American population to make them the pretext and justification of a timid policy in our foreign affairs. The concluding sentence of President Wilson's message was very felicitous. It is a paraphrase of Luther's immortal statement at the Diet of Worms. ("Here I take my stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me.") This memorable statement, which proved one of the turning points in history, proclaimed something more than the quarrel of a monk with his ecclesiastical superiors. Luther represented the democratic spirit of Germany which was then rising against the arrogance of autocratic power as represented by the Kaiser Charles V. . President Wilson by this happy paraphrase reminded the German-Americans of our country and the German people that the best spirit of Germany is not that of the Hohenzollerns or of the Junkers, but of the quiet, patient, long-suffering German Michel, whose worst fault is the extreme to which he carries the docility of discipline, his excessive love of authority, and the avidity with which he accepts all that a censored press tells him. A censorship of the press has stifled for three years the voice of the nobler Germany, but that voice, silenced as it may be when a Liebknecht is im prisoned, will yet be heard. The land of Goethe and Schiller, Bach and Beethoven, Dürer and Holbein, Humboldt and Lessing, is not dead. It is only for the moment gagged and stifled. The cry of the German people is that of the dying Goethe: "More light!" When they recognize, as recognize they must at no distant date, that there can be no peace for them and no resumption of friendly relations with the rest of the world until they have rid themselves of the incubus of Hohenzollernism, then will come in very truth the reckoning. Even a governmental press-next to the Hohenzollerns the greatest curse of Germanycannot silence the mutterings of the coming storm in that land of horrors. The Russian convulsion will find its reflex in a land where the greatest political party in numbers, the so-called Socialists, are those of democratic tendencies, and bravely, under the most trying conditions, represent the opposition to Prussian tyranny. The hand of the crippled cobbler of Zabern will yet be mightier than that of the Crown Prince. As Longfellow sang of Germany many years ago: "Not thy councils, not thy Kaisers, Germany's high qualities of courage, steadfastness, and infinite self-sacrifice are worthy of all praise. I venture the prediction that no nation will ultimately profit more by the stupendous sacrifices of this war. It only needs to be relieved from the incubus of Hohenzollern tyranny to become an infinitely greater people than its poets, prophets, and seers have ever dreamed, while with the Hohenzollerns dominating its destinies with mediæval despotism, it will not have a true friend in the world. The continuance of that despotism is a menace to democracy and civilization. As the cry rang through Europe in 1814, “enough of Bonaparte!" so let the cry now sound through civilization in the words of Voltaire, Ecrasez l'infâme!" 66 That day of deliverance is measurably nearer realization since Woodrow Wilson committed his great nation to the ordeal of battle and counselled his countrymen to unsheathe the sword of America in order, to quote his inspiring words, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included; for the right of nations, great and small, and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. |