D D 
 
 UC-NRLF 
 
 B H SD7 DIS 
 
GIFT OF 
 
GIFT 
 I^OV 20 1918 
 
 GERMANY'S MOST 
 
 SUCCESSFUL 
 
 HOAX 
 
 How Germany .Imposed Upon the World the 
 Myth of her Supremacy in Social Progress, In- 
 dustry and Invention, and the Arts and Sciences 
 
 Germany's Boasts vs. The Facts 
 
 Behind the Camouflage of a Social Paradise 
 Poverty and Indigence Abounded. "Kultur" 
 Revealed in Enslavement of Underpaid 
 Workers, Appalling Rate of Infant Mortality 
 and Child Suicides, and Misery of Out- 
 cast Aged Poor. German Achievements 
 in Industry and Science Based on the Rob- 
 bery of the Inventions and Discoveries of 
 Other Nations., ,In Her Claims to Pre- 
 eminence vn A,rt :aad, .Literature "Germany 
 Presented the Spiectacle" of the Belly-god 
 Seeking, to Filoh thel.ajure)8 of Apollo" 
 
 hy 
 RALPH M. EASLEY 
 
 1918 
 
rV 
 
 ^1/ 
 
 A 
 
GERMANY'S MOST SUCCESSFUL HOAX 
 
 By Ralph M. Easley 
 
 While Germany was preparing armies and manufacturing 
 cannon for her intended onslaught for world dominion she was 
 engaged at the same time in a ''peaceful oifensive" designed to 
 win from America an overwhelming and subservient admira- 
 tion and esteem which should disarm our indignation and render 
 us inert when the time for her first blow came. To camouflage 
 her baleful preparations and sinister intentions, Germany dur- 
 ing those years presented herself as a nation, which by industry, 
 thrift and the practice of homely virtues, had not only become 
 prosperous in peaceful industry but had evolved a social paradise 
 for the working classes. A benefactor among the nations, seek- 
 ing only to wipe out disease and all the ills of mankind, Germany 
 exploited her leadership in science, medicine, inventions, in in- 
 dustry and commerce, in the uplift of the working classes and 
 the elimination of poverty. In the arts, she arrogated to herself 
 the highest place among the muses. Until the world was stunned 
 by her treacherous blow to Belgium all that Germany claimed 
 (vas taken at its face value. Germany had herself made the 
 phrase ** German honesty'^ an axiom. None questioned her 
 most sweeping claims; acceptance became tacit. During those 
 unsuspecting days Germany accomplished her supreme achieve- 
 ment — the imposition upon the world of the most colossal fake 
 in history. 
 
 The world, without knowing very much about it, swallowed 
 the boast that Germany was ''over all" in music, art and 
 literature ; that she had become the saviour of mankind from the 
 afflictions of disease by her discoveries in bacteriology and medi- 
 cine; that she was the A-number-one object lesson in industrial 
 economy, and was indeed the fairy godmother of the nations 
 who, by a wave of her Prussian wand, had banished the immemo- 
 rial ills of the hitherto downtrodden laboring classes. Where it 
 came to fostering the gracious arts, on what Germany reported 
 and her fatuous admirers furthered, the Hohenzollern autocracy 
 made the ducal patrons of Milan appear as "pikers." In Ger- 
 many, we were told, genius was recognized and the poet was 
 peer to the peers ; only in America had literature and art become 
 commercial, so that the poets and writers who refused to sell 
 themselves to the capitalistic magazines were compelled to live 
 in indigency. American education was a poor thing at best, 
 while German universities were the final seat of learning — an 
 idea assiduously fostered by the German University League, 
 
 383543 
 
Prof. Hugo Muensterberg and by little American professors who 
 yearned for an exchange-professorship in some German institu- 
 tion. What most impressed the working classes of America — 
 whom Germany most wanted to alienate from their own Gov- 
 ernment and render discontented — was the myth that German 
 workers, alone favored among all the workers of the world, en- 
 joyed millenially ideal conditions of working and living. While 
 the Teuton propaganda boasting Germany's supremacy in cul- 
 ture, education, etcetera, was abetted by such American admirers 
 as Prof. John W. Burgess, Dr. Ernest Flagg Henderson and 
 George Sylvester Viereck, the social progress myth was indus- 
 triously and zealously carried on by such writers as Fred. C. 
 Howe, Dr. Roger W. Babson and Morris Hillquit. Where these 
 gentry left off, Germany's publicity game of deception after the 
 outbreak of the war was still furthered by Dr. Bernhard Dern- 
 burg, Dr. William Bayard Hale, Dr. Edward A. Rumely, Jere- 
 miah 'Leary, and others now in unsavory repute. 
 
 For nearly a quarter of a century — and while thousands of 
 Germans fled to other countries to find new homes — the American 
 people have been told that the German masses were well fed and 
 happy, that from infancy to old age they were solicitously cared 
 for by a fatherly government, that workers enjoyed shorter 
 hours and higher pay than those of other countries, that they 
 had picturesque homes, cheap food in plenty. According to the 
 reports, in Germany there was no poverty, slums did not exist, 
 German babies were provided with pasteurized milk and cared 
 for in krippen and clinics, and in sere old age, instead of poverty 
 or the almhouse, the happy Germans enjoyed ease, comfort and 
 freedom from worry through the marvellous German system of 
 pensions. 
 
 In fact, so delightful were the living conditions of the masses 
 of German workers before the war, as presented by various 
 paid and unpaid promoters of German propaganda, includ- 
 ing certain American sociological ''experts," that many 
 people in this country pined for the paradise provided by 
 the Kaiser for his devoted subjects. Especially were Socialist 
 leaders, whose political philosophy came from Germany and who 
 opposed our going to war with Germany, outspoken in the belief 
 that the German system was better than our own. J. 0. Bentall, 
 former Socialist candidate for Governor of Minnesota (later 
 found guilty by a jury in the Federal court of Minneapolis of 
 violating the espionage act, and also under sentence for obstruct- 
 ing the draft), declared in effect in a public speech: ''What if 
 the Germans come over and rule us? What do we care who 
 governs us so long as we are well fed and happy?" 
 
 Of the various kinds of German propaganda which have been 
 sprung upon the world at a cost of millions of dollars, none was 
 so successful as this. It served to cloak the sinister purposes 
 of the Imperial German Government. It enlisted the regard of 
 the working classes and intellectuals of other nations. It caused 
 
many people, after the outbreak of the war, to temporize for 
 Germany, and served to allay the righteous indignation and 
 horror aroused by the bestial atrocities of her military hordes. 
 
 The system which has been worked out in Germany is what 
 the German autocracy by force of might would impose upon the 
 people of the world. Should it be desired with outstretched armg 
 as a blessing for all mankind? The Allies have given their 
 answer, and America has given her answer. Yet so long- 
 continued and persistent was the German propaganda, that many 
 Americans are still in ignorance of the actual facts concerning 
 conditions in Germany. When they realize what actually existed 
 they will better understand why the peoples of the world must 
 resist the thing called Prussianism with force to the utmost. 
 
 Extolled Soclvl InsuRxVnce and Farm Loan System a Farce. 
 
 What are the facts back of these claims for superior working, 
 social, and economic conditions in Germany? The League for 
 National Unity undertook to assemble the facts regarding these 
 conditions up to the outbreak of the war. These facts, drawn 
 from official German documents and other authoritative sources, 
 have been available at any time in our public libraries to the 
 ** social reformers" who have so misled the American people on 
 these matters. The studies were prepared for the League by 
 Gustavus Myers, the well-known research expert and historian. 
 They deal with the following topics : 
 
 Oppression of the farmers. 
 
 Underpaid workers. 
 
 Industrial enslavement of women and children. 
 
 Shocking housing conditions. 
 
 Chronic underfeeding and great infant mortality. 
 
 The large extent of pauperism. 
 
 Counterfeit social insurance. 
 
 The facts and figures quoted by me in this article are based 
 on Mr. Myers 's report. Now let us see what they reveal : 
 
 That conditions under which workers and farmers in Germany 
 lived and worked were intolerable in the extreme; that women 
 and children worked like beasts of burden on farms and in the 
 cities; that sweatshops abounded; that the majority of workers 
 lived in foul, wretched tenements; that they suffered from lack 
 of food and fuel, and labored for stretches of hours unparalleled 
 in other countries for starvation wages. 
 
 As for the so-called social insurance laws, what did they 
 amount to ? According to the Amtliche Naehrichten des Reichs- 
 Versicherung-Amt, Berlin, the average invalidity pension in 
 1913 was $46.51 a year — less than $1 a week. The average 
 sickness pension was $48.45 a year — also less than $1 a week. 
 
The average old-age pension was $39.75 a year — about 76 cents 
 a week. The average widow's and widower's pension v/as $18.49 
 a year — about 35 cents a week. The average widow's siekaess 
 pension was $18.59 a year and the average orphan's pension 
 $19.07 a year. These were the pensions in a country where the 
 poorest paid adult, living in the lowest possible scale, needed at 
 least $140 to $155 a year for the cost of the barest subsistence. 
 
 The American press agents of Teutonic superiority have ex- 
 tolled the various social reform measures, particularly the pro- 
 visions for giving financial credit to small farmers. In the 
 United States the Federal Farm Loan Act operates to the benefit 
 of small farmers who actually till the soil, and eliminates ab- 
 sentee landlords. Loans from $100 to $10,000 are made on land 
 security and improvements, from five to forty years, repayable 
 on easy terms and at a low rate of interest. From the time 
 the Federal Farm Loan Act was put into operation up to Dec. 
 1, 1917, in less than six months, $30,000,000 was loaned. Yet 
 these very American farmers have been told that the German 
 Government is much more generous. But is this so ? 
 
 Dr. Kapp Konigsberg, General Director of the Prussian 
 Landschaften — the Mutual Farm Loan Associations — testifying 
 before a visiting commission in 1912, admitted that the systems 
 of loans on landed property had benefited chiefly the landown- 
 ing aristocracy. 
 
 *'0f the estates," he testified, "which exceed 100 hectares 
 (a hectare is not quite 2^^ acres) 66.3 per cent, have availed 
 themselves of landschaft loans; the corresponding proportion in 
 the case of peasant holdings is only 13.5 per cent. ' ' 
 
 The meaning of this is clear when it is explained that in 
 Germany 2,084,000 farm holdings are under li^ acres, 1,294,449 
 farm holdings are from li/4 to 5 acres, 1,006,277 farm holdings 
 from 5 to 12l^ acres, and 1,065,539 farm holdings from 12% 
 to 50 acres. The Landwirtschaftliche Betriebsstatistik, Part 2-B, 
 published by the Imperial Statistical Office, Berlin, 1912, fur- 
 ther shows that while the millions of peasant farmers have only 
 tiny farms, 23,566 Junkers — feudal barons or magnate farmers 
 — own nearly 25,000,000 acres, embraced in estates of 250 to 
 500 acres'and more. Of the farms in Germany, 36.3 per cent, 
 are under I14 acres, 22.6 per cent. I14 to 5 acres, 17.5 per cent. 
 5 to 12 acres, 18.6 per cent. 12i/^ to 50 acres, 4.6 per cent. 50 
 to 250 acres, 0.2 per cent. 250 to 500 acres, and 0.2 per cent. 
 500 acres and over. 
 
 It can therefore be seen what an insignificant proportion 
 of the small farmers have received the aid of loans from these 
 Mutual Farm Loan Associations. In their inception they were 
 meant for the landed aristocrats, and have remained so. 
 
 Much praise has been accorded the annuity banks of Ger- 
 many by infatuated admirers of the paternal Prussian system. 
 To what extent have these banks benefited small farmers? 
 They were established in 1850, and enlarged in functions later 
 
by legislation. They have served, in the words of Dr. Augsbin 
 of Berlin '*in facilitating the redemption of old servitudes en- 
 cumbering the lands of peasants, so as to enable the peasant 
 farmer to buy off the feudal dues incumbering his land. ' * These 
 banks issue annuity bonds, guaranteed by the Prussian Govern- 
 ment, which run from fifty to sixty years, and by 1909 the 
 amount issued was more than 500,000,000 marks. Thus the 
 peasants of Germany are compelled to pay off dues for feudal 
 impositions of five centuries ago. 
 
 The vast proportion of farms are so small that the farmers 
 cannot afford machinery, and instead use the labor of women 
 and children. Does one see women and children hitched with 
 oxen and dogs, drawing plows and carts, in the United States? 
 ''In Germany," reported F. J. H. von Engelken, (President of 
 the Federal Farm Loan Bank of Columbia, S. C.,) member of a 
 visiting American commission, ''the greater proportion of the 
 farm work is done by women. It is a common sight to see women 
 hoeing or pitching hay or spreading manure." And what were 
 the generous emoluments in prosperous, happy Germany? Ac- 
 cording to testimony given on farm wages in 1912 a woman 
 farm laborer earned from 38 to 48 cents a day, and children 
 over 12 years got 24 cents a day, without board. Male farm 
 labor got 72 cents a day. 
 
 The happy farmers of Germany! The demeaning caste sys- 
 tem which sharply defines a peasant in Germany is surpassed 
 in rigidity perhaps only in India. 
 
 The peasant farmer is sharply defined in a class by himself. 
 In the United States every agriculturist, whether proprietary 
 farmer, tenant farmer or farm laborer, has the equal right to 
 vote. But in Germany only farmers (and many farmers are 
 renters) who pay taxes are allowed to vote, and even they are 
 only allowed to vote for the Reichstag, which is merely a debating 
 society. Women have no vote. A peasant the little farmer is, 
 and he stays a peasant. 
 
 Educational System Makes Germans Vassals from 
 Childhood. 
 
 The educational system is so devised that, generation after 
 generation, the child is educated so that he will remain in the 
 station of life in which he was born. The Kaiser's Government 
 sees well to it that the child's mind and movements are molded 
 for uses the autocracy wants to make of it in its militaristic 
 and intrenched caste system. The Junkers believe in the divine 
 rights of kings, and lording it as they do over the peasants, 
 use the so-called educational system to fill the peasants' minds 
 with that doctrine. 
 
 The entire educational system of Germany is designed to 
 keep the people vassals of the Junker autocracy. Prof. Thomas 
 Alexander, who spent many years studying the Prussian schools, 
 describes them thus: 
 
"The Volkschulen (people's schools) in Germany are, there- 
 fore, for the very large underclass. Class lines are very marked, 
 and those lower orders of society which send their children to 
 the Volkschulen very rarely ever think of breaking over into 
 the forbidden fields. There is, therefore, a marked difference 
 in the quality of pupils in the upper schools and those of the 
 lower. The lower classes unconsciously admit their inferiority 
 in their attitude to the ruling ten thousand, and they have main- 
 tained this attitude for so long, that they are now really inferior, 
 mentally, morally and physically. 
 
 ''The first great aim of German elementary education is the 
 production of an. efficient German citizen * * * who is ready 
 and willing to take his place in that part of the social order 
 to which he belongs. 
 
 "The second aim is the * * * need of producing in large 
 numbers a type of citizenship easily amenable to the dictates 
 of hureaucratic officialdom. This under class is composed of 
 the peasants, small tradesmen, subordinate officials, artisans and 
 other laboring classes, together comprising fully ninety per cent 
 of the total population * * * The great mass have been molded 
 and cast in one die — they think alike, they act alike. What 
 they think and do is determined by the leaders of the nation. 
 This is accomplished by the Volkschulen * * * for the masses 
 * * * respond as a man to the slightest suggestion of au- 
 thority." 
 
 That "authority" is, of course, the HohenzoUern autocracy, 
 with its mainstays, the Junkers and the Bureaucracy. The mass 
 of the German people are brought up and taught to be their 
 dupes. 
 
 As long ago as 1890 the Kaiser in a public speech at the 
 Berlin Conference on Secondary Education sneered at "an over 
 production of a highly educated people," declared that "the 
 gentlemen who write for the press are a danger to us," and 
 concluded with habitual emphasis on the autocractic I : "I will 
 therefore approve the foundation of no more such schools in 
 the future unless their necessity can be proved. We have enough 
 of them already. ' ' The Kaiser wanted no independent, thinking 
 people; a submissive mass was what the military machine de- 
 manded and meant to have; education was to be reserved as 
 much as possible for the privileged castes. 
 
 The debauchment, by this system of education, of an entire 
 people from their childhood accounts for the phenomenal sub- 
 missiveness of the Germans to their rulers and their resignation 
 to the most intolerable oppressions. Their very virtue of in- 
 dustriousness has been perverted by their masters into tacit 
 slavery. 
 
 In the United States the ten-hour workday was established 
 in 1840 and the eight-hour workday received Congressional 
 sanction in 1869. Up to the very beginning of the war the 
 general workday for highly skilled trades in Germany was fif ty- 
 
 6 
 
seven to sixty hours a week and in other trades twelve to 
 fourteen hours a day. The average usual hours for labor, ac- 
 cording to the replies of German employers to the British Board 
 of Trade Inquiry, in 1908 were: Fifty-four hours for com- 
 positors; 59 hours in the building trades; 591/2 hours in the 
 engineering trades. By comparison, hours of labor in Germany 
 were 8 to 12 per cent, higher than in England and 10 to 34 
 per cent, higher than in the United States. 
 
 As for those reported high wages, we have the facts given 
 by Dr. R. R. Kucznski, director of the municipal statistical 
 office of Schoeneberg, who was commissioned by the German 
 Imperial Treasury Department to prepare a memorial. In 1907 
 the following wages prevailed in the prosperous Fatherland : 
 
 Miners, hard coal mines, an average of $334 a year. 
 
 Miners, soft coal mines, an average of $297 a year. 
 
 Workers in salt mines and works, an average of $309 a year. 
 
 Miners in copper mines, an averacre of $271 a year. 
 
 Miners in iron mines, an average of $266 a year. 
 
 Masons, $1.26 to $1.61 a day. 
 
 Carpenters, $1.24 to $1.61 a day. 
 
 Plumbers, gas fitters, and steam fitters, $1.13 to $1.39 a day. 
 
 Stonecutters, $1.62 to $1.72 a day. 
 
 Krupp plant, at Essen, average daily earnings, $1.27. 
 
 Journeymen printers, $6.55 to $7.44 a week. 
 
 Skilled State railway shopworkers, 86 cents to $1.02 a day. 
 
 Engineers, conductors, &c.. State railway, 70 cents a day. 
 
 Artisans and mechanics, State railway, 98 cents to $1.09 a 
 day. 
 
 Employes, Prussian-Hessian State railway, average 76 cents 
 a day. 
 
 Able-bodied seamen, Baltic and North Sea, average $15.18 a 
 month. 
 
 This list includes skilled men only. Other kinds of workers 
 in these different industries received, of course, much less than 
 the skilled. An investigation at the same time made by the 
 Federation of German Woodworkers — an industry employing 
 nearly 800,000 persons — disclosed that the average weekly labor 
 hours of joiners, turners, brush and basket makers, wheelwrights, 
 wooden-shoe makers, box and toy makers, were 57 hours. 
 
 The average weekly earnings of adult males were $5.90 a 
 week. 
 
 Cost of Living Exceeded Wage Income. 
 
 According to a summary sent out by the German Imperial 
 Statistical Office, the average earnings of men per day in certain 
 important groups of industries were, in March, 1914 : 
 
 Metal industry $1.32 
 
 Engineering industry 1.28 
 
Electrical industry $1.07 
 
 Paper industry 93 
 
 Woodworking industry 1.01 
 
 Chemical industry 1.24 
 
 Stoneworking and pottery 1.07 
 
 Food, drink and tobacco 1.36 
 
 Leather and rubber 1.20 
 
 In the textile industry wages were considerably lower than 
 the low wages in other industries. An article in the Soziale 
 Praxis of Berlin, Nov. 11, 1915, stated that in normal times 
 weekly wages of from 7 to 10 marks ($1.67 to $2.38) for female 
 workers and from 14 to 15 marks ($3.33 to $3.57) for male work- 
 ers represented the average wages paid in some important textile 
 districts in Germany. 
 
 How do these wages compare with the cost of living? The 
 German Imperial Statistical Office in 1908 published a report of 
 an investigation of the annual living expenses of 852 families, 
 which placed the average annual expenditure per family at 
 $531.70. Compare this with the average yearly earnings of un- 
 skilled workmen, $310, and of skilled workmen, $373. 
 
 It has been said a hungry man knows no conscience. Before 
 the war, while the land-owning and manufacturing classes waxed 
 inordinately rich, the masses of Germany suffered from actual 
 hunger. While Germany was increasing her navy and building 
 her costly war machine, rents and the costs of living went up 
 year by year ; the barrack tenements became more and more over- 
 crowded; foods that were mere necessaries in America became 
 luxuries to the German workers; the pinch of poverty became 
 more acute. The German government realized that its subjects 
 were approaching uneasiness, if not active protest. It realized 
 that to bring this hungry and at the same time docile people to 
 the savage mood for war all that was needed was the declaration 
 that Germany was attacked and that England wickedly intended 
 to deprive the Germans of the fruit of their industry and thrift. 
 It likewise held out the promise of the fat lands of France, the 
 markets of Great Britain, of colonies beyond the seas. Success 
 in war meant money and food. 
 
 The German Imperial Statistical Office affords accurate in- 
 formation as to the condition of the German workers' stomach 
 up to the beginning of the war. 
 
 The German workers for many years have used horse meat 
 and some dog meat. In Berlin before the war 11,000 to 14,000 
 horses were butchered annually for the markets. Beefsteak, veal 
 and chops were far above the slender means of many. The aver- 
 age German workingman, according to official German statistics, 
 was able to buy for his family only 79 cents' worth of meat and 
 26 cents' worth of sausage each week. The average family ex- 
 penditure for fish was 7 cents a week, for butter or its substi- 
 tutes — suet, oleomargarine and lard — 36 cents a week, and for 
 eggs 12 cents a week. Of cheese, a staple German food, a family 
 
 8 
 
was able to buy only 7 to 8 cents' worth. For other necessaries 
 the average family expenditure each week was: Potatoes, 15 to 
 16 cents' worth; vegetables, 10 to 11 cents; sugar, syrup and 
 honey, 11 cents ; fruit, 12 cents ; flour, rice and cereals, 13 cents ; 
 coffee, consisting chiefly of coffee substitutes, 12 cents ; tea, choco- 
 late and cocoa, 4 cents ; milk, 45 cents, and bread and pastry, 75 
 cents. During peace times the principal diet of the German 
 workers consisted of hog meat, potatoes, milk, pastry and 
 bread. With an average additional outlay of 14 cents a week 
 for drinks and 10 cents for tobacco, the average annual expendi- 
 ture per year for a skilled worker's family amounted to $230.65. 
 
 Germany the Pioneer in Food Adulteration. 
 
 Of course, one has heard a great deal about the cheapness of 
 food in Germany; that for a little money one can get a great 
 deal more than in the United States. In addition to the cost of 
 food, according to a study of a given number of families made 
 by the German Imperial Statistical Office during 1907- '08, the 
 average family expenditure each year for clothing was $67.22; 
 for rent, $95.50; for heating and lighting, $21.62, and for mis- 
 cellaneous expenses, $105.19. Bearing in mind that the average 
 yearly earning of unskilled workmen was $310 and of skilled 
 workmen $373, the difference in cost of food between Germany 
 and the United States was not relatively so great as it was repre- 
 sented to be. An idea of how the German workers' food com- 
 pared with that of the workers in the United States may be 
 gleaned by a comparison of the food consumption of the average 
 German workman in 1907, as reported bj^ the German Imperial 
 Statistical Office, with what the average adult male, according 
 to the report of the United States Bureau of Labor, consumed 
 in 1903 in the United States : 
 
 Meats pounds. 
 
 Poultry do . . . 
 
 Butter do . . . 
 
 Other fats do. . . 
 
 Fish do . . . 
 
 Cheese do . . . 
 
 Eggs dozen. 
 
 Potatoes pounds . 
 
 Coffee do. . . 
 
 Milk quarts. 
 
 Sugar pounds . 
 
 Tea do... 
 
 Molasses gallons. 
 
 Flour meal pounds. 
 
 Rice do . . . 
 
 German 
 
 United States 
 
 workman, 
 
 adult male, 
 
 1907. 
 
 1903. 
 
 60.63 
 
 186.19 
 
 
 19.44 
 
 16.31 
 
 30.13 
 
 13.23 
 
 22.50 
 
 
 20.46 
 
 8.38 
 
 4.38 
 
 
 23.48 
 
 202.82 
 
 240 
 
 6.83 
 
 13.37 
 
 111.90 
 
 103.71 
 
 
 69.75 
 
 
 3.13 
 
 
 1.06 
 
 
 166.25 
 
 
 7.90 
 
Reduced to the barest necessities, the German masses even at 
 that were forced to use substitutes and adulterated articles in- 
 stead of pure food. Taking the facts embodied in reports of 
 Prussian state officials, the ' ' Zeitschrif t fiir Oeifentliche Chemie" 
 published in 1914 an amazing account of the methods of food 
 adulteration which prevailed in Germany. According to this 
 report, artificial butter was increasingly being used instead of 
 real butter, even in the country; benzoic and sulphuric acids 
 were used as preservatives in margarine ; flour and bakery prod- 
 ucts were adulterated with sand, talcum and weed seeds ; imita- 
 tion egg mixtures were colored with coal tar products; canned 
 vegetables were colored with salts of copper ; coffee was adulter- 
 ated with pulse or lupine seeds; fruit jellies were found to be 
 entirely artificial; without regard for human health, the most 
 flagrant adulteration of candy was carried on. The penalty for 
 such adulteration, so the report declared, *'has not been clearly 
 defined because the law has not been properly explained." In 
 fact, Germany never had any effective food investigations or 
 scandals. 
 
 It is true that wages rose in Germany after the outbreak of 
 the war. But how did they rise? xiccording to the Bremer 
 Burger-Zeitung, by September, 1916, the prices of foodstuffs had 
 increased 100 per cent. Against this the increase of wages was 
 46 per cent, for men and 54 per cent, for women. 
 
 Intolerable Conditions in Wretched Tenements. 
 
 But don't model homes for workingmen, quaint cottages and 
 miniature villas embowered with flowers, compensate the workers 
 for hardships? In January, 1913, an old bill demanding hous- 
 ing reform was again introduced in the Prussian Legislature. 
 This bill set forth the deplorable conditions existing. Needless 
 to say, the bill did not pass. The general mass of workers in 
 Germany, skilled and unskilled, live in what are known as '* bar- 
 rack tenements. ' ' These tenements are built in a series of blocks, 
 one row behind the other, the grim rows situated thirty to forty 
 feet apart, and usually three to six stories in height. The gloom, 
 the foulness, the lack of light and air, the sordid barrenness of 
 the dark rooms, the lack of baths and heat were hidden by the 
 meretricious overdecoration of the street exterior. American 
 visitors, seeking proof of German superiority over the rest of the 
 world, described only these gaudy exteriors. They did not tell 
 that the hall baths in the rear were used by from eight to ten 
 families, or that one-fourth of the families living in these small 
 two and three-room flats had to take in lodgers in order to pay 
 their rent. 
 
 The Berlin census of 1900 showed that 96.7 per cent of the 
 city's population lived in rented dwellings, mostly in these sordid 
 barrack flats. Of 412,713 tenements in Berlin, 37,369 were of 
 one room, 175,163 of two rooms, 143,744 of three rooms, and 
 
 10 
 
56,197 of four rooms. Of 555,416 dwellings, housing a popula- 
 tion of 1,906,994 persons in 1913, 40,690 consisted of one room, 
 186,756 of two rooms, 180,850 of three rooms, and 62,676 of four 
 rooms. Of this number 34,508 had no kitchens. In 41,115 room- 
 ers were kept, and in 58,400 households transient night lodgers 
 were taken in. Such are the happy homes of German workers ! 
 Mr. Gerard has stated that 55 per cent, of the families in Berlin 
 live in one room. The prevailing ''dwelling" for workers is a 
 two-room flat, accommodating a family of four to six persons, 
 and lodgers besides. For these "luxurious" quarters the Ger- 
 man workingman, earning on an average $225 a year, has had 
 to give up the equivalent of about fifty-six days' work a year for 
 rent. Local taxes and State income taxes are not included. 
 
 Conditions similar to those in Berlin exist in all the great 
 German cities. In Diisseldorf , much praised for its picturesque 
 workingmen's homes, one-fourth of the workers in 1910 lived in 
 one and two-room flats. It has been said that Germany is with- 
 out slums. What are perhaps the foulest slums in the world are 
 found in Magdeburg and Dantzig. 
 
 Against the intolerable housing conditions existing in Ger- 
 many one might present the reforms in housing introduced in 
 England, France, Belgium, and the United States. While much 
 remains to be done in improvements in this country, the masses 
 of American workers enjoy both working and living conditions 
 infinitely superior to those of Germany. 
 
 Labor Organizations Repressed. 
 
 The German propaganda has aimed particularly at impress- 
 ing the working classes of other lands with the purpose, as before 
 pointed out, of weakening the allegiance of labor to their own 
 Governments by making them believe workers were better off in 
 Germany. Yet, in Germany, workers were not allowed to organ- 
 ize until long after unions were regarded as a fundamental right 
 in other nations, and even today labor meetings are under direct 
 bureaucratic surveillance. Few strikes have been successful in 
 Germany. 
 
 In 1912, according to the German Statistical Year Book, 68.3 
 per cent., or more than two- thirds of the strikers, were compelled 
 to return to work without meeting any success for their demands. 
 In Saxony, where the general weekly wages of textile workers 
 were from $1.30 to $2.12 a week, the workers in 1917 petitioned 
 for the granting of a minimum wage scale. According to the 
 Berlin Vorwdrts of Aug. 21, 1917, General Groner, who was 
 charged with the enforcement of the auxiliary service law, de- 
 clared himself against the minimum wage — and that ended it. 
 When the textile workers in Landeshut, Silesia, appealed to the 
 War Arbitration Office at Posen, the presiding officer brusquely 
 declared their wages were sufficiently high and threatened, if 
 
 11 
 
the mills closed, to send all males into the army or war material 
 establishments and the females to farms in West Prussia. Such 
 is ''the industrial and social equality'' exploited by the fatuous 
 American propagandists of ' ' superior German kultur. ' ' 
 
 How has the German worker, earning less than it costs to 
 keep a family, managed to get along ? An investigation made by 
 the Imperial Statistical Office showed that, out of 852 families, 
 in 278 the wife had to work out. In 1913 T. St. John Gaffney, 
 United States Consul General at Dresden, reported to the United 
 States Department of State that a full third of the economic 
 labor of the German Empire was performed by women; that 
 German statistics showed there were 9,500,000 wage-earning 
 women in Germany, which meant that every second woman 
 earned her own living. In 1910 Mr. Gaffney reported that the 
 work day for women had been reduced from eleven hours to ten 
 hours daily, and eight hours on Saturday. As Mr. Gaffney was 
 such a pro-German that he had to be removed from office by our 
 Government, it can be assumed that he did not exaggerate the 
 bad conditions. 
 
 Women in Strenuous Trades. 
 
 In 1905, according to an investigation made by the Berlin 
 Chamber of Commerce, there were more than 100,000 sweatshops 
 in Berlin alone, and 80 per cent, of the home workers were women. 
 The Berlin Chamber of Commerce, investigating 2,051 municipal 
 employes, found that the wives of 20.2 per cent, worked for 
 money. The majority earned from 75 cents to $1.50 a week ; only 
 25 received more than $2.50 a week. 
 
 That young girls worked in canning factories from thirteen 
 to eighteen hours a day, and on Sundays for ten to more hours, 
 was brought out by an investigation made by the German Fac- 
 tory Workers' Union in 1905. Their wages were 3 to 4i/^ cents 
 an hour. 
 
 Women have been enlisted in the most strenuous trades. 
 Their average daily earnings in March, 1914, according to a 
 report of the German Statistical Office, were : 
 
 Cents. 
 
 Metal industry 49 
 
 Engineering industry 55 
 
 Electrical industry 65 
 
 Paper industry 55 
 
 Woodworking industry 47 
 
 Chemical industry 57 
 
 Stoneworking and pottery industry 41 
 
 Food, drink and tobacco industry 51 
 
 Leather and rubber industry 67 
 
 Before the war about 64,000 women and girls were employed 
 in the metal trades, working from nine to ten hours a day. In 
 the Soziale Praxis, Berlin, April 19, 1916, the Federation of 
 
 12 
 
German Metal Workers reported thus on the slavery of women 
 in the metal trade : 
 
 ''Even for men, and still more for women, work at flanging 
 machines is too hard. * * * At these machines projectiles 
 weighing from 22 to 82 pounds have to be lifted breast high and 
 clamped to the bed; then undamped and placed again on the 
 floor. This entails a great physical strain. In order to earn a 
 wage of 3 marks (71 cents) a day, a woman must perform this 
 operation 75 or even 100 times." 
 
 In 1914, before the war, 7,265 women and 31,290 children 
 were employed in coal and salt mines. According to a report 
 made in 1914 by United States Consul General Henry H. Morgan 
 at Hamburg, the number of children employed in German mines, 
 mills, and factories in 1911 was: finder 14 years, 7,434 
 boys and 5,970 girls ; 14 to 16 years, 332,882 boys and 172,535 
 girls. Of 518,821 children employed, 40,799 boys and 1,063 girls 
 worked in mines; 29,164 boys and 8,398 girls worked in stone 
 and earth trades; 55,821 boj^s and 12,027 girls worked in metal 
 trades, and 67,258 boys and 4,917 girls worked on machinery. 
 Since the war women and children have been recruited by 
 countless thousands to fill the places of men taken away as can- 
 non fodder for the Kaiser's armies. 
 
 Employment in trades for which only men were normally 
 capable, combined with underfeeding, made many of these 
 women unfit for motherhood. Infant mortality up to the be- 
 ginning of the war was higher in Germany than in any country 
 excepting Russia and Austria, 
 
 Infant Mortality Alarmingly Great. 
 
 Germany has claimed to be the innovator of the movement 
 to reduce infant mortality, to take care of poor mothers, to give 
 babies and children proper food and medical attention — in fact, 
 the whole ''child saving" sj^stem was claimed by the exponents 
 of Teuton Kultur. As a matter of historical fact, this movement 
 originated in France, before the Revolution, in 1786, when the 
 Societe de Charite was founded. Milk stations for babies were 
 established in France a quarter of a century ago. Yet Germany 
 has advertised her krippen, milk stations, clinics, maternity hos- 
 pitals and other alleged social reforms to the degree that Socialist 
 Bentall and perhaps many others were inclined to regard the 
 possible imposition of such a wonderful government upon our- 
 selves with acquiescence. Germany has never advertised the 
 facts regarding infant mortality or child suicides. In this alone 
 is a damning indictment of the Prussian system. 
 
 According to official figures the number of deaths per hun- 
 dred of children under one year of age in the German Empire 
 from 1910 to 1914 averaged 17, against 11 in France and 10.9 
 in England and Wales. The infant death rate per thousand in 
 
 13 
 
1912, according to the report of the Prussian Medical Depart- 
 ment, Ministry of the Interior, was : Berlin, 178 ; Dantzig, 203 ; 
 Breslau, 203 ; Magdeburg, 202 ; Posen, 212 ; Diisseldorf , 146, and 
 Hanover, 132. The death rate of children in the East Side of 
 New York and the slums of other American cities has been ex- 
 ploited for their own purposes by various American radicals and 
 Socialist reformers, who at the same time praised everything that 
 was German. A death rate of 125 or 130 per thousand births in 
 any American city would be regarded with great alarm. In 
 1912 the infant death rate per thousand in New York was only 
 105, and in New York there is a mixed population, including 
 immigrants and uneducated foreigners. But in Germany, where 
 the infant death rate in cities averaged 130 to 258 per thousand, 
 there was no such problem. Why was there such a high rate of 
 infant mortality in the German Empire? 
 
 Military Juggernaut Reaps Infant Victims. 
 
 The British Labor Party and Trade Union Commission inves- 
 tigating conditions of life and labor in Germany in 1910, in- 
 quired into the infant mortality rate. The investigators found 
 that in the town of Gera, from 1898 to 1907, more than 30 per 
 cent, of the children died before they were one year of age. Re- 
 viewing the infant death rate in the German textile industrial 
 districts, the reasons given for the astounding conditions were: 
 
 ''First — The fact that wages are so low that the wife is 
 obliged to go to the mill to help keep the house going. 
 
 ''Second — That prices of necessities are so high that a suffi- 
 cient amount cannot be purchased, especially of meat, to keep 
 the mother in a state of physical efficiency. 
 
 "Third — That a considerable number of the children are 
 handed over to the care of neighbors or older children, and lose 
 the close attention of the mother, who returns to the factory as 
 soon after confinement as possible. 
 
 "Perhaps the principal reason has been overlooked by the 
 Germans themselves. From the number of workmen 's homes we 
 visited and the inquiries we made, it is safe to assume that the 
 average textile worker's family is housed in two small rooms, 
 measuring twelve feet by nine feet, in a high building of five 
 or six stories. It is the exception rather than the rule for a 
 worker to have three of these rooms, unless he has other members 
 of the family working; and the stuffiness of these rooms can be 
 better imagined than described, when the family is all present. ' ' 
 
 According to statistics prepared by Breckh's, six-sevenths of 
 the infants' deaths in Berlin were of bottle-fed babies — this 
 despite the vaunted use of pasteurized milk. The death of a 
 majority of these infants, therefore, must be ascribed to the 
 physical condition of mothers who, to earn a meagre living, were 
 driven to drudgery, to hard labor in fields, mines, factories and 
 
 14 
 
shops. Overstrained, underfed, their health destroyed, unable 
 to nourish infants, they brought into the world weaklings too 
 physically unfit to survive. 
 
 Appalling Rate of Child Suicide. 
 
 And of those who did survive, an appalling percentage was 
 driven to death hy suicide. Perhaps there is nothing so reveal- 
 ing of the actual conditions in Germany, no such commentary 
 on the government which seeks to impose its will on the world, 
 as the death by their own hand of the little children of Germany. 
 Why did these children seek escape by death from a life of hap- 
 piness and folksong? Germany was pictured to American chil- 
 dren as the home of Santa Glaus, of the Christmas tree, of 
 marvellous mechanical toys. 
 
 Yet in this Germany of alleged happy homes many children 
 found death more alluring than life. In Saxony there were eight 
 child suicides to every one in the United States, and in Berlin 
 fifteen to every one in New York City. In the United States 
 registration area the suicide rate for children from ten to four- 
 teen years of age has been 0.55 per 100,000 population; in 
 Bavaria it has been 1.55, and in Saxony 4.39. Bavaria has been 
 less under the influence of Prussia than Saxony, where the work- 
 ing classes are hard-worked and underfed. In Alsace-Lorraine, 
 where the Prussian influence has made the least impress, the 
 suicide rate was only 0.85 per 100,000 population, or 0.30 more 
 than that of the United States. 
 
 The suicide rate of adults in many parts of Germany was 
 unparalleled in other parts of the world. It may be remarked 
 that a low general rate of suicides prevailed in the Roman Cath- 
 olic sections of Westphalia, the Rhine provinces and the Polish 
 provinces of Prussia, while in the stretches from the North Sea 
 along the Elbe to Bohemia, which were most affected by the 
 Prussian system, a high rate of 30 to 35 per 100,000 prevailed. 
 During the five years ending wdth 1913 the suicide rate per 100,- 
 000 in Berlin was 35.8. In New York City, where suicides are 
 more especially marked among the foreign population, the rate 
 was 17.2, and in London 11. During the same period the suicide 
 rate per 100,000 population in the Kingdom of Saxony was 32.6, 
 in the province of Brandenburg, exclusive of Berlin, 33.1. In 
 the Kingdom of Bavaria, which is largely Roman Catholic, the 
 rate was 16.2, and in Alsace-Lorraine, which has resisted Prus- 
 sianization, only 15.5. 
 
 The great increase in longevity in Germany has long been 
 one of the chief arguments of propagandists for German effi- 
 ciency. But figures show that the death rate in New York City 
 has decreased much more rapidly than in Berlin. According 
 to the figures of Gustavus Myers, the actual gain in longevity 
 in Germany for a period of thirty years was only 1.6 years. 
 
 15 ' 
 
Comparing the period from 1881- '92 with the four years from 
 1908- '12 the decrease in the death rate in New York was 39.9 
 while the decrease in Berlin was only 27.8 per cent. In short, 
 health is not so well safeguarded in Germany as in America. 
 
 One of the other chief arguments for German efficiency has 
 been the abolishment of the unemployed class. Figures show 
 that the number of men out of work far exceeded the available 
 positions. Just before the war there were 171 applicants for 
 every 100 jobs, according to the figures of the employment 
 bureaus in one German state. Clearly this understates the real 
 situation since many men undoubtedly sought in vain for work 
 without applying to an agency. 
 
 Pauperism Doubled in Ten Years. 
 
 Pauperism in any country is an unfailing index to ''the just 
 distribution of wealth" in that country. While Germany spent 
 untold sums in advertising her model homes for workingmen, 
 her insurance schemes and other alleged social reforms, she was 
 significantly reticent regarding pauperism. Of course, if the 
 pension system of Germany was what it was said to be there 
 should have been no such thing as pauperism. In fact, it was 
 claimed there were no paupers in Germany. 
 
 Dr. Friedrich Zahn, director of the Bavarian Royal Statis- 
 tical Office at Munich, and the greatest authority on poor relief 
 in Germany, read a paper at an international convention, held 
 in 1912, impressively called ''The Fifteenth International Con- 
 gress on Hygiene and Demography. ' ' Dr. Zahn presented facts 
 and figures which proved that pauperism, increasing year by 
 year, was a general condition throughout the German Empire. 
 In Berlin, for instance, the number of persons receiving poor 
 relief had increased from. 31,358 in 1891 to 55,601 in 1909. 
 From 1895 to 1909 between 9,000 and 10,000 persons were given 
 poor relief in Hamburg, In Munich the number of paupers 
 getting relief had more than doubled in five years; the number 
 who received alms had increased from 11,133 in 1895 to 25,187 
 in 1900 although the city's population had decreased less than 
 two-thirds. From 1905 to 1909 the poor relief expenses in- 
 creased almost one-third in Frankfort-on-the-Main. In Nurem- 
 burg the number receiving alms increased from 9,030 in 1900 
 to 14,496 in 1908. In Diisseldorf the number of paupers re- 
 lieved almost doubled in ten years. In all of the large German 
 cities pauper burials were frequent. While the German military 
 machine was in the making, while German manufacture and 
 commerce expanded, while the world was thrilled with bluster- 
 ing boasts of German achievements, stark destitution increased 
 among the masses throughout Germany. 
 
 Destitution Rampant in Richest Agricultural States. 
 
 Public expenditures for paupers and orphans in twenty-six 
 German cities in 1910, according to Dr. Zahn, were : 
 
 16 
 
Expendi- 
 ture, 1910 
 Marks 
 City 
 
 Berlin 15,651,325 
 
 Hamburg 7,709,240 
 
 Munich 3,178,798 
 
 Leipsic 3,868,567 
 
 Dresden 3,305,722 
 
 Cologne 3,321,212 
 
 Breslau 2,107,812 
 
 Frankfort-on-Maine 3,085,527 
 
 Duesseldorf 1,811,947 
 
 Nuremberg 1,340,687 
 
 Hanover 1,408,183 
 
 Essen 1,228,104 
 
 Stuttgart 1,191,062 
 
 Magdeburg 1,114,466 
 
 Koeningsberg 1,041,324 
 
 Bremen 1,683,007 
 
 Dortmund 1,032,903 
 
 Kiel 1,079,219 
 
 Halle 842,104 
 
 Strassburg 886,753 
 
 Danzic 891,740 
 
 Aachen 1,090,036 
 
 Karlsruhe 580,902 
 
 Mayence 503,819 
 
 Wiesbaden 496,953 
 
 Augsburg 430,927 
 
 Per capita 
 
 expenditure 
 
 Marks 
 
 Marks 
 
 1907 
 
 1910 
 
 6.44 
 
 7.56 
 
 7.53 
 
 8.28 
 
 4.67 
 
 5.33 
 
 7.22 
 
 6.56 
 
 5.07 
 
 6.03 
 
 .... 
 
 6.43 
 
 3.49 
 
 4.12 
 
 6.62 
 
 7.45 
 
 5.71 
 
 5.05 
 
 3.46 
 
 4.02 
 
 4.32 
 
 4.74 
 
 3.67 
 
 4.17 
 
 5.68 
 
 4.16 
 
 4.56 
 
 3.99 
 
 4.61 
 
 4.23 
 
 5.58 
 
 6.87 
 
 3.40 
 
 4.86 
 
 6.23 
 
 5.10 
 
 4.14 
 
 4.66 
 
 3.12 
 
 4.96 
 
 4.60 
 
 5.23 
 
 5.93 
 
 6.98 
 
 2.55 
 
 4.33 
 
 .... 
 
 4.55 
 
 3.66 
 
 4.55 
 
 .... 
 
 4.21 
 
 In some of these cities the cost of earing for sick paupers in 
 hospitals was not included. In Bavaria, the richest agricultural 
 state in the German Empire, the number of paupers relieved, 
 according to Dr. Zahn, had increased from 189,484, in 1900, to 
 230,218, in 1911. Even at that the Bavarian statistical record 
 was incomplete. Expenditures for poor relief in Bavaria in- 
 creased from 9,442,955 marks, in 1897, to 17,460,000 marks, in 
 1911. In ten years from 1897 to 1906 about $26,000,000 was 
 spent for poor relief. That destitution was not confined to the 
 great cities was shown in the annually increasing expenditures 
 for poor relief in two rural districts alone : 
 
 Rhenish 
 
 Westphalia Prussia . 
 
 Year Marks Marks 
 
 1886 300,000 611,000 
 
 1890 330,400 700,000 
 
 1895 491,600 1,006,000 
 
 1900 615,700 1,349,000 
 
 1905 835,800 1,510,000 
 
 1906 817,300 1,504,000 
 
 1907 895,100 1,533,000 
 
 1908 984,000 1,715,000 
 
 1909 1,034,650 1,697,000 
 
 This increase in poor rural relief in the rural districts has 
 been out of all proportion to the population. Yet the multipli- 
 
 17 
 
cation of paupers went on with the development of the German 
 state, the increase of German wealth, the develoment of German 
 industry, and after the enactment and application of the so- 
 called social reform laws. Does this indicate, as has been asserted, 
 that there was a fairer distribution of wealth in Germany than 
 elsewhere in the world? 
 
 Deprived of self-respect, branded as an outcast, the German 
 pauper was doomed to end his days in the foul obscurity of hid- 
 den byways and the abominable barrack tenements. And what 
 did he generally get ? An average of $1.50 a month. An allow- 
 ance of $3 to $4 was considered magnanimous and was most un- 
 usual. Because of these individual ' ' benefits, ' ' as they are euphe- 
 mistically called, the majority of paupers have been kept out 
 of the almshouses, and superficial investigators swallowed the 
 declaration of German officials that their almshouses were almost 
 empty. 
 
 In the United States paupers are generally sent to alms- 
 houses. In this country the proportion of almshouse paupers 
 per 100,000 of population had decreased from 116.6 in 1900, to 
 91.5, in 1910. And here is a significant fact : Of 84,190 paupers 
 admitted to almshouses in 1910, 6,281 were negroes and 33,353 
 foreign-born whites, of which 5,531 were German born. 
 
 Crime Steadily on the Increase. 
 
 Since the United States entered the war the German press 
 has referred with bitter cynicism to the alleged low standard 
 of official and political integrity, as well as individual honesty, 
 in this country. It may be assumed that the efficiency and in- 
 tegrity of a government may be interpreted by the absence of 
 crime and the moral standard of the people. Without referring 
 specifically to the profiteering scandals in Germany of the past 
 year or more, or to the crime wave which has swept over the 
 nation which designated treaties as mere scraps of paper, official 
 statistics show that the extent of crime in the German Empire 
 before the war was astounding. Evidence of this may be found 
 in the "Imperial Statistics of the German Empire," Volume 
 228, dealing with ''Criminal Statistics." Dr. Thos. A. F. Smith, 
 author of "The Soul of Germany," compiled a table showing 
 the convictions for various crimes in Germany and England. 
 According to data gathered by Dr. Smith, there were in Ger- 
 many in a period of ten years 250 convictions for murder, 
 against 97 in England and Wales. Pointing out that the popu- 
 lation of England and Wales is three-fifths that of Germany, 
 Dr. Smith gives the following staggering comparisons : 
 
 18 
 
Germany England 
 
 ,, ,. . , 1897-'07 1900-'10 
 
 Maliciously and feloniously wounding . 172,153 1,262 
 
 Murders 35O 97 
 
 Rapes 9,3gi 216 
 
 Incest 573 5g 
 
 Unnatural crimes g41 290 
 
 Illegitimate children 178,115 37,041 
 
 Divorce petitions 20,340 '965 
 
 Malicious damage to property 25,759 358 
 
 Arson 610 278 
 
 Just as children were driven to suicide in Germany because 
 of the intolerable conditions, so were a large proportion of chil- 
 dren driven to crime. In 1908 1,957 persons were convicted of 
 crimes causing death — of this number 176 were between twelve 
 and eighteen. In the same year, of 13,562 persons convicted 
 of crimes against morality 1,319 were between the ages of twelve 
 and eighteen. From 1901 to 1910 about 178,000 illegitimate 
 children were born each year, and, according to German sta- 
 tisticsj 25 per cent of the children born in Berlin are illegitimate. 
 Since the beginning of the war the German government — fol- 
 lowing its policy of fostering the production of ''fodder for 
 cannon" — has encouraged the propagation of male children by 
 establishing a pension for all male infants born, and children 
 born out of wedlock have been officially legitimatized. Writing 
 on ''Polygamy and the Collapse of the Family in Germany," 
 Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis quotes the Berlin Lokalanzeiger, 
 of March 7, 1916, as urging that "every girl should be given 
 the right on reaching 25 years to have one child born out of 
 wedlock, for which she should receive from the State an annual 
 allowance." Documents found on the dead bodies of German 
 officers, quoted by the Brooklyn clergyman, officially ordered the 
 seduction of women by stalwart Hun soldiers for the callous and 
 monstrous purpose of bringing about a wholesale propagation 
 of Hun children. The German government in its warfare has 
 carried out a policy of killing off Belgian and French women 
 and children, and of making occupied territory uninhabitable, 
 in order that the depleted peoples of Europe should not be 
 able in the future to withstand the swarming Teuton breed. In 
 the scientific, cold blooded purpose of increasing the Hun race, 
 womanhood is being prostituted to the designs of imperial Ger- 
 many in a manner unsurpassed" even in the days before Chris- 
 tianity dawned upon the world. 
 
 Germany's Policy the Exploit Sham. 
 
 Well paid for their labor, comfortably housed, provided with 
 beer gardens and free amusements, cared for in sickness and old 
 age by the German system of pensions, the German working 
 class from birth to old age enjoyed a social paradise such as 
 existed nowhere else on the globe — that is what Americans were 
 
 19 
 
told. That is what caused certain Americans to hazard the 
 amazing declaration that it might not be so bad after all if the 
 benevolent Prussian government came over here and took things 
 in hand. Before the war, among all nations, Germany was the 
 arch-hypocrite. Since the war she has established herself as the 
 arch-criminal. 
 
 Ignoring all that has been accomplished in bettered working 
 conditions, in wage compensation, in the relation of employers 
 and employes by the American Federation of Labor and the Rail- 
 way Brotherhoods, a host of malcontents. Socialist agitators, pro- 
 German pacifists, I. W. W.-ites and statistical experts for years 
 have sought to create discontent and dissatisfaction and to ex- 
 ploit their isms by foisting the German hoax upon the people of 
 this country. And it is this very breed of fake uplifters, of 
 pseudo millenarians who at this late day advocate compromise, a 
 patched-up peace with that perfidious, hypocritical and criminal 
 power. In America, it is true, we have been more prone to seek 
 out and exaggerate defects than to recognize social progress and 
 industrial betterment. But in Germany it has been the policy 
 to gloss over actual conditions and exploit the sham. And it is 
 all that is ugly, cruel and barbarous which the actual facts reveal 
 behind this sham that the Prussian autocracy, for its own benefit, 
 would inflict upon the world through a war unparalleled in cal- 
 lous crime in the annals of mankind. To maintain our precious 
 birthright of freedom, all that civilization has gained for us, we 
 cannot consider peace until that power is broken and that savage 
 system of human enslavement utterly destroyed. 
 
 German ' ' Efficiency. ' ' 
 
 With her braggart claims to social progress — which, as shown, 
 facts totally disprove — imperial Germany also grandiosely bla- 
 zoned the world with assertions about her supremacy in the arts 
 and sciences, in inventions, medical discovery, and industrial 
 efficiency, with conservation of man power and human energy. 
 And the amazing thing was that, carrying out a gigantic bluff 
 for fifteen years, she got away with it. The German nation, 
 swollen with self-conceit, found its supreme expression in its 
 bumptious Kaiser, who mouthed about his partnership with God 
 and his commission from heaven. But did Germany's claims 
 to supremacy in industry, invention and the arts have any more 
 basis than her claims to superiority in social progress? 
 
 In the inventions which have revolutionized modern industry 
 America has been the leader. So far as industrial efficiency is 
 concerned, for 100 trained men in a certain industrial plant in 
 the United States it took an average of 450 methodical, stolid, 
 slow-moving Germans to do the same job in their own land. 
 In medical science — in which Germany has especially claimed 
 sovereign leadership — the most beneficent discoveries were by 
 Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans and a Russian. 
 
 20 
 
But let us give Germany full credit for the efficiency in which 
 she has become most expert — in the fiendish, destructive per- 
 version of science and invention. Science in other nations has 
 been devoted to the amelioration of mankind's ills. German 
 science with plodding patience diligently sought the most effi- 
 cient and deadly methods of destroying human life and inflict- 
 ing human suffering — in poisoning wells and streams, in innocu- 
 lating human beings and animals with loathsome diseases, and in 
 the invention of the most hideous instruments of warfare. Ger- 
 man science triumphed in the invention of poison gas and liquid 
 fire. German efficiency, as a means of terrorization, was demon- 
 strated in Belgium. Germany exhibited her savage efficiency 
 in the treacherous killing of women and children on the high 
 seas, in the bombing from the air of undefended towns and cities 
 and of Red Cross hospitals. 
 
 Before the war Germany imposed the myth of her social and 
 industrial greatness upon the world by blatant fabrication and 
 shameless deception. Her successes in this war, as a matter of 
 fact, have been the successes only of deceit, betrayal and treach- 
 ery. Unable to defeat Russia and eliminate that country from 
 the war by military action, Germany achieved the same result 
 by the corruption of leaders whom the simple Russian people 
 trusted. Unable to worst the Italian army with all her com- 
 bined forces on the Austrian front, Germany brought about the 
 Italian defeat by demoralizing the army through deceitful So- 
 cialistic propaganda from within. Frustrated and baffled in 
 her desperate onslaughts against brave France, Germany sought 
 to undermine that nation by defeatist propaganda such as that 
 conducted by the anarchistic Bonnet Rouge and by Bolo 
 Pasha. In underhand methods of deception and deceit Germany 
 has uniquely, proved her efficiency — ^but it is hardly a creditable 
 efficiency. It is the efficiency of the coward and the bully, of 
 the highwayman and the thug, of the creature who strikes in 
 the back. It is the efficiency one would expect of the nation 
 which declared all treaties to be scraps of paper, which sank 
 the Lusitania, and shot Edith Cavell. 
 
 Germany regarded with frank aplomb and self-gratification 
 the vast spy system which she wove in peaceful times and with 
 which she enmeshed the unwary nations of the world. In some 
 respects, it must be admitted, that spy system was efficient. 
 Besides gathering military information, her spies were indus- 
 triously engaged in pilfering the fruits of American inventive 
 genius, and of the genius of other nations whom she is now 
 fighting. These Germany unscrupulously appropriated as her 
 own. She was manifestly efficient in theft. When it came to 
 the outright robbery of inventions, plans and documents, Ger- 
 many's professional sneak thieves and eavesdroppers compe- 
 tently carried out the will of their imperial masters. But where 
 it came to gauging the temper of a nation, to comprehending 
 the spiritual ideals and moral principles of peoples, they were 
 
 21 
 
totally abysmal failures. German spies in England reported 
 that that effete nation would not go to war if Belgium were 
 attacked. German spies in France — whose miserable Hun souls 
 were incapable of measuring the ideals and heroic soul of France 
 — reported that France, morally corrupt and unprepared, could 
 not withstand Germany. German spies were not able to dis- 
 cover that Foch could come back, or that he had an army in 
 reserve. German spies, operating in the United States, con- 
 temptuously reported that America, interested only in dollars, 
 would never go to war over the U-boat issue. The German 
 propaganda — save among Socialists, the I. W. W., pacifists and 
 motley radicals — could not be called successful. Despite the 
 expenditure of untold millions, German efficiency failed to keep 
 America out of the war. With all her underground ramifica- 
 tions of spies, Germany has not been able to interfere with the 
 transportation of troops nor obstruct the nation in its military 
 program. History will not fail to give Germany the place she 
 deserves, and to give her full credit where credit is due. It will 
 not be credit for social insurance laws, model tenements, for 
 evolving a paradise for workers, or even for supreme gifts in 
 beneficent medicine. History" will accord to German efficiency 
 and inventive skill credit for what it has done in the slaughter 
 of humans, in efforts to debauch, debase and betray unsuspecting 
 nations. It will give her full credit for all that is represented 
 in the Brest-Litovsk treaty. 
 
 Much has been written, and by the very fellows who have 
 carried on the social progress myth, about German science and 
 invention. As no other nation had adopted a blow-hard policy 
 of trumpeting its own superior greatness, German achievement 
 was practically the only achievement we heard about. 
 
 What Germany Has Not Done in Scientific Invention. 
 
 In an article in The National Magazine, of September, 1917, 
 Mr. Bennett Chappell takes up Germany's claim to leadership 
 in scientific invention, and shows exactly what Germany has not 
 done, and what other nations, especially America, have accom- 
 plished. Mr. Chappell cites the invention of the steamboat, by an 
 American, as an event which opened up the free seas of the 
 world for the wider use of mankind. It was not a German, but 
 an American, Lieut. Maury, who, before the Civil War, charted 
 ocean currents and established steamship lanes. The very charts 
 that are used today all over the world were prepared under his 
 direction. 
 
 What had German inventive genius to do with electricity t 
 From Franklin to Edison, America has been the home of elec- 
 trical invention. Where was the cotton gin, which has afforded 
 cotton clothes as the common garb of the world, invented ? Who 
 invented the telegraph and the telephone? The submarine, the 
 torpedo, the aeroplane, the bicycle and pneumatic tire? Did 
 
 22 
 
Germans invent harvesting machinery, binders, disc-plows, 
 threshers, washing-machines, and sewing machines? Did the 
 moving picture machine, modern printing presses, the linotype 
 and monotype, and piano player originate in the Fatherland? 
 To America the credit for every one of these great and revolu- 
 tionary inventions belongs. 
 
 The business life of the world has been advanced by the con- 
 structive genius of America. America is the home of the type- 
 writer, the adding machine, the phonograph, the dictaphone and 
 the detectaphone. Did the sky-scraper originate in Germany? 
 Did Germans first use structural steel and brick or stone? Did 
 they invent elevators? It was a Yankee who invented the first 
 shoe machinery. *' Drilling machines, glass blowing machinery, 
 carpet weaving machinery, automatic machinery, all came first 
 from America," writes Mr. Chappell. "Look over the records 
 of our steel companies for comparative efficiency. The tin can 
 is an American idea of efficiency, food-box making machinery 
 another. What have we overlooked? Oh, yes, it was America 
 who taught the world how to use reinforced concrete and build 
 great dams and bridges — how to tunnel mountains and build 
 great suspension and cantilever bridges." Mr. Chappell points 
 out that Americans were the first to make alloy steel; that 
 Americans invented air-brakes, car couplings and other life- 
 saving appliances; that America inaugurated and still leads in 
 the ' * Safety-first ' ' movement ; that automatic signals, pneumatic 
 switches and sleeping cars were invented and developed in 
 America. "If you took American inventive genius away from 
 the world and only had German efficiency, where would the 
 world get off?" asks Mr. Chappell. Americans, Mr. Chappell 
 points out, invented the following : 
 
 Submarines Telephone 
 
 Airplanes Harvesting machinery 
 
 Torpedoes Gas engines 
 
 Automobiles Railroads 
 
 High explosives Typewriters 
 
 Machine guns Electricity in all its forms 
 
 Telegraph Modem printing presses 
 
 "In manufacturing circles do we have to bend the knee to 
 German efficiency ? Hardly ! ' ' continues Mr. Chappell. "America 
 practicalized steam railroads for long distance runs, invented 
 the first Corliss engine and electric storage battery. We were 
 the first to make gasoline and electric boats. The art of vulcan- 
 izing rubber as a basis for thousands of useful articles in every 
 day use was made practical by the American, Goodyear, and our 
 efficiency here has led the world since the beginning of the in- 
 dustry. We were the first to use alcohol commercially and make 
 alcohol engines and boilers. The Germans, along with the rest 
 of the world, laughed at us as we worked over rotten cabbage 
 and garbage waste to make alcohol. Yet today their exploita- 
 
 23 
 
tion of this idea is regarded as the great sign of Germany's much 
 vaunted efficiency/' 
 
 It was the Government of the United States that first organ- 
 ized in 1873 a weather bureau. Germany gained from us the 
 knowledge of weather conditions which has enabled her to per- 
 fect her dream of the Zeppelin. Two technical scientific inven- 
 tions of America are the barograph for measuring the height 
 at which an aeroplane flies, and the spring thermometer for 
 registering degrees of cold beyond 80, wherein mercury freezes. 
 The microphone which is used today to warn those on shore of 
 the approach of ships is the invention of an America Ji. 
 
 Mr. Chappell goes on to say: 
 
 ''The reason why the United States has led the world in ef- 
 ficiency is simple. We were the first nation to grant an indi- 
 vidual the right to profit hy his idea — hy giving a patent. The 
 first patent in America was issued hy our first President, George 
 Washington, and ran for a period of seventeen years. American 
 brains have been *at it' ever since. The American patent law 
 is the father of all patent laws in the world today — in recog- 
 nition of individual rights. The inventive genius of America 
 has been given full swing, the individual initiative has been 
 encouraged. Think of that, you who have been forgetting Amer- 
 ican efficiency. 
 
 ''The German spy system began long before the war. During 
 the last fifty years, the United States has made world-strides in 
 invention, in business management and industrial exportations, 
 and Germany sent her lookouts — ostensibly to observe, but really 
 to appropriate. There have been many instances of young Ger- 
 mans working in American foundries, burning the midnight oil 
 and making drawings so as to utilize the fruits of American 
 inventive genius and efficiency. In Germany they could supply 
 skilled labor at half the cost, and successfully compete with 
 America in her own market — even in the face of a high tariff. 
 To secure the plans and ideas, without cost or loss of time, was 
 the main consideration. Germany did not balk at the moral 
 issue involved in this process of polite larceny." 
 
 What has Germany done for the health of the world ? What 
 has she originated in sanitation? In medicine? Mr. Chappell 
 answers : 
 
 * ' Every step in the direction of sanitation as expressed in the 
 modern bathroom and toilet facilities has been taken in America. 
 What has this meant to the health of our cities ? Look into the 
 practice of medicine and find who discovered and used the first 
 anesthetic, which has been the basis of all surgery and relief 
 of pain. It was not a Germany efficiency expert — it was the 
 American, Dr. Wells, who did this for the world, and first 
 demonstrated it in an American hospital. 
 
 24 
 
TRroMPHS m Science and Medicine That Abe Not German. 
 
 Another American, Dr. Trudeau, showed that pure cold air, 
 proper food and all sane, common-sense ways of living form the 
 most efficacious treatment of consumption. Dr. Murphy, whose 
 intestinal button has saved thousands of lives; Dr. Lazear, who 
 died in proving that mosquitoes carry yellow fever and malaria ; 
 Dr. Carel (with the French Dr. Dakin), whose wonderful anti- 
 septic treatment of wounds has shown marvelous results in 
 France, and Dr. Abbott, discoverer of the hot wax treatment 
 for burns — all these men are Americans. The most important 
 discoveries in the medical realm are not attributable to Ger- 
 mans. Dr. Jenner, an Englishman, gave vaccine to the world; 
 Dr. Lister, also English, was the father of antiseptics; France 
 has given the Pasteur serums, the Roux antitoxin for diphtheria, 
 the Curie radium and radio-activity discoveries ; and the bacterial 
 action of white corpuscles of the blood was the theory advanced 
 by Dr. Metchnikoff, a Russian. " 
 
 What about Germany's preeminence in chemistry? Surely, 
 even if she has bluffed about other achievements, at least we 
 must concede that in chemical discoveries, especially in coal-tar 
 products, her claims have been legitimate. Townes R. Leigh, in 
 an article published in the Drug and Chemical Markets, points 
 out "that of the thirty chief men of science of the sev- 
 enteenth century only three were of German blood; and, of 
 twenty-seven of the eighteenth century, again only three were 
 German. ' ' Although Germany exploited, and grew rich on, coal 
 tar dyes, the production of coal tar dyes was the work of an 
 English chemist, W. H. Perkins. An Englishman, Lightfoot, 
 in 1863, produced aniline black; Verquin, a French chemist, 
 produced the dyes known as magenta and rosaniline, while the 
 important discovery of the sulphur dye was also the work of 
 Frenchmen, Croissant and Brittonpiere. 
 
 ''When we recall that Samson slew a thousand Philistines 
 with the jawbone of an ass," writes Mr. Leigh, "we intuitively 
 wonder how many he would have slain if armed with the jaw- 
 bone of a German propagandist, according to whom all things 
 were made by Germans and without them was not anything 
 made that was made. As much as the German has boasted, he 
 has borrowed more; as much as he has talked, he has taken 
 more." 
 
 Mr. Leigh presents facts in the history of chemical discoveries 
 and development, and these facts conclusively prove that the 
 Teutonic claim to preeminence in this science is just as hollow 
 as the claim to superiority in social progress and in industrial 
 and inventive achievements. The first chemical works in the 
 world were established by Chaptal, near Montpelier, France. 
 Among the bright names of those who gave the world the princi- 
 ples and fundamental laws by which the science of chemistry 
 is governed — as given in the leading text book used in the f ore- 
 
 25 
 
most universities — the name of no German is to be found. Ger- 
 many, says Mr. Leigh, did not discover a single one of these 
 secrets of general chemistry. Liebig and Wohler, who in the 
 nineteenth century made important contributions to the branch 
 of synthetic chemistry, received their training from the French. 
 Mr. Leigh continues: 
 
 "When we look over a catalogue of the chemical elements 
 we are at once impressed with the very small number of useful 
 ones discovered and first examined by Germans. Not a com- 
 ponent of the air he breathes was discovered by a German. 
 Oxygen is credited to Priestley, an Englishman; nitrogen, first 
 recognized by Rutherford, a professor in Edinburgh University ; 
 carbon dioxide, isolated by Black, a Scottish chemist and physi- 
 cist; helium, krypton, xenon and neon, discovered and first 
 studied by British subjects, Lockyer, Ramsay, Crookes and Ray- 
 leigh. Not an element in water was discovered by any German. 
 Hydrogen was discovered by Cavendish, the noted English 
 chemist. Not an element in the salt with which we savor our 
 food was discovered by any German. Its chlorine is a gift of 
 that productive investigator, Scheele, a Swede; its sodium from 
 the versatile Davy, of London. The indictment which has been 
 brought against German chemists concerning the elements in air, 
 water and salt may be extended to cover the elements found in 
 seventy-five thousand other substances, including nearly all of 
 the synthetic compounds used in the world's trade." 
 
 Coal was first distilled, and coke, tar and gas obtained, in 
 1739 by Dr. Clayton, of Kildare. A Scotch nobleman, the Earl 
 of Dundonald, less than fifty years later, patented a process of 
 extracting coal tar in commercial quantities. Coal gas was 
 first used as an illuminant in 1792 by William Murdock, an 
 Englishman. ''Naphthalene, used chiefly in the manufacture of 
 indigo," continues Mr. Leigh, ''was discovered in 1820 by Gar- 
 den; benzol, the parent substance of the most important dyes, 
 was discovered in illuminating gas in 1815 by Faraday ; anthra- 
 cene, largely used in the synthesis of Turkey-red, was first pro- 
 duced by Dumas, of France ; toluene, used both for making dyes 
 and the powerful explosive, T. N. T., was first obtained by 
 Mansfield; and picric acid, also employed in the manufacture 
 of dyes and explosives, was first prepared by Peter Woulfe, a 
 London chemist." Mr. Leigh points out that the miner's safety 
 lamp, by which the hazards of coal mining were largely removed, 
 is the invention of Sir Humphrey Davy. W. H. Perkins, the 
 English chemist, not only produced in 1856 the first coal tar dye, 
 but perfected a method of manufacturing alizarin, whereby the 
 use of madder in making the dye was rendered unnecessary and 
 the vast acreage formerly devoted to the cultivation of this plant 
 was given over to cereals and other crops. 
 
 It is true that Germany forged ahead in the manufacturing 
 of dyes, and that in 1913 she exported twelve times as much 
 synthetic color as was manufactured in the United States. But 
 
 26 
 
in this, as in other industries, she simply appropriated and bat- 
 tened upon the genius and work of others, and, while covering 
 her malfeasances and thefts by impressive boasting, continued 
 her outlaw career as camouflaged highwayman among the 
 nations. 
 
 German Commercialization of Musical Prestige. 
 
 Blandly ignoring France, England and Italy, and contemptu- 
 ously dismissing America as a country whose highest form of 
 literature and art is found in newspaper advertisements and 
 magazine covers, and whose noblest form of music is ' ' ragtime, ' ' 
 Germany lauded her own supremacy in music, painting, sculp- 
 ture and literature. 
 
 Consider music. Germany has asserted with fiinality that 
 she has been supreme in this art. And just as we tacitly ac- 
 cepted her other braggings, we never paused to question the 
 legend of her musical superiority. Germany has produced some 
 great musicians, but let it be noted they were not Prussian, but 
 South German. How did she encourage music? How did she 
 foster the rare genius that did find its birth in the Fatherland? 
 Some light on Germany's place in music is given in an article 
 by John C. Freund in the October, 1918, issue of Musical 
 America, which answers these questions. Mr. Freund says: 
 
 ''Through the excellent German musicians and music teach- 
 ers who came to this country in years past, through the musical 
 conductors, principally Germans, continuous propaganda was 
 made to the effect that a musical education could not be really 
 secured in the United States, so one had to go to Germany, 
 especially to Berlin or Dresden, for it. Writers on the Ameri- 
 can press were so imbued with the German idea that they turned 
 the cold shoulder to French, Italian, and particularly English 
 music. Such music, indeed, barely existed for them. In fact, 
 take our leading critics for years. They were so saturated with 
 'the German myth' that they went so far as to declare that such 
 an idea as an American composer was preposterous. He did 
 not exist, and he never would. As for 'musical atmosphere,' so- 
 called, why that existed only in Germany. 
 
 "So we have ample evidence that the German virus had been 
 so injected into the blood of the American people that if a con- 
 ductor passed away, there was only one thing to do, and that 
 was to cable to Berlin to find out who was out of a job, or 
 who would accept from six to ten times as much money as he 
 ever saw before, to come over here and help us musical barbarians 
 out of our dilemma. 
 
 "While we have received with complacency, and, indeed, 
 subserviency, the criticism that Germany has hurled at us all 
 the time, that we are a non-musical people, it has never occurred 
 to anybody to throw the limelight on Germany. 
 
 ' ' The finest symphony orchestra among the German-speaking 
 people is not a Berlin orchestra, but the Vienna Philharmonic. 
 
 27 
 
And that is not up to the standard of the New York Philhar- 
 monic nor of the Boston Symphony. The greatest opera or- 
 chestra is not at the Berlin Opera House but at the Royal Opera 
 House, in Dresden, and that orchestra, in the opinion of com- 
 petent and unbiased experts, is not up to the standard, by any 
 means, of the present orchestra in the Metropolitan in New 
 York. 
 
 *'To hear people talk, one would suppose that all the great 
 conductors came from Germany. They didn't. Hans Richter 
 was born in Hungary, educated in Vienna. Nikisch is a Hun- 
 garian by birth, family and education. Gustav Mahler was a 
 Bohemian. Seidl, the great Wagner conductor, for years with 
 us at the Metropolitan, was a Hungarian. Mottl, a Viennese, 
 born in Vienna. Weingartner, a Dalmatian. Stransky is an 
 Austrian. So is Kunwald. As a matter of fact, Germany, in 
 a generation, has produced only one great conductor outside 
 of the late Theodore Thomas, namely, Hans von Biilow. 
 
 *' Now let us take some of the great musicians, often classed 
 as Germans. Kreisler is a Viennese. Kubelik is a Bohemian. 
 Auer, the renowned violin teacher, is a Hungarian. Among 
 the pianists, Rosenthal came from Austria. Sauer is a Viennese, 
 though born in Hamburg. D 'Albert was born in Glasgow, 
 Scotland,; while De Pachman is a Russian. 
 
 ' \ Now so far as opera is concerned. Italian opera in Ger- 
 many is a weird thing. Anybody who has ever heard 'Aida,' 
 especially in a minor German city, will agree. 
 
 ''Only recently Dr. Richard Strauss suggested, as a means 
 of doing away with what he called ' Germany 's operatic misery, ' 
 that three or four of the cities of twenty-five thousand inhabi- 
 tants, or more, should get together and combine their resources, 
 so as to get something like a decent standard of operatic per- 
 formances. 
 
 "If you want to hear a fine Wagner performance, you need 
 not go to Germany. You can hear it right here in New York 
 or Chicago. 
 
 "Prices for opera, it is true, are cheap, in Germany, one 
 of the reasons being the poor salaries paid to the singers, espe- 
 cially to the chorus and musicians. And then there is the state 
 and municipal support given to opera. 
 
 "Berlin is the piano center of the world. Admitted. But 
 few of the concerts are of high rank. One of the reasons is 
 that so many young people, especially young Americans, are 
 anxious to start concert careers there. They spend money to 
 get criticisms from the German press, which are worth little or 
 nothing. 
 
 "There are many fine military bands in Germany, but not 
 one superior to our Sousa's, as was proved when Sousa took his 
 band through Europe not so long ago. 
 
 ' ' There are some fine teachers in Germany, but by no means 
 superior to the German teachers and others in this country, 
 
 28 
 
whether for instrumental or vocal work. In the case of leading 
 teachers, unless a student is well advanced and has considerable 
 talent, he or she is apt to be handed over to a ' vorbereiter ' — or 
 assistant — generally a pupil who is paying his lessons that way. 
 
 ''To hear Germans talk — that is, Germans in Germany — you 
 would think that as soon as a celebrated composer brings out 
 a new work, it will be produced in Berlin. Before six months, 
 New York will have it, and that will be months before it will 
 be heard in Berlin. In Berlin the people are so over-sated with 
 music that they have become blase. They are musically over- 
 educated. 
 
 "The result of the high degree of musical knowledge and 
 culture in Germany is that it has been used as a cloak for an 
 army of fakers, who pose as musical experts and teachers, whose 
 special prey are Americans. 
 
 ''Let us never forget that all the great composers of whom 
 Germany is so proud today, including Liszt, who was, by the 
 bye, more Italian than German, never received any recognition 
 from their own compatriots until it was too late, or till after 
 they were dead, like Schubert. Read the biography of Wagner 
 and realize how he was maligned by his compatriots, the Ger- 
 mans, till the crazy King Ludwig of Bavaria took compassion 
 on him. 
 
 "In all this madness there was method! Not alone because 
 it brought money to the grist mills in Germany that were grind- 
 ing out war munitions, preparing food supplies for the great 
 day when the strike would be made for world dominion, but 
 because the German High Command realized long ago that 
 through the German music, through the German musicians, 
 through the German conductors, they had access to the inner- 
 most circles of life, not only all over Europe, but in this country, 
 and as we know through the internment of Dr. Muck of the 
 Boston Symphony, of Dr. Kunwald, of the Cincinnati Symphony, 
 they used this power not only for propaganda, but for the most 
 nefarious assaults upon the very welfare and lives of our 
 people." 
 
 Teuton Vandalism Unparalleled Since Burjjing of 
 Alexandrian Library. 
 
 In an article on "Germany, Patron of the Gracious Arts," 
 T. Everett Harre, the novelist, considers Germany's vainglorious 
 claims to eminence in literature, painting and sculpture. Mr. 
 Harre says : 
 
 "In the early days of the great war, when the world stood 
 aghast at the spectacle of f rightfulness wrought in Belgium, 
 many people asked how it was possible for the quiet, simple, home 
 loving Germans suddenly to change into demoniac murdering 
 and burning hordes. The stunned world saw cathedrals and 
 
 29 
 
edifices of incomparable beauty given wantonly to the flames. 
 Since the burning in the fourth century of the famed library of 
 Alexandria, containing the most precious heritage of literature 
 and learning then in the world, including the volumes of Per- 
 gamus and the poems of Sappho, history has accounted no such 
 monstrous crime against the intellectual and spiritual life of 
 mankind. How could the Germans, who chiefly prided themselves 
 on their *kultur,' wallow in such needless, wanton vandalism? 
 How could the people, who boasted of such superior literary 
 achievements, consign to the flames the famed library of Lou- 
 vain ? Could a people of genuine culture commit such sacrileges 
 against religion, learning, art and literature? A people of gen- 
 uine culture could not. And the fact is that the Germans have 
 not been a people of genuine culture. 
 
 *' Germany with trumpets announced her adoption of Shake- 
 speare, and while she did not go so far as to claim that Shake- 
 speare was a German, she did assert that the immortal bard was 
 better appreciated and understood in Germany than in England. 
 In fact, Shakespeare came into his own only among the intellec- 
 tual Germans. In modern literature Germany has declared her- 
 self far ahead of any other nation — ^more liberal, more ad- 
 vanced. She produced figures showing the annual production 
 of books in the Fatherland and proved thereby that the German 
 masses were better read than the general public of any other 
 country. In typical Teuton fashion she proved her literary ad- 
 vancement by statistics ! But let us consider what Germany has 
 actually done. 
 
 **It is true that in literature Germany has struck one ncAv 
 note. That note is the morbid analysis of sexuality and sexual 
 aberration. Germany's modern poetry is represented by Marie 
 Madeline, who has put into verse subjects generally confined to 
 the study of psycopathics, and translations of whose work would 
 be impossible in English. In modern drama she has been repre- 
 sented by Wedekind, whose revelations of the sexual viciousness 
 of childhood are admittedly original, and who has succeeded in 
 making even prostitution unique in its depravity. The novels 
 that were most popular in Germany up to the outbreak of the 
 war— the German 'best sellers' — dealt with subjects outside the 
 pale of polite discussion in any other country, and at that they 
 lacked the excuse the 'broadest' French fiction could claim — 
 literary finish and artistry. Among the swarm of German 
 propagandists who infested America after the advent of Dr. 
 Bernhard Dernburg in 1914, was one Hans Heintz Ewers. It 
 was part of Herr Ewers 's commission to boost the cultural and 
 literary achievements of his exalted Fatherland. The variety 
 and extent of Herr Ewers 's activities are probably known to 
 the Department of Justice, for some time ago agents of 
 the United States Government saw fit to intern the author 
 of one of the Kaiser's favorite poems. This poem which 
 particularly appealed to His Majesty had been reprinted by the 
 
Kaiser at his imperial expense and many thousands of copies 
 had been distributed in Germany. Hans Heintz Ewers was one 
 of the most popular of modern German novelists, and perhaps 
 the most widely read of his romances, a 'German best seller,' 
 dealt with a topic so revolting, and told a story so unspeakably 
 shocking, that the plot could not even be discussed in a self- 
 respecting mixed American company. The popularity of such 
 books in itself is an index to Teutonic literary taste. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, what novel of any distinction has Germany pro- 
 duced? What poet of universal appeal? What essayist dis- 
 tinguished by beauty and felicity of language? The suggestion 
 of beauty of style in German in itself seems absurd. 
 
 *'If Germany had produced any great literature surely the 
 world would know of it, for no nation has done so much by com- 
 pulsory methods to force its language and 'kultur' upon other 
 peoples. Is the language of 'kultur' itself in anyway associated 
 with literature? We speak of the language of Chaucer and 
 Shakespeare. One never hears of Addisonian German. English 
 song goes back to Caedmon, who wrote in the seventh century; 
 Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic, dates from the eighth or ninth 
 century. Where was German literary art at that time? Did 
 Germany have a contemporary to the Venerable Bede ? English 
 literature, and French and Italian literature, began when the 
 German hordes were still savage. 
 
 Wagner Operas Based on Legendary Tales op Norse, British 
 
 AND French. 
 
 **Did Germany ever present a constellation such as that of 
 the Elizabethan age? Where are her peers to Shakespeare, 
 Spencer, Milton, Marlowe or Ben Johnson ? To Samuel Johnson, 
 Dean Swift and Oliver Goldsmith? What poets has she pro- 
 duced who match even the more modern English singers? Does 
 one even think of the German language as a vehicle for poetry? 
 Can one by any stretch of the imagination think of Keats 's 
 ' Endymion ' — that poem of rainbow light and moonshine — as hav- 
 ing been written in cumbrous, uncouth German? Can one con- 
 ceive of Shelley's 'Adonais' as rendered in the German tongue? 
 The German language simply could not carry the music peculiar 
 to Swinburne. Did the spirit of democracy ever find poetic 
 voice in Germany such as it found through Shelley? Is there 
 a German parallel to 'Prometheus Unbound'? Did Germany 
 give birth to any such apostle of liberty as Byron? Did she 
 have any worthy contemporary of Wordsworth and Tennyson? 
 The Germans, it must be conceded, have produced Goethe, 
 Schiller and Heine. Goethe and Schiller were not Prussians, but 
 South Germans, and Heine was a Jew. Yet none of these names 
 is a universal household word. So far as Heine was concerned, he 
 was hounded and persecuted in Germany. He was saved from 
 starvation by the generosity of a French royal patron and to this 
 
 31 
 
day the Kaiser has refused to permit a statue to be erected in his 
 honor in the Empire. 'Faust,' the most famed German literary 
 production, is not even popularly read among the German masses, 
 and yet, it is notable and significant that 40 to 50 years ago a 
 popular ten-cent edition of 'Faust' was issued by Harper and 
 Brothers and was widely read by the 'barbarian Americans.' 
 The whole theme of 'Faust' — the spiritual struggle between 
 good and evil — is above the head of the Prussian. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, 'Faust' is generally known to the world through 
 the medium of an opera composed by Gounod, a Frenchman. 
 The Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, is universally better known 
 and more widely read than any German poet. The literature 
 of the Arabians has had a greater world influence than any lit- 
 erature of the Germans. Singularly, Germany has affected to 
 scorn the literature and art of her neighbor nations, despite the 
 fact that Italian literature goes back to Petrarch and Dante and 
 French literature to the Romance troubadors and trouveres. 
 In line with her unscrupulous policy of appropriating what be- 
 longs to others, Germany has sought to claim Dante, Houston 
 Stewart Chamberlain — the Englishman who became a natural- 
 ized Prussian propagandist — having put forth to the amusement 
 of the world the preposterous claim that Dante was of Teuton 
 origin. 
 
 "What has Germany given that is original? The story of 
 Parsifal and the Holy Grail, which Wagner put into opera, and 
 which the Germans have exploited as their supreme religious 
 epic, a peculiarly German property, originated with the French. 
 A French trouvere, Guyot, was the first to compose in the twelfth 
 century a poem on the subject of the Holy Grail, and it was 
 a century later that the legend — which became the subject of 
 German story and music — was taken over by a German, Wol- 
 fram von Eschenbach, and put into literary form. The story 
 of Tristan and Isolde, which forms the theme of the finest of 
 Wagner's operas, was not German, but was the subject of many 
 metrical tales in the Romance language, w^hich were versified by 
 the early French minstrels from more ancient British authorities. 
 The story was first taken from the French and given in German 
 by Gottfried of Strasburg, who lived in the early part of the 
 thirteenth century. The mythological lore which Wagner made 
 the basis of his ' Niebelungenlied ' — that whole imaginative world 
 of gods and heroes — originated with the Norse and Scan- 
 dinavians and was not, as the Germans have asserted, native with 
 them. In ancient as in modern times the Germans simply took 
 what other peoples originated. The native stories and legends 
 which were popular in Germany in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries were noted only by a ponderous and coarse humor. 
 That was their only originality. The most famous folk book, 
 'Till Eulenspiegel' narrated the story of one Eulenspiegel, who 
 was baptised three times in mud — a typically Teuton fancy — 
 and recounts just such coarse and burlesque adventures as would 
 
 32 
 
appeal to the heavy German mind. From the earliest to modern 
 times what has been known as German wit has been only coarse 
 buffoonery and clumsy vulgarity. Modern German wit has been 
 chiefly represented in the obscene and profane periodicals, 
 'Jugend' and ' Simplicissimus. ' The shocking and ribald blas- 
 phemies of ' Simplicissimus ' in cartooning Deity and jeering at 
 and ridiculing God, in making jokes of the most sacred beliefs 
 of mankind, oddly parallel the sacrilegious attitude of the vulgar 
 Kaiser as to his relations with God. The only difference is that 
 the Kaiser lacks even impious humor, but the blasphemy in both 
 cases reveals a revolting lack of reverence and human decency 
 that is peculiarly German, and the affront to God and the spir- 
 itual instincts of mankind are the same. 
 
 ''Germany has produced two modern dramatists of excellent 
 merit, Hauptmann and Sudermaim. Germany has not produced 
 a single dramatist of the stature of Moliere, nor a Kostand, nor 
 a single craftsman such as Sardou. None of her dramatists 
 ranks with Ibsen, a Scandinavian. 
 
 "How does German literature compare with that of 'effete 
 France', for instance? France, with her Villon, Verlaine and 
 Baudelaire. Does Germany have a singer the equal of any of 
 these? Has she produced any novelist who ranks with Victor 
 Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Gautier and Anatole France? Any 
 essayist who rivals Montaigne or Pascal ? Any equal to Rabelais 
 or Voltaire? When Frederick the Great, the brains of the 
 Hohenzollerns, wanted to get in touch with real culture he sum- 
 moned Voltaire to his court. Frederick the Great, like Nero, 
 was a musician and poet — sic! He played the flute and, like 
 his descendant, William II, wrote verse. His flunkeys, like the 
 toadies of Nero, applauded his verse; but when he sent them 
 to Voltaire for criticism that frank Frenchman remarked, "See, 
 the King sends me some of his dirty linen to wash.' Compare 
 Germany with any nation, and how does she measure ? Has she 
 produced any stylist in her language who matches Ruskin and 
 Walter Pater in English? Has she produced any literary critic 
 equal to the English Matthew Arnold, to Taine and Sainte 
 Beuve, of France? Has she produced any master of the short 
 story equal to de Maupassant, the Frenchman, Kipling, the 
 Englishman, or 0. Henry, the American? Has she produced 
 any writer of fantasies whose name may be mentioned in the 
 same breath with that of Edgar Allen Poe? Is there any mod- 
 ern German dramatist, poet and philosopher possessing the 
 transcendental imagination, the exquisite delicacy of Maeterlinck, 
 the Belgian ? Italy has given the world Boccaccio, Manzoni and 
 D 'Annunzio ; Spain, Cervantes and Ibanez ; Poland, Sienkiewicz ; 
 Russia, Tolstoy, Tourguenief, Dostoyevsky, Merejkovsky and 
 Gorky. Germany has not a single novelist who ranks near any 
 one of these. Not a single first-rate novelist. 
 
 "Germany has made much of her leadership in philosophy. 
 No one would desire to disparage the intellect of Immanuel Kant, 
 
 33 
 
and yet the question arises — what single philosopher has Ger- 
 many given the world who has shed actual light on the mystery 
 of human existence, whose words have guided and ennobled, 
 who has helped humanity in its upward climb as did Plato, 
 Socrates, Confucius and Marcus Aurelius? Among all her 
 philosophers Germany has produced no such standard-bearer of 
 the truth as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Marcus Aurelius, a Roman, 
 and Emerson, a modern American, have both contributed a phil- 
 osophy which is helpful in mankind's struggle toward greater 
 justice and righteousness, and which is applicable to individuals 
 and races striving toward moral betterment. What philosophy 
 has Germany given that has encouraged and helped the world 
 toward democracy, toward greater spirituality of thought and 
 conduct? No such philosophy came from Hegel, who lacked 
 even the power of lucid self-expression. No such philosophy 
 came from Schopenhauer, who sought to rob mankind of all qual- 
 ities of goodness and designated God as an illusion. No such 
 philosophy came from Neitzsche, whose monstrous teachings of 
 the superman who is above good and evil perhaps did more to 
 poison German thought and bring Germany to her ruin than any 
 other thing. It was Neitzsche who gave the Hohenzollerns the 
 philosophy which they applied in Belgium and Northern France, 
 and which condoned outrages without parallel in the onslaught 
 for world domination. It was Rudolph Eucken, the modern 
 German philosopher, who pictured Germany as the sturdy young 
 oak among the nations which should grow up, branch out, 
 strangle all of its weaker brothers and dominate the earth. The 
 Socialist philosophy of Karl Marx is a belly-philosophy, a phil- 
 osophy which ignores the soul of man and its aspirations and re- 
 duces life to mere material necessity. It is a brutalizing, earthy 
 philosophy, blind to the dreams of the brain, valuing only the 
 work of the hands, which would reduce humankind to a dead 
 level of standardization. And it was this very philosophy which 
 the Prussian autocracy applied in the commercialization of 
 modern Germany. German philosophy has been planted firmly 
 in the earth ; its eyes have not peered above the horizon and seen 
 visions among the clouds. Is it not significant that in her 
 philosophy, her novels and dramas, Germany affords so little 
 that is exalting and inspiring? Scorning the transcendental, 
 the poetic, the imaginative, the altruistic, does it not seem that 
 for a mess of pottage of material prosperity Germany for- 
 feited her human birthright to spiritual ideals, 'the living ray 
 of intellectual fire?' Germany was tempted by her evil genius 
 with the lure of making bread from stones and of possessing the 
 kingdoms of the world. Her very philosophy, her so-called litera- 
 ture, are an expression of that spiritual and moral fall. 
 
 ''Without a great literature, Germany simply sought to 
 cover her deficiency by empty claims. Among the nations 
 she has been the parvenu. Her entire procedure in at- 
 tempting to gather to herself the trappings of ' kultur, ' intellect 
 
 34 
 
and respectability, has been concretely illustrated in the home of 
 any newly rich German-American brewer. The St. Louis 
 brewer's home, cluttered miscellaneously with cheap art, mere- 
 tricious paintings, and libraries of books bought wholesale to 
 fill the shelves, epitomizes German culture. The brewer has 
 shelves of books, but they are not read. He is satisfied with the 
 appearance. His culture is just rank, unashamed ' fake. ' ' ' 
 
 Painting and Sculpture Among the Huns. 
 
 Long before Germany reached out to grab territory belonging 
 to other peoples, she sought, as we have seen, to appropriate the 
 fruits of others ' minds. With characteristic Teuton hoggishness 
 she sought to corner for herself the very heights of Parnassus. 
 In his article, Mr. Harre says : ' ' It was a spectacle of the belly- 
 god seeking to filch the laurels of Apollo, of the bristling wild 
 boar seeking to ride the steed Pegasus." In considering Ger- 
 many's claims to pre-eminence in painting and sculpture, Mr. 
 Harre goes on to say : 
 
 "What great art has Germany produced? What master- 
 pieces of painting and sculpture? What sublimely beautiful 
 forms of architecture? 
 
 ' * Italy leads the world with Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Raphael. 
 Benvenuto Cellini and Titian, supreme masters. France has 
 produced Millet, Corot and Meissonier; England, Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds, Gainsborough, Millais, Constable; America, Whistler 
 and Sargent ; Spain, Murillo and Sorolla. After the Frenchman, 
 Rodin, the greatest modern sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, is an 
 American. What masters has Germany given the world, what 
 names that conjure magic? There was Lenbach, who painted 
 the famous * Iron Chancellor ' — a grim expression through a hard 
 human face of imperial German savagery. Lenbach, in viola- 
 tion of the canons of art, made his paintings with the assistance 
 of photographs of the subjects. What has Germany to offer to 
 match the achievements of her neighbors, the despised Dutch? 
 In the annals of Germany, has there been a Rubens or 
 Rembrandt? German art, so-called, has taken one form in 
 convelitional lachrymose religious pictures, popularly repro- 
 duced in prints, in which the sacred personages are en- 
 dowed with a Teutonic physiognomy and in which even the 
 weeping Magdalens indicate a Teutonic opulence of flesh. The 
 ;vomen of German art are universally hefty. They are high- 
 colored, buxom. The saints and virgins are so flagrantly physi- 
 cal one can hardly picture the representations as being those of 
 members of the spiritual kingdom. Of course, this depiction of 
 womanhood is the sort that must appeal to the Teutonic imagina- 
 tion. The glorious Brunhildes are simply muscular Amazons. 
 They would tip the scales where the average American male 
 would fearfully decide that for his health's and soul's sake he 
 must take to riding or golf. A comparison of these large ladies 
 
 35 
 
with the ethereal women of Dante Gabriel Rosetti illuminatingly 
 reveals differences of racial ideals in feminine beauty. Another 
 school of art, most popular in Germany, is the immortalization in 
 oils of large baskets of fruit, platters of juicy beeves, and of 
 barons or monks holding up with gusto foaming steins of beer. 
 This is no doubt the artistic expression of the sublime Teuton 
 stomach. Balzac, inspired by a sense of humor, once invited 
 to a banquet a party of friends, and when they arrived at his 
 house they found the banquet prepared — in the shape of a table 
 laden with mimic delicacies drawn upon the wall of his dining 
 room. No German could possibly exercise sufficient imagination 
 to enjoy such a purely aesthetic repast, but it may be that the 
 unsatisfied appetites of the underpaid, underfed, food-and-beer- 
 loving masses explains the popularity of these chromos of food 
 and drink. 
 
 ''Germany has declared that she has produced great sculp- 
 ture. Let this at once be admitted. Her archaeologists went 
 out to Greece and Asia and with picks and shovels produced 
 from the soil statues hewn thousands of years ago by the 
 ancients, which they carried off to enhance the royal palaces 
 and museums of Berlin. It is a question whether this was in- 
 spired so much by a love of beauty as by a lust for loot. 
 
 ''When the ravening Huns swept through Belgium, burning 
 and otherwise destroying cathedrals, churches and other rare 
 edifices, a German newspaper excused this vandalism by declar- 
 ing that the razed structures would be replaced by more beauti- 
 ful edifices, that all the inferior effete art destroyed would be 
 replaced by a superior art. That ' superior architecture and art ' 
 were, of course, German. In those anxious days before the Ger- 
 man drive on Paris was halted, what one logically expected, 
 should the Germans reach Paris, was that Teuton efficiency would 
 convert Notre Dame into a brewery and the Louvre into a 
 sausage factory, although it is more probable that the Gothic 
 glory of Notre Dame would have been such an eyesore to the 
 Huns that they would have wrecked it with fiendish glee, and 
 with the purpose of replacing it with a more robust and utili- 
 tarian form of architecture. Probably in keeping with 
 the shape of his head, the Hun mind runs to square heavy 
 buildings, devoid of delicacy. And, strangely like the insane 
 and mentally unbalanced, he delights in bright, conflicting colors. 
 This is expressed in German churches, with their artificial flow- 
 ers and gaudily coated statuary. It is expressed in the ensemble 
 of the average Teuton home, with its glazed porcelain, red and 
 green glassware, hectic embroideries, and florid chromos. It is ex- 
 pressed in the court of Potsdam, as extravagant and exaggerated 
 in its brummagem trappings as the court of an opera bouffe. It 
 has reached over to this country and finds an expression, as I have 
 said, in the newly-rich German brewer 's establishment. The whole 
 note is sheer lack of taste. If the Teuton stands alone in any orig- 
 inal characteristic it is in this. It is right here that you find the 
 
 36 
 
essential difference, the dividing line, between the Teuton and 
 other nationalities. G. K. Chesterton has said the Teuton lacks the 
 mental quality of being able to see other people's point of view. 
 That is because of this essential lack, this absence of a mental 
 connecting link, of sympathy in appreciation. The Hun's mind 
 is isolated, peculiar. He can't think as people with delicacy of 
 feeling, fineness of appreciation, refinement of thought, honor, 
 consideration of others, courtesy, tolerance and self-abnegation — 
 which constitute taste — can think. This poverty of mind ex- 
 plains his so-called art ; it explains his politics, his dealings with 
 other peoples. It explains his empty bragging, his claims to 
 other peoples' achievements; it makes clear the point of view 
 which designated treaties as scraps of paper. It makes clear, 
 too, how the German breed — instinctively realizing and resent- 
 ing its deficiency, and therefore hating any achievement and 
 beauty it could not itself attain — could burn the Library of 
 Louvain and the Cathedral of Ypres. * Beauty is truth,' said 
 Keats, 'truth beauty.' An apprehension of beauty, as well as 
 an apprehension of truth, certainly seems to sum up what the 
 Prussian entirely lacks. ' ' 
 
 37 
 
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