Whether the type here taken is a true criticism of a commercial
attitude in a neutral State like Holland, it does not become us to
discuss. Raemaekers is a Dutchman, and doubtless a patriotic Dutchman.
And the patriot, and the patriot alone, has not only the right but the
duty of criticising his own country.
For us it is better to regard the figure as an international, and
often anti-national, character who exists in all nations, and who,
even in a belligerent country like our own, can often contrive to be
neutral and worse than neutral. A prosperous bully with the white
waistcoat and coarse, heavily cuffed hands, with which such prosperity
very frequently clothes itself, is represented as thrusting food in
the starved face of an evicted Belgian and saying: “Eat and hold your
tongue.”
The situation is worthy of such record, if only because it emphasises
an element in the general German plot against the world which is often
forgotten in phrases about fire and sword. The Prussianised person is
not only a military tyrant; he is equally and more often a mercantile
tyrant. And what is in this respect true of the German is as true or
truer of the Pro-German.
The cosmopolitan agent of Prussia is a commercial agent, and works by
those modern methods of bribing and sacking, of boycott and blackmail,
which are not only meaner, but often more cruel, than militarism. For
anyone who realises the power of such international combinations, there
is the more credit due to the artists and men of letters who, like
Raemaekers himself, have decisively chosen their side while the issue
was very doubtful. And among the Belgian confrères there must certainly
have been many who showed as much courage as any soldier, when they
decided not to eat and be silent, but to starve and to speak.