That is why our President, speaking for the republic, has told Germany
plainly that no treaty signed by the Emperor and his government
means anything whatsoever. There is no German in the Fatherland or
in the United States but understands thoroughly that the word of a
German statesman is less than nothing: the shadow of the shade of the
possibility of a cipher. Here is von Bernstorff, given his papers
and sent back to Berlin. Bernstorff gives out a final interview,
stating that he has the full approval of his conscience (a favourite
expression of German spies), in that he was carrying away from the
United States the full consciousness that he had never done one
deed or had one thought save to draw the Fatherland and the great
republic closer together, though all the time his secret agents had
been journeying back and forth between Washington and Mexico, carrying
bribes, organizing sedition, maturing plots, looking towards war
between Mexico and Texas, and pledging Carranza that Germany would
restore to her New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Scarcely less horrible
Luxburg's cipher despatch advising Germany to sink the steamers of
the Argentine Republic, "leaving no trace behind." In Norway the
German Ambassador from Berlin used his trunk, covered with the red
sealing wax of the Foreign Office, to carry bombs, and the cultures
of glanders and anthrax to spread disease among the Norwegian people
and to sink their steamers. In the old days of Cæsar Borgia in Italy,
poisoning was made a fine art. Whenever the Italian prince coveted a
rich man's palace, diamond ring, beautiful wife or young daughter, or
his villa, he invited the owner to dine at the palace, having first
of all poisoned the wine or the meat. Now the world has wakened up to
discover that the Borgias were children in the arts of dissimulation
and hypocrisy, and that Germany is the original inventor of perjury.
The Kaiser, Bethmann-Hollweg, von Bernstorff, and some pro-Germans in
this country have displayed a form of wickedness so cool, calculated,
and scientific, as to seem the characteristics of fiends, while their
plots to plant bombshells on our steamers, and kill innocent people by
the hundreds represent such hardened forms of fiendishness that even
the worst thief would scarcely dare hint at such crimes to his own
accomplice in devilishness.