1. The Original Plot of the Members of the Potsdam Gang

Many historic meetings, big with social disaster, are recorded in history. Witness the meeting of the Athenian judges for the killing of Socrates. Witness the coming together of the priests and Judas for the piteous tragedy of the death of Jesus. Witness that midnight meeting of the conspirators in Florence for the burning of Savonarola. Terrible also the results of that meeting in the Potsdam Palace in 1896 that culminated in the Pan-German Empire scheme.

What began as a spark that day has ended in a world conflagration.

In retrospect the Kaiser and his associates had many events behind them to encourage the ambition to make Berlin a world capital, Kaiser Wilhelm the world emperor and all the other nations and races subject peoples.

Beginning in 1860 with thirty-five millions of people and only fifteen billions of dollars, Germany had climbed to greatness upon iron steps, heated hot by war. Never did wars yield so large a return.

The war with Denmark had given Germany the Kiel Harbour, the Kiel Canal and a sea-coast for her ships.

The war with Austria had given Germany the rich coal provinces of Central Europe. The war with France had given Germany the iron mines of Alsace and Lorraine.

And here for the next war were Denmark and Holland, Belgium and northern France so many jewel boxes that could be looted. To the eastward were Poland with her coal mines, Rumania with her oil fields and Russia with her wheat granaries. And once Central Europe became a Middle-Europe German Empire there was no reason why later on Germany should not extend her conquests to Russia on the east and England on the west, and then to North and South America.

It was a great scheme. Never was prize so rich. Never could obstacles be so easily swept away. To make Berlin a world-capital and Kaiser Wilhelm a world-emperor only two things were needed.

Plainly the first thing to be done was to organize the Pan-German Empire League and educate the leading men of Germany the ship owners, bankers, merchants and manufacturers, editors, ministers, priests and university professors.

Local branch societies were organized in all the large German towns and cities. Weekly meetings were held, papers read and reports made. Slowly people of the middle class were included in the league. Documents marked “Secret and Confidential” were distributed, setting forth the details of the scheme.

Full reports were made as to what Germany could make by seizing the fields of Denmark, the cities on the mouth of the Rhine in Belgium, the coal and iron mines of France, Poland and Russia, and also the undeveloped resources of the Valley of the Euphrates.

Careful statements were prepared as to the difficulties that must be surmounted, but always this lure was held out that the poorest German who then had nothing, would when Germany was victorious become a landowner, live in a mansion and drive his own automobile. Then he would have Russians and Frenchmen to wait upon him, since the German was a superman, intended for a patrician, while all other races were pigs, intended by nature to be bondsmen and plebeians.

“The rest of the world is amassing wealth, and when the fruit is ripe then we Germans will pluck it” this was their motto.

Little by little the germ of world-ambition became a fever, burning in the soul of every German at home or abroad. It took twenty years to thoroughly inculcate every individual of the German race with this feverish ambition, but when 1914 came every German had gone over to the Pan-German scheme and was ready to die for it.

2. The Berlin Schemers and Their Plot

After all the Germans at home and abroad understood the Pan-German scheme of seditious intrigue in foreign countries and the vast web was spun and thrown out over all the cities and continents where the Kaiser’s representatives were living, the second thing to be done was to make the plan clear by spreading it out like a great map. The method used, therefore, was pictorial.

The Department of Publicity in Berlin became experts on geography. They began to issue illustrated maps so that the rudest German peasants and the German colonists living in Milwaukee or El Paso, in Rio Janeiro or Buenos Aires, in Brussels or St. Petersburg, in Melbourne or Calcutta, could easily understand the method and the goal.

Out of twenty maps issued in Berlin and reproduced by Andre Cheredame, no one is more important than the one marked “The Old Roman Empire.” The simplest German miner understood the map at a glance and realized its meaning for the members of the Pan-German League. Here is old Rome marked world capital. Here is Cæsar Augustus called the first world emperor. Here is Carthage with its capital looted and Roman peasants remaining after the victory to move into rich men’s houses and estates of North Africa. And here also were the maps of conquered Palestine, Ephesus, Athens and Corinth. To be sure the old Romans had to become soldiers, but, later, did not each Roman soldier live in the rich gardens around Thebes, Ephesus and Corinth?

Instantly the imaginations of the German peasants and workmen kindled. The Kaiser was right. What had been in Rome must be in Berlin. The Elbe must succeed the Tiber. Berlin shall be the second world-capital. Our Wilhelm shall be the second world-emperor. Germania shall be written straight across Europe from Hamburg on the North Sea to Bagdad on the Persian Gulf. Germans alone shall be allowed to carry weapons, as once only the Roman was allowed to own a spear; only Germans shall be allowed to hold title deeds to lands, even as once only Romans could hold a field or a house in fee simple. Old Rome won by becoming a military State.

Did not the people of Rome go forth as soldiers and return with triumphal processions, with treasures of loot that took days to pass along the Appian Way, while the Romans stood cheering and the women and children sang and threw flowers in the path? Why should not the German army, between the reaping of the wheat in July and the threshing of the wheat in October, return from Brussels and Paris laden with treasure, while a second triumphal procession marched down Wilhelmstrasse?

The German peasants kindled at this dream. Why should the German have to live always on bologna sausage, drink beer, eat sauerkraut and live in ugly houses when the people of Paris and London drank champagne, ate roast fowl, wore French laces and the finest English wools? It was a wicked shame. Surely the German was intended for something better than sauerkraut and beer!

“Two weeks and we will be in Brussels. Three weeks and we will have Paris. Two months and we will loot London.”

This was the plan. How significant that letter, taken from the dead body of a German boy found in No Man’s Land, near Compiègne.

“Within three days, Liebschen, we will be in Paris. I intend to bring you a pocketful of Paris rings and jewels, with Paris gowns and laces.”

From the body of a German boy found near Lunéville was taken this letter saying that, with his three companions, he had picked out four French farms and left the houses standing, and that his friends and himself had picked out these farms as permanent homes. Later he added that Heinrich thought it would be much better for them to wait until they smashed England and made Canada a German colony. Then they could own, not small French farms, but vast Canadian farms with a hundred tenants working for him in the valleys around Toronto and the vineyards of Winnipeg and orchards of Hudson Bay.

Most shrewd and cunning, the plotters of the Potsdam gang. They knew how to feed the fires of envy and avarice in the German people. Every few weeks they placed new material in the hands of every German at home and abroad. They reminded each poor peasant and foreign colonist that he was a superman, and that by day and by night he was to prepare for the time when he would become the head of all the people of the town or industry with which he was related. Poor Germans in foreign countries dreamed their dreams of the time when they would be appointed by the Kaiser and Foreign Minister to take charge of the village in Mexico, the mine in Chile, or when they would be the tax collector in some distant province.

We know now, from letters that have been found, that the German soldiers in France carried in their pockets a description by the German historian Curtius of the triumphal procession along the Appian Way, when the Roman conquerors came home loaded with loot. These skillful German plotters printed at the bottom of Curtius’s description the statement that each German soldier must look forward to a similar return from London, Paris and Brussels to march through the streets of Munich and Berlin.

What a dream was this German dream! What treasures were to be brought into Berlin! What marbles and bronzes of Rodin stolen from Paris! At last Berlin was to own beautiful paintings, for the treasures of the Louvre were to be the Kaiser’s.

Never was there such a dream dreamed by peasants who soon were to become princes and kings and patricians. The German had exchanged the rye bread of 1913 for the “fog bank” of 1918; had given up German beer to grasp only empty, breaking bubbles. But it was a great dream while it lasted. In pursuance of his hope he sacrificed three million German boys, left dead in the fields of Flanders and France. He sent home four million German cripples. He filled the land with vast armies of widows and orphans.

It could not have been otherwise. There has never been, and never will be, but one world city Rome; and there has never been but one world-emperor Cæsar Augustus. There is to be one universal kingdom and that is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of love, justice, peace and good-will. The German has been pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp.

A world-kingdom will come, but no Kaiser will rule over that empire of love. In that world-parliament all the races shall be represented as equals; then the earth that has long been a battle-field shall become an Eden garden, where all are patriots towards the world-kingdom, and scholars towards the intellect, and self-sufficing towards the family, and obedient towards their God.

3. German Superiority a Myth That Has Exploded

Several years before the great war began a Dutch humorist wrote a play on German megalomania. He portrayed a German schoolroom in Prussia. Thirty or forty embryonic Prussians are at the desks and a Prussian schoolmaster is in the chair.

“Children, what is the greatest country in the world?”

All shouted vociferously, “Germany!”

“What is the greatest city in the world?”

“Berlin!”

“Who is the greatest man in the world?”

“The Kaiser!”

“Should there ever be, children, a vacancy in the Trinity, who is best fitted to fill the position?”

“The Crown Prince!”

“Who are the chosen people of the good old German God?”

“The German people!”

Never was there a finer bit of sarcasm and yet the Germans were never able to understand the play. The Kaiser, the War Staff, the Cabinet, down to the last wretched creature working in the stables and the sewers, reading the play, exclaimed:

“What is the man driving at? Why, of course the Germans are the greatest people in the world we admit it!”

Now, during the last few years the Germans have spent untold millions in propagating this myth of superiority, and yet the German intellect has never even had a second-rate position. Call the roll of all the tools that have redeemed men from drudgery and you will find that Germany’s contributions are hopelessly inferior to the other nations.

The new industrial era began with the locomotive and steamship; James Watt invented the one and Stevenson the other.

The new era of physical comfort began with the loom; a Frenchman named Jacquard and an Englishman named Arkwright made men warm for their work in winter. Garments within the reach of the poor man in forest and factory, field and mine, means the cotton gin, and that gin is the gift of an American. The sewing machine changed woman’s position, but the world owes that to our own Elias Howe.

We owe the telegraph to an English inventor and, in part, to Morse. We owe the cable in part to Lord Kelvin and, in part, to Cyrus Field. We owe the telephone to Bell and the wireless to Marconi.

Holland invented the submarine, Wright the airplane, McCormick the reaper and Edison the phonograph.

An American invented the German submarine; an American invented the German torpedo; an American invented the German machine-gun; an American invented the Murphy button, the yellow fever antitoxin, the Dakin solution.

An English physician discovered the circulation of the blood, Jenner gave us vaccination, Lister antiseptics, France the Pasteur serums and the Curie radio discoveries, while a Bulgarian, Dr. Metchnikoff, discovered the enemies of the blood.

It was from France, England and the United States that Germany stole the typewriter, the steel building, the use of rubber, the aniline dyes, reenforced concrete bridges, air-brakes, the use of electricity.

One of the most amazing volumes in the world is the “History of Tools and Machinery.” We have all known for a long time that there is not one single German name among the eight great masters of painting that begins with Rembrandt and includes men like Velasquez and Giotto. We have long known that there is no German sculptor of the first class nor a German sculptor that is within ten thousand leagues of Rodin, Michael Angelo or Phidias. We have long known that Schubert and Schumann and Rubinstein and Haydn and Chopin were all Jews, and that three-fourths of the other so-called German musicians were Jews whose ancestors suffered such frightful political disabilities in Germany and were so regularly looted of all their property that they gave up their Hebrew names and took German, just as now thousands upon thousands of Germans in this country, ashamed of their names, are Americanizing their family title.

The simple fact is that if a Jew will only write the creative music, like that of Beethoven, a German whose gift is detail will conduct the orchestra.

The German can standardize a machine, providing an Englishman, a Frenchman or an American will first invent it. The German will gather up the remnants and scraps and odds and ends in a clothing factory but, oh, think of an American gentleman having to wear the coat that was cut by a tailor in Berlin or Munich! Having during ten different summers looked at their garments, all one can say is that the German men and women are covered up but not clothed.

For thirty years the Germans have paid their representatives to stand on the corner of the street and bawl out to every passer-by: “Great is the Kaiser! Great are we Germans! Let all people with cymbals, sackbut, shawms and psaltery cry aloud, saying ’Great is the Kaiser and all his people!’”

And now suddenly the myth has burst like a bubble. The delusion is exploded. The Kaiser has found out that it is dangerous to blow too much hot air into a German bladder.

Measured around the stomach in the Hofbraus in the presence of a barrel of beer, the Prussian and the Bavarian are great; but the hat band requires the least material of any made in four countries.

For the time has come to confess this simple fact that for any one great tool, or art, or contribution to science created by a German there are four invented by either an American, an Englishman or a Frenchman.

4. German Intrigues

The spider’s web stretched out over a flower bed with a great fat spider at the centre and the threads along which the spider runs to thrust its poisoned sting into the enmeshed butterfly is nature’s most accurate symbol of the vast web of espionage lying over North and South America with secret threads that vibrated to the touch of the spider at the centre named Berlin.

In that web thousands of German-Americans were enmeshed. The records of our Secret Service concerning these German enemies of the American Government read like a book of assassinations or like a history of the black arts. When the whole story comes to be told it will horrify the world.

The quality of the German-Americans that Berlin bribed is set forth in the reminiscences of Witte when he says that the Kaiser and the Foreign Department paid Munsterberg of Harvard University $5,000 a year salary and that Munsterberg was the most successful and efficient spy that the German system had ever developed.

In the long list of German agents are to be found the names of German-American bankers who received secret decorations and medals from the German Government; of German merchants who were partners in this country of firms in the Fatherland and were bribed by a ribbon and an invitation to the Potsdam Palace; of German newspaper men who were under German pay, and, most amazing of all, among the papers seized in the office of a German Consul was found a commission appointing this Consul in an American city to the office of Governor-General of one of the greatest States of Canada as soon as Canada became a German colony.

Many of the threads from Berlin ran into the various cities of Mexico. A German head office was set up under the general direction of Zimmermann in Berlin and of von Bernstorff in Washington. Certain large institutions that did business in Mexico, working in the same field, were quietly elbowed out of Mexico, and an American company, ostensibly American, but controlled by Germans, took over the business of the other firms under special arrangement with Mexico. Pledges were given Mexico that as soon as Germany had reduced Canada and the United States to the position of German colonies, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California should be handed back to the Mexicans.

Millions were spent by the German Foreign Office as ordinary men spend dollars. The German spies, like Boy-Ed and von Papen, arranged to blow up American munition factories and held dinners waiting for a telephone message saying that the magazine had just exploded or the depot had taken fire or a scow had been sunk, after which they drank the health of the man who lighted the match.

German agents burned up wheat elevators with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of wheat; they fired warehouses, blew up bridges, wrecked munition plants, destroyed shiploads of food, dynamited the House of Parliament in Ottawa, sank the Lusitania near Ireland, spread glanders among the horses in Sweden, poisoned the food in Rumania, sank the ships of Norway, plotted against the Argentine Republic. Their spies, dynamiters, secret agents, were in every capital and country because it was their purpose to make Berlin a world capital, Kaiser Wilhelm the world emperor and to Germanize the people of the whole earth.

The web had as its centre the Potsdam Palace, but its black lines ran out into all the earth.

5. German Burglars Loaded With Loot Are the More Easily Captured

It seems that Germany has published, for the Spaniards, a list of treasures she has won. In the long calendar the reader finds that eight States Belgium, France, Poland, Rumania, Russia, Serbia, Armenia, Italy have all been looted.

The Germans claim they have spoiled over three hundred first class cities, several thousand secondary cities and towns; they add that they have destroyed seventy-three cathedrals and looted them of their priceless treasures of statues, paintings, stained glass, vessels of silver and gold.

With brazen audacity the German pamphlet tells the Spaniards that they have seized so many hundred thousand watches, so many hundred thousand rings, so much treasure of diamonds and jewels, so many paintings from rich men’s houses, and the long boast ends with the statement that they “obtained nearly five billions of loot out of western Russia and have assessed two billions more upon the farmers, villages and cities of Ukraine.”

But the boast is an idle and empty boast. It is true that no army of the Allies has crossed the German frontier to permanently hold a city. But let no man think that Germany has succeeded because of the richness of her loot. There is a success that is failure. There is a victory that is defeat.

Macbeth killed Duncan and went to live in the palace of the dead king, but did Macbeth succeed? Was not his palace a brief halting place in his journey towards remorse, insanity and the day when Duncan’s friends in turn slew Macbeth?

The rich judges of Athens succeeded and Socrates failed. They went home to drink wine and feast, while Socrates went to the jail to drink a cup of poison. But who succeeded? The judges whose names are written low down and bespattered with dirt or Socrates, whose name fills the sky and who has become the thinker for the world?

What if the Kaiser does boast of his successes to-day? So boasted Nero sending Paul to his rags, crusts and the dungeon preparatory to the headman’s axe. But it is Nero that lost out, and it is Paul who reigns a crowned king.

The chief priests celebrated their victory; at the close of the day, after they had succeeded in crucifying Jesus; but after nineteen centuries the murderers are unknown and almost forgotten, while that young carpenter rules over His Empire of Love.

To-day the Kaiser claims to have won the victory of “a superman.” In that he has carried murder, arson, lying, rapine, lust up to the nth power, let us concede his claim. Not otherwise two hundred years ago the Indian, with his scalping knife, his war-whoop and his tomahawk, was “a superman” in terms of savagery. Not otherwise the Spaniards under Bloody Alva were “supermen” in terms of rack, thumbscrew and instruments of torture.

But what savages once did in the little, the Kaiser and his men now do in the large. But because the Kaiser can publish a long list of wealth gained by breaking his treaties, by murder, arson and lust let no man think that he is successful.

The two Biddle brothers looted the Bank of England, but they became outcasts upon the face of the earth, and always the dungeon yawned for them, just as the Kaiser and von Hindenburg never sleep at night without a vision of an oak tree, a long bough and a hemp rope dangling at the end, for the hemp is now twisted that will one day choke to death the murderous Kaiser and his War Staff.

Let no patriot, whether he lives in Spain, Russia or the United States, forget that ours is a world ruled by men who were defeated.

To-day on the thrones of the world are the heroes, like Paul and Demosthenes; the martyrs who were burned with Savonarola in Florence or poisoned with Socrates in Athens.

To-day, the soldiers of Marathon and Marston Moor, Gettysburg and the Marne now rule the world.

The treasure of the burglar and the brigand dissolves like snowflakes in a river.

Long ago the Hebrew poet said: “I have seen the wicked flourish like a green bay tree, and then I lifted up my eyes, and, behold! he was not.” And when a little time has passed all lovers of liberty and humanity will exclaim: “During four years I have seen the Kaiser and von Hindenburg flourish as the green bay tree, and I lifted up mine eyes, and, behold! they were not. For the breath of His nostrils had slain them.”

6. Germans Who Hide Behind the Screen

Two thousand years are a long time in terms of history.

Many damnable tools have been invented during these twenty centuries. The rack, the thumbscrew, the tomahawk, the fagot belong among these devilish instruments.

Cruelties so terrible have been devised that old scholars often felt unwilling to believe that men were so low in the scale as to have been the authors of these methods of fiendishness.

In the hope, therefore, of keeping respect for man many scholars transferred all responsibility unto devils. They called in Satan and made him to be the father of hate and cruelty. They could not believe that Nero, Judas or Torquemada could conceive such wickedness. They therefore made the devil with his cloven feet and his long tail to whisper these cunning suggestions in the ear of the traitor. Thus the responsibility for unwonted cruelty was divided between the murderer and the devil who counselled the black crime.

Perhaps the most damnable thing that was ever suggested by the devil in two thousand years is this little object called the German soldier’s token. Never did an object so small send forth cruelties so large and manifold.

The little disc is stamped out on thick paper for German privates and upon aluminum for the officers. At the top of this cardboard is the portrait of that awful being called by the Kaiser “our good old German God.”

Look at his white hair, the long beard and the great sword in the right hand, with the suggestion that since God uses the sword the German soldier must cut men to pieces also.

Beneath you see flames gushing up, suggesting to the German soldier that he is quite right in burning the houses of France and Belgium after he has looted them, and for flinging the dead bodies into the blazing rafters. Now read the words written beneath the face of the being the Germans call God.

“Strike them all dead. The Day of Judgment shall ask you no questions.”

Strike dead old men and women! Dash the children’s brains out against the stone wall! Violate young girls! Mutilate their fair bodies so that they will be unseemly when they are found by the husband or father. Burn, steal, kill but remember that your Kaiser and the War Staff have promised to stand between you and God Almighty and the Day of Judgment! Even if Jesus did say, “Woe unto them that offend against my little ones,” you must remember that your Kaiser and officers have promised you immunity on the Day of Judgment.

That is what is meant by the sentence on page thirty-one in the German handbook of “War on Land”: “That which is permissible to the German soldier is anything whatsoever that will help him gain his goal quickly.”

Nothing better illustrates the total collapse of manhood in the Germans than this soldier’s token.

A coward by nature, the German is afraid to kill and steal, and so he invented a screen behind which he could hide and named it “the soldier’s token.”

Going into a French village the Germans collect the women and children, order them to march in advance, shoot a few to terrorize the rest, and then, hiding behind this living screen, the Germans march forward. In this way they protect themselves.

The whole history of the human race contains no chapter of atrocity like the atrocity of the Germans. The history of the world contains no story of cowardice so black and damnable as the cowardice of the Germans. Out of cowardice the soldier’s token was born.

And so the Kaiser and the War Staff invented this round piece of cardboard, with the representation of God as going forth with His sword to kill men and with His flames to burn them and with the motto: “Strike them all dead, for the Day of Judgment will ask you no questions.”

Therefore among the instruments of cruelty, called the rack, the fagot, the thumbscrew and the tomahawk, let us give the first place to the German soldier’s token, the most damnable weapon that has come out of hell during the last two thousand years.

7. Must German Men Be Exterminated?

A singular revulsion of sentiment as to what must be done with the German army after the war, is now sweeping over the civilized world. Men who once were pacifists, men of chivalry and kindness, men whose life has been devoted to philanthropy and reform, scholars and statesmen, whose very atmosphere is compassion and magnanimity towards the poor and weak, are now uttering sentiments that four years ago would have been astounding beyond compare. These men feel that there is no longer any room in the world for the German. Society has organized itself against the rattlesnake and the yellow fever. Shepherds have entered into a conspiracy to exterminate the wolves. The Boards of Health are planning to wipe out typhoid, cholera and the Black Plague. Not otherwise, lovers of their fellow man have finally become perfectly hopeless with reference to the German people. They have no more relations to the civilization of 1918 than an orang-outang, a gorilla, a Judas, a hyena, a thumbscrew, a scalping knife in the hands of a savage. These brutes must be cast out of society.

Some of us, hoping against hope, after the reluctant confession of the truth of the German atrocities, have appealed to education. We knew that Tacitus said, nearly two thousand years ago, that “the German treats women with cruelty, tortures his enemies, and associates kindness with weakness.” But nineteen centuries of education have not changed the German one whit. The mere catalogue of the crimes committed by German officers and soldiers and set forth in more than twenty volumes of proofs destroys the last vestige of hope for their future. Think of the catalogue! Babies nailed like rats to the doors of houses! Children skewered on a bayonet midst the cheers of marching Germans as if the child were a quail, skewered on a fork! Matrons, old men and priests slaughtered; young Italian officers with throats cut and hanging on hooks in butchers’ shops; the bombing of Red Cross hospitals and nurses and the white flag; everything achieved by civilized man defiled and destroyed reverence for childhood and age, the sanctity of womanhood, the standards of honour, fidelity to treaties and all destroyed, not in a mood of drunkenness or a fit of rage, but on a deliberate, cold, calculated policy of German frightfulness.

The sense of hopelessness as to civilizing the German and keeping him as an element in the new society grew out of the breakdown of education and science in changing the German of the time of Tacitus. Plainly the time has come to make full confession of the fact that education can change the size but not the sort. The German in the time of Tacitus was ignorant when he took the children of his enemy and dashed their brains out against the wall; the German of 1914 and 1918 still butchers children, the only difference being that the butchery is now more efficient and better calculated, through scientific cruelty, to stir horror and spread frightfulness. The leopard has not changed its spots. The rattlesnake is larger and has more poison in the sac; the German wolf has increased in size, and where once he tore the throat of two sheep, now he can rend ten lambs in half the time. In utter despair, therefore, statesmen, generals, diplomats, editors are now talking about the duty of simply exterminating the German people. There will shortly be held a meeting of surgeons in this country. A copy of the preliminary call lies before me. The plan to be discussed is based upon the Indiana State law. That law authorizes a State Board of Surgeons to use upon the person of confirmed criminals and hopeless idiots the new painless method of sterilizing the men. These surgeons are preparing to advocate the calling of a world conference to consider the sterilization of the ten million German soldiers, and the segregation of their women, that when this generation of German goes, civilized cities, states and races may be rid of this awful cancer that must be cut clean out of the body of society.