How can our rights and the rights of mankind to which the President has
alluded be made secure? What definite concrete facts must be established
in order that democracy may be made safe?
In the first place, the autocratic power that now puts terror into the
heart of the world must be broken beyond repair. The Hohenzollerns and
the rest of the military caste which now controls Germany must be
politically exterminated. No pretended or half-way internal political
reforms, leaving a road for their return to power, will be sufficient.
Annihilate the Menace. The cancer must be cut out, with no roots left in
the body politic to spread its hideous disease again. Make an effective
job of it once for all. We want no chance, under the cloak of peace, for
the return of this monster.
"The time has come to conquer or submit," wrote President Wilson shortly
after our declaration of war. It is true. Can any one doubt what would
have happened to the United States of America if Prussian autocracy had
dictated terms of peace to vanquished Allies and as part of those terms
had taken over the allied fleet and obtained territory in Canada? Or can
any one doubt what will now happen to all the democracies if the present
Pan-Germany, now existing by means of Prussian victories in this war, is
during the next ten years consolidated, organized, Prussianized--and
then, a fighting machine twice as powerful as the machine of 1914,
hurled against the democracies? With an army of seven or eight million
men trained to the hour, with equipped reserves of ten or twelve million
more, with a complete network of military railroads capable of
concentrating the units of this engine of destruction wherever military
strategy shall designate, and with aeroplanes and transatlantic
submarines in proportion, what chance will the democracies have?
In the second place, it ought to be very clear that future power and
prosperity on the part of the plain people of Germany will be no bar to
securing our rights, provided, however, that this power and prosperity
is not owned and controlled by Prussian autocracy so that it can again
be forced into a huge fighting machine to put the rest of the world in
terror. The spirit of Lafayette, although its fight against such masters
is eternal, will not lead in a war of conquest or annihilation against
the German people.
"We have no quarrel with the German people," said the President of the
United States in his message of April 2, 1917. "We have no feeling
toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their
impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was not
with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon
as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples
were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged
in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who
were accustomed to use their fellowmen as pawns and tools." It was a war
determined upon by the same Menace that thrust the democrat Lafayette
into a dungeon, and which so hated democracy that when compelled to
release him it attempted to impose terms that he should be deported to
America, never again to place foot on Prussian or Austrian soil.
The corollary of this is that the best security for the rights of
democracy is the establishment of a republic in Germany. A real
republic, not a sham one. This is the one definite, concrete fact which
would make the world safer for its peoples.
When will the German people see the light? When will there be a
government of the people of Germany, for the people, and by the people?
The shades of her dead, led to the slaughter by a merciless and
heartless autocracy in a needless war, cry out for it. What say you, you
men of Germany? Among you are men whose souls are brave and strong and
true, an unnumbered host. How long, slaves, will you bend your backs to
the lash of your military masters? They lied to you and made you
believe the Fatherland was attacked, and led you, dupes, into a war of
conquest. Your modern Pilate, in his blasphemous pride, with the name of
God upon his lips and the blood of innocents upon his hands, is now
crucifying Freedom upon his cross of iron. But the day of the
resurrection will come; and how will your record stand then? Awake, ye
free of Germany! When shall you come into your own?
Every hour that the coming of such a republic is shortened means just so
much less agony for the peoples of the world. There is no better pledge
for the safety of democracy. "Self-governed nations," said the President
of the United States in the message referred to above, "do not fill
their neighbour states with spies or set the course of intrigue to
bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an
opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be
successfully worked out only under cover and where no one has the right
to ask questions. Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression,
carried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be worked out and
kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or behind the
carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are
happily impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full
information concerning all the nation's affairs."