Page:The web (1919).djvu/478

 herself? If the Germans should be serfs for centuries, they could not pay the reckoning in silver and gold alone. But that is not the great question. What of the silent dead, demanding also their due before Almighty God?

Germany never can pay her bill. So long as her language is spoken, it will be the tongue of a debtor race whose account never will be paid and never can be. And why should the world forgive that debt or that debtor, even should it find it impossible to collect the debt. What outlaws such a debt in the just belief of the world? Shall continued arrogance and treachery serve to outlaw that unpaid debt? Shall a continuance in America of the old German ways in America serve to outlaw her awful and eternally unpaid debt?

Why does such feeling as this exist in the minds of the most chivalrous of foes against whom Germany ever fought? Why should America and France and Britain feel an implacable hatred against a helpless enemy? In other wars the sign of submission has arrested the wrath of warriors. But not in this war. The world looks on beaten Germany to-day with cold scorn and with no feeling of relenting. It is the way that she fought—it is the spying that she did, the brutality that she showed, which has awakened the ice-cold wrath of the world to-day. That wrath means to exact its pound of flesh from the heart of Germany itself. What of the dead who died unfairly? What of the innocent and the unarmed dead? Only in her own tears of blood could Germany learn the humble and the contrite heart. She has not yet learned her lesson. It must be taught her for a century yet and more.

More and more as the facts shall come from Europe, uncovering the real Germany, showing her ferocious treachery all over the world, her utter insensibility to any feeling of responsibility, her abysmal ignorance of such a term as honor, shall we be ready to make fair conclusions; for these must be our only premises.

It is only those who really know Germany's methods in America—those who know her treachery, her duplicity, her efforts to undermine our country—who can make up a fair judgment as to how Germany should be treated in the future.