The members of the A. P. L. have drawn aside the masks and found hundreds of thousands of two-faced "citizens" amenable to no sense of honor and fair play, hating the flag they have sworn to honor. America does not need those people. America needs only the facts about them. The judgment thereon will be written in the next two generations of American history.
The plea of Germany for food after the Armistice was only part of her old propaganda. Her attempts to split this country away from the Allies is now carried on only as a part of her old systematic propaganda. It behooves us to be well aware of such methods, since we once have known them. Germany will not be allowed at the peace table. She will not be allowed in the League of Nations. Why? Because she has lost the right to shake the hand of honorable soldiers. How about honorable citizens?
There is not so much bitterness as cold and relentless reason in all such statements. But you may get a trace of bitterness from the press of Europe, suffering as Europe has all these years under the ruthlessness of German war. There is indeed "every reason for belief that other pledges would be as treacherously shattered did not the victors control the only agency which Germany understands—sheer material force. There can be no compassion based on any code of sound morality for people so despicable as to snivel for help in the midst of an orgy of cowardly iniquity. Germany in this last and most loathsome of her ugly roles should excite about as much legitimate sympathy as a hungry snake."
The murders of Liebknecht and of Rosa Luxemburg have excited certain strange comment in the German press. "What will the world think of us?" asks the German paper Vorwaerts, "if we commit murders such as this?"
That certainly is a purely German question! It is a trifle academic. What in Germany is the murder of one woman or one man? The seventh of May, 1915, was proclaimed a national holiday in Germany. On the seventh of May in 1916, 1917, 1918, the German people closed their shops and their factories, and in holiday attire paraded the streets to celebrate that glorious German victory when a submarine sank an unarmed vessel and murdered more than a thousand
