclaim.

G. E. WOODBERRY.

Poisoning the Well of Public
Opinion

ALIENS in this country must assist in maintaining the liberty they enjoy, or we shall know the reason why.

“Ninety-five per cent. of the people of the United States would die as willingly for their beliefs as the men of 1776. It is for the other 5 per cent. to show not the slightest manifestation of disloyalty.

“Our message to them will be delivered through the criminal courts all over the land. And may God have mercy on them, for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging government.”

—Speech of Attorney-General Gregory in New York,
November, 1917.

The Enemy Within

NOT even the prodigious Cruelty of the Germans in this Atrocious War has shocked the moral sense of mankind as much as has their Deceit. We are horror-stricken by the reports of their premeditated cruelties which link the Germans with the beasts—the wolf, and tiger, and boa constrictor, and vulture. The beast does these things because he has never risen to a higher plane than that of the beast. But Deceit is the attribute of Man; of one who dwells above the standards of the brute creation, who has had the moral sense developed in him, who has known the compulsions of conscience, who has acknowledged the obligations of duty, and has recognized himself as being a striver after the Ultimate Good. Through some flaw in the German’s nature all these qualities in him changed, turned bad, and he hailed Evil as his guide and inspiration. Whatever of good there was in him he uses to promote his wicked designs. Had he not been human he could never have understood how to make his perverted nature work successfully to deceive his fellow-men. The snake and panther do not deceive us, we know their ways and guard against them. But the moral pervert can deceive, because he hides his purpose and his method behind the mask of a counterfeited virtue.