[Sidenote: Advance in humanity--until August, 1914.]
Until the present war the whole civilized world has boasted of its
advance in humanity. This advance had been marked in many fields, and
in none had greater progress been made than in the protection to be
given to the private citizen in an invaded country. As far back as
1863, in the _Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United
States in the Field_ the United States declared:
[Sidenote: United States treatment of civilians, 1863.]
"22. Nevertheless, as civilization has advanced during the last
centuries, so has likewise steadily advanced, especially in war on
land, the distinction between the private individual belonging to a
hostile country and the hostile country itself, with its men in arms.
The principle has been more and more acknowledged that the unarmed
citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honor as much as the
exigencies of war will admit.
"23. Private citizens are no longer murdered, enslaved, or carried
off to distant parts, and the inoffensive individual is as little
disturbed in his private relations as the commander of the hostile
troops can afford to grant in the overruling demands of a vigorous war.
"24. The almost universal rule in remote times was, and continues
to be with barbarous armies, that the private individual of the
hostile country is destined to suffer every privation of liberty and
protection, and every disruption of family ties. Protection was, and
still is with uncivilized people, the exception."
[Sidenote: German Government's reversion to barbarism.]
These declarations were made in the midst of our Civil War--one of
the world's fiercest conflicts. A half-century later, after more than
50 years of progress, the German Government has gone back to the
methods used by "barbarous armies" and "uncivilized people." It has
deliberately adopted the policy of deporting men and women, boys and
girls, and of forcing them to work for their captors; it has even
compelled them to make arms and munitions for use against their allies
and their own flesh and blood.
No other act of the German Government has aroused such horror and
detestation throughout the civilized world. Thousands of helpless men
and women, boys and girls, have been enslaved. Families have been
broken up. Girls have been carried off to work--or worse--in a strange
land, and their relatives have not known where they have been taken, or
what their fate has been.
This system of forced labor and deportation embraced the whole of
Belgium, Poland, and the occupied lands of France.
The plan for setting forth the essential facts of the deportations and
forced labor is as follows: the documents, that is to say, a small
fraction of those which could be cited, will be allowed to tell the
story, and only such comments will be added as are needed to enable the
reader easily to grasp the connection of events.