It is a proverb that things done in secret soon or late are published
from the housetops.
Certainly everything that was hidden as to the plots of the Potsdam gang
is, little by little, now being revealed.
Nothing illustrates this fact better than that volume published in
Leipsic in 1907, called "Reminiscences of Ten Years in the German
Embassy in Washington, D. C."
When that aged diplomat published the story of his diplomatic career he
doubtless thought that the volume prepared for his children and
grandchildren and friends was forever buried in the German language. It
never even occurred to the Councillor of the Ambassador, von Holleben,
that the book would ever fall into the hands of any American. The very
fact that an American author found the volume in a second-hand
bookstore of Vienna in 1914 and translated the three chapters on the
Kaiser's representatives in the United States and the organization of
the German-American League, must have roused the Foreign Department in
Berlin to the highest point of anger.
Children and diplomats oftentimes unconsciously betray the most
important secrets. No volume ever published could possibly have revealed
matters of greater moment to Germany than this volume of reminiscences
that sets forth the propaganda carried on in the United States by
Ambassador von Holleben and his legal councillor for the furthering of
the Pan-German Empire scheme.
No scholar can doubt the right of this old diplomat to speak. The Kaiser
personally vouched for him by giving him this important duty. The
honours bestowed at the end of his long diplomatic career tell their own
story. Every page breathes sincerity and truthfulness. No one who reads
this volume can doubt that this author gave the exact facts--facts well
known to his German friends--in the recollections of his diplomatic
career.
This diplomat tells us plainly that von Holleben and himself were sent
to the United States specially charged with the task of reuniting
Germans who were naturalized in America with the German Empire.
It was their duty to organize secret German-American societies in every
great city like New York and Brooklyn, Chicago and Milwaukee, Cincinnati
and St. Louis, and to present to these societies a German flag sent from
the hands of the Kaiser himself.
Their work, says the author, was based upon the fact that the Kaiser had
passed a law restoring full citizenship in Germany to those Germans who
had become naturalized citizens of the United States. When, therefore,
these members of the German-American League formally accepted their
restored citizenship their first duty was to the Fatherland and the
Kaiser and their second duty to the United States and its Government.
Indeed, this lawyer and author actually goes so far as to give extracts
from von Holleben's speech before the German-American League in Chicago
when he presented the society with a German flag and swore the members
to the old-time allegiance.
He says that in some way the editor of the Chicago _Tribune_ found out
about this meeting and wrote a very severe editorial, after which, he
adds, that von Holleben and himself had to be more careful.
Concerning the Milwaukee meeting, he refers to a conversation which
revealed his judgment that if ever there was trouble between Germany and
the United States the war would partake of the nature of a civil war.
The author not only gives an account of the conference held at the
Waldorf-Astoria between Ambassador von Holleben, Professors Munsterberg
of Harvard and Schoenfield of Columbia and himself, on the one side, and
Herman Ridder on the other, but he gives the instructions from Berlin
that Herr Ridder could only keep his subsidy from the German Government
for the New Yorker _Staats Zeitung_ by placing his fealty to Germany
first and subordinating his Americanism, and that otherwise Ambassador
von Holleben would found a rival German paper that would have back of it
"unlimited resources, to wit: the total resources of the German Empire."
Here, then, is proof positive that the Kaiser began his efforts to
establish a pro-German movement against the United States for several
years before 1906 and that he methodically kept it up until the war
began.
Through it all he claimed to be our sincere friend; but he was then, as
he is to-day, an implacable and relentless enemy, with a heart laden
with hatred and bitterness.
2. The Kaiser's Character Revealed in His Choosing the Sultan for His
Friend
Nothing tests manhood like the choice of a bosom-friend. Criminals
choose bad associates.
Every Black Hand leader goes naturally towards the saloon, the gambling
house and the dens where thieves congregate. Dickens made Fagin surround
himself with pickpockets, burglars and murderers.
History tells us that Christianity has always kept good company. Its
friends have been architects, artists, poets and statesmen. Christianity
repeats itself through its friends in the Gothic Cathedral shaped in the
form of the cross, in the Transfiguration of Raphael, the Duomo of
Giotto, the Paradise Lost of Milton, the In Memoriam of Tennyson, the
Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln. Christianity has never formed any
close friendships with jails, gallows or slave ships. Men like Gladstone
and Lincoln always kept good company; their friends have been scholars
and heroes; but, in striking contrast, consider the friends selected by
the Kaiser.
To the Kaiser came a critical hour; at that moment he was at the parting
of the ways. It became necessary for him to make a choice of friends.
Like every man, his isolation was impossible and friendship became a
necessity.
The Kaiser had the whole world from which to choose. Yonder in London
were King Edward and his son, the Prince of Wales. In France were
certain statesmen and scientists like Curie. There was the old hero
living in the capital of Japan and two ex-Presidents known the world
around for their splendid manhood; and he could have made overtures of
friendship to any one of these brave men; but in the silence of the
night the Kaiser passed in review earth's great men, and finally
selected for his close friend the lowest of the low--the butcher,
unspeakable butcher--the Sultan of Turkey.
At that time the Sultan had just completed the butchery of many
Armenians. His garments were red with blood, his hands dripped with
gore. His house was a harem; his hand held a dagger. The sea-wall behind
his palace rose out of the blue waters of the Bosporus.
When an American battle-ship was anchored there and a diver went down he
pulled a rope and was brought up, shivering with terror, and saying that
he found himself surrounded with corpses tied in sacks and held down by
stones at the bottom of the sea.
In that hour the Kaiser exclaimed: "Let the Sultan be my associate! I
will go to Constantinople and sign a treaty with the unspeakable
butcher."
And so the Kaiser took his train, lived in the Sultan's palace, signed
this treaty, and hired the Sultan's knife and club, just as the Chief
Priest Annas chose Judas to be his representative upon whom he could
load the responsibility for the murder of Jesus.
Never was a friendship more damnable. Reared in a country that believed
in the sanctity of the marriage relation and in monogamy, the Kaiser
lined up with polygamy. The treaty that he made was thoroughgoing. He
sent out word to all Mohammedans, whether they lived in India or Persia,
in Arabia or Turkey, that they must remember that the Kaiser had entered
into a treaty to become their protector and friend. Having become a
Lutheran in Berlin, he became a Mohammedan in Constantinople on the
principle that "When you are in Rome do as the Romans do, and when you
are in hell act like the devil"--a simple principle which the Kaiser
proceeded to obey as soon as he reached Constantinople.
Every one knew that the Kaiser wanted to build a German railroad through
to Bagdad and the Persian Gulf; this would give him an outlet for
surplus goods to be sold in India. Serbia lay straight across the path,
and he had to work out some scheme to attack Serbia. Then he needed the
Sultan's friendship, and the end justified the means--and the end was
the Bagdad Railroad.
But the Turk tired of being the Kaiser's tool; he wanted more land; the
Armenian was in his way; the Turk was lazy, shiftless and a spendthrift.
The Armenian was industrious and hard-working. The Turk's method of
living made him poor. The gifts of the Armenian tended towards wealth.
Once in twenty years the Turk found himself a pauper and found the
Armenian rich; the result was envy and covetousness on the part of the
Sultan and his people. It became necessary to bribe the Turk to stand by
the Kaiser and his Baghdad Railroad. The Kaiser's German officers,
therefore, furnished the bribe.
"Let us go to this Armenian village, or that, and kill the people. We
German officers will take the large houses of the rich merchants and
move into them, and your Turkish soldiers can kill the old men, use the
Armenian girls for the harem, and fling the little children's bodies
into pits dug in the garden behind the house. We will enter the village
in the morning as soldiers; when the night comes, as Germans and Turks,
we will be the only people living in the Armenian village, and we will
move into their stores and take possession of their houses and their
looms."
"You cannot hang an entire nation," said Edmund Burke. "You must arrest
the leaders and hang them." Burke was right as to the punishment of
criminals, but he was wrong when it comes to murdering industrious and
honest Armenians. You can murder an entire nation, for the Germans and
the Turks have practically done it. Ambassador Morgenthau has just said
that the Kaiser and the Sultan through their forces have murdered nearly
a million Armenians. But, soon or late, remorse and conscience will take
hold upon these two unspeakable butchers with hands that drip with
blood--the butcher Kaiser, the butcher Sultan, that represent earth's
two murderous twins.