A singular revulsion of sentiment as to what must be done with the
German army after the war, is now sweeping over the civilized world. Men
who once were pacifists, men of chivalry and kindness, men whose life
has been devoted to philanthropy and reform, scholars and statesmen,
whose very atmosphere is compassion and magnanimity towards the poor and
weak, are now uttering sentiments that four years ago would have been
astounding beyond compare. These men feel that there is no longer any
room in the world for the German. Society has organized itself against
the rattlesnake and the yellow fever. Shepherds have entered into a
conspiracy to exterminate the wolves. The Boards of Health are planning
to wipe out typhoid, cholera and the Black Plague. Not otherwise, lovers
of their fellow man have finally become perfectly hopeless with
reference to the German people. They have no more relations to the
civilization of 1918 than an orang-outang, a gorilla, a Judas, a hyena,
a thumbscrew, a scalping knife in the hands of a savage. These brutes
must be cast out of society.
Some of us, hoping against hope, after the reluctant confession of the
truth of the German atrocities, have appealed to education. We knew that
Tacitus said, nearly two thousand years ago, that "the German treats
women with cruelty, tortures his enemies, and associates kindness with
weakness." But nineteen centuries of education have not changed the
German one whit. The mere catalogue of the crimes committed by German
officers and soldiers and set forth in more than twenty volumes of
proofs destroys the last vestige of hope for their future. Think of the
catalogue! Babies nailed like rats to the doors of houses! Children
skewered on a bayonet midst the cheers of marching Germans--as if the
child were a quail, skewered on a fork! Matrons, old men and priests
slaughtered; young Italian officers with throats cut and hanging on
hooks in butchers' shops; the bombing of Red Cross hospitals and nurses
and the white flag; everything achieved by civilized man defiled and
destroyed--reverence for childhood and age, the sanctity of womanhood,
the standards of honour, fidelity to treaties and all destroyed, not in
a mood of drunkenness or a fit of rage, but on a deliberate, cold,
calculated policy of German frightfulness.
The sense of hopelessness as to civilizing the German and keeping him as
an element in the new society grew out of the breakdown of education and
science in changing the German of the time of Tacitus. Plainly the time
has come to make full confession of the fact that education can change
the size but not the sort. The German in the time of Tacitus was
ignorant when he took the children of his enemy and dashed their brains
out against the wall; the German of 1914 and 1918 still butchers
children, the only difference being that the butchery is now more
efficient and better calculated, through scientific cruelty, to stir
horror and spread frightfulness. The leopard has not changed its spots.
The rattlesnake is larger and has more poison in the sac; the German
wolf has increased in size, and where once he tore the throat of two
sheep, now he can rend ten lambs in half the time. In utter despair,
therefore, statesmen, generals, diplomats, editors are now talking about
the duty of simply exterminating the German people. There will shortly
be held a meeting of surgeons in this country. A copy of the preliminary
call lies before me. The plan to be discussed is based upon the Indiana
State law. That law authorizes a State Board of Surgeons to use upon the
person of confirmed criminals and hopeless idiots the new painless
method of sterilizing the men. These surgeons are preparing to advocate
the calling of a world conference to consider the sterilization of the
ten million German soldiers, and the segregation of their women, that
when this generation of German goes, civilized cities, states and races
may be rid of this awful cancer that must be cut clean out of the body
of society.