The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon Part 1

The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon.

by Newell Dwight Hillis.

Note

These brief articles are sparks struck as it were from the anvil of events. They were written on trains, in hotels, in the intervals between public addresses. During the past year beginning October 1, 1917, Dr.

Hillis, in addition to his work in Plymouth Church, and as President of The Plymouth Inst.i.tute, has visited no less than one hundred and sixty-two cities, and made some four hundred addresses on "The National Crisis," "How Germany Lost Her Soul," "The Philosophy of the German Atrocities," and "The Pan-German Empire Plot," the substance of these lectures and addresses being given in the book, "German Atrocities,"

heretofore published. These articles are ill.u.s.trative of and supplementary to the principles stated in that volume.

While consenting to publication, the author was not afforded opportunity for full revision of this second volume, being again called over-seas just as this book was being put into type. This will account for the form in which the material appears.

THE ARCH-CRIMINAL

I

1. The Kaiser's Hatred of the United States

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 ill.u.s.trates this fact better than that volume published in Leipsic in 1907, called "Reminiscences of Ten Years in the German Emba.s.sy 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 Amba.s.sador, 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 Amba.s.sador 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 pa.s.sed 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 Amba.s.sador 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 Amba.s.sador 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 a.s.sociates.

Every Black Hand leader goes naturally towards the saloon, the gambling house and the dens where thieves congregate. d.i.c.kens made f.a.gin 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 Emanc.i.p.ation 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 j.a.pan 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 pa.s.sed 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 a.s.sociate! 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 d.a.m.nable. Reared in a country that believed in the sanct.i.ty 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 h.e.l.l 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. Amba.s.sador 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.

3. Pershing's Charges versus the Kaiser

Nothing measures a man so accurately as the names he gives to his favourite son. Most significant, therefore, is the fact that the Kaiser named his second son Eitel, or Attila. Who was this Attila who has captured the imagination of the Kaiser? He was a Hun who devastated Italy fifteen hundred years ago. The motto of this black-hearted murderer Attila the Hun was: "Where my feet fall, let gra.s.s not grow for a hundred years." When the Kaiser read Attila's story he exclaimed: "That is the man for me!" First, he named his favourite son for Attila the Hun. Second, in sending his German soldiers out to China, and later in 1914 to Belgium, he gave them this charge: "You will take no prisoners; you will show no mercy; you will give no quarter; you will make yourselves as terrible as the Huns under Attila." Plainly the Kaiser knew his men. He knew that they were capable of outdoing even that monster Attila the Hun. So he sent them forth to bayonet babes, violate old women, murder old men, crucify officers, violate nuns, sink _Lusitanias_, and turn solemn treaties into sc.r.a.ps of paper.

Now over against the Kaiser's charge, black as h.e.l.l, and big with death, witness Pershing's charge, reported loosely by a French boy, with his imperfect knowledge of English, translated out of the French newspapers on July 18, 1917. Pershing's brief address comes to this:

"Young soldiers of America, you are here in France to help expel an invading enemy; but you are also here to lift a shield above the poor and weak; you will safeguard all property; you will lift a shield above the aged and oppressed; you will be most courteous to women, gentle and kind to little children; guard against temptation of every kind; fear G.o.d, fight bravely, defend Liberty, honour your native land. G.o.d have you in His keeping." "Pershing."

The difference between yonder lowest h.e.l.l in its uttermost abyss and yonder highest heaven, where standeth the throne of a just G.o.d, is not greater than the chasm that separates that unspeakable butcher, the Kaiser, from General Pershing and the American soldier boys, who have never betrayed in France, the n.o.blest ideals of service cherished by the people of the American Republic.

4. Who Taught the Kaiser That a Treaty Is a Sc.r.a.p of Paper?