Little by little under the influence of this Pan-German empire scheme,
the German people began to go to pieces morally. The breakdown of
character is slow. The most virulent disease needs time to destroy the
tissues, and poison the blood. The first to go over to the Potsdam
gang were the officers and the army. Next followed the university
professors, the bankers and the landowners. Last of all came the
manufacturers and the shippers, who for a long time were timid lest
their foreign trade be injured. Finally the state clergy, who received
their salary from the Kaiser's treasury, were whipped into line, and
men like Eucken, Harnack, heard the crack of the slave-driver's scourge
above their heads, and became abject servants.
At last the woven web was spread all over the world through spies.
Could any man have been lifted up above Berlin, and had full power to
survey the whole world, he would have seen a spider's web, with its
center in Berlin, with the Kaiser as the big black spider, sending out
along the sinuous threads into every capital of every country and of
every continent his evil plans and plots. Men like von Bernstorff in
Washington, and Münsterberg in Boston, von Bopp, recently convicted in
San Francisco, Luxburg in Buenos Ayres, with their schemes to blow
up munition factories, planting of bombshells in ships, dynamiting
Parliament buildings, blowing up bridges, organizing sedition in
Mexico, India, and Brazil, the millions and millions of dollars spent
in our own country, the secret decorations of medals given to bankers,
manufacturers, shippers, editors, newspaper boys, stenographers, make
up a story of Machiavellian deviltry and subtle cunning that has no
parallel. The only difference between Judas and the average German
spy is that the modern spy in the United States would not only have
betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, but would have given ten
per cent. off for cash. All that Germany won in three hundred years
through the teachings of Martin Luther has been lost in twenty-five
years through the influence of the Kaiser and his militarists. In the
presence of all the world we have seen Germany lose her soul. All that
John Milton taught, as to the fall of Satan as an angel, becoming a
devil, has been literally enacted on the stage before the nations of
the earth. What in 1900 was efficiency, in 1914 became the science of
lying, theft, rape, poison and assassination.