A prophet is nearly always a bore. He is apt to be tiresome when
expounding his predictions, and likely to become a common nuisance
should his predictions come true. Indeed, the I-told-you-so person is
oftentimes a worse pest than the I-am-now-telling-you-so individual. I
have no desire to assume either rôle; but here lately I have not been
able to restrain my satisfaction at finding, as I believed, that two of
my own private convictions are about to be justified by the accomplished
fact. As a result of all that I saw and heard in the war zone, more than
two years and a half ago, I made up my mind to the probable consummation
of these contingencies--namely:
FIRST: That, despite her earlier successes, despite all her preparedness
and all her efficiency and all her valour, Germany eventually would be
defeated as the Southern Confederacy was defeated--by being bled white
and starved thin.
SECOND: That when to Germany's rulers this prospect became certain they
would with deliberate intent embroil the United States in the conflict
as an avowed and declared enemy, in order that the men who drove Germany
to the slaughter might save their faces before their own people, at the
front and at home, by saying to them in effect: "We were strong enough
to beat all Europe and all Asia; we were not strong enough to beat the
supreme Power of the New World too; we, with our allies, could not
withstand the combined forces of the whole earth."
Though Germany is still very far, one imagines, from the point of
complete exhaustion, it is not to be denied that she is bleeding white
and starving thin. And, as all fair-minded patriotic men on this side of
the ocean agree, she did, by a persistent campaign of aggressions
against our flag, and by murdering our people on the high seas, and by
plotting against our industries and our national integrity, finally
force us into the war.
Having been forced into the war, as we are, it is well that our people
should know to the fullest possible degree not only what they are
fighting for--the preservation of democracy in the world, for one
thing--but that likewise they should know and in that knowledge
recognise the danger to us, of the mental forces operating behind the
military arm of our national enemy.
I think they should know that in the minds of these self-idolaters, who
have laid claim to Creator and to creation as their own ordained
possessions, we shall stand in no different light than the Belgians
stand, or the Serbians, or the Poles, or the people of Northern France.
Upon us, if the chance is vouchsafed them, they would visit a heaping
measure of the same wrath they poured on those invaded and broken
nations of Europe, showing to Americans no more mercy than they showed
to them.
I deem it my duty, therefore, to write what already I have written in
this little book, and, before closing it, to append certain quotations,
as particularly illuminating evidences of the besetting mania that has
been fastened upon the brains of an otherwise rational race of our
fellow beings through two generations of crafty implanting and fostering
by greater maniacs, wearing crowns and shoulder straps, and--yes, the
livery of Our Lord and Master.
For the quotations from the poetic utterances of the Reverend Doctor
Vorwerk, which appeared in preceding paragraphs of this article, the
writer is indebted to a documentation compiled from authentic German
sources by a Dane, the Reverend J. P. Bang, D. D., professor of theology
at the University of Copenhagen, a famous Lutheran institution, under
the title of _Hurrah and Hallelujah_--which, incidentally, was a title
borrowed from the published poetic works of this same Doctor Vorwerk.
Doctor Bang's symposium has lately been published in English by the
American publisher, Doran, with an introduction by "Ralph Connor," the
Canadian novelist, otherwise Major Charles W. Gordon, of the Canadian
Overseas Forces.