New Britain herald., 1914-08-31
The End of KaiSerS. (Oswald Garrison Willard in Review
 of Reyiews)

of Reviews.)
 The masses of the kaiser's empire! To them surely the sympathy of the world must go out as to the poor Bell
 gians who have died about Liege
 without knowing why. realizing only that a hell of shot and shell had
 burst without warning upon them as lightning from the sky. On the heads of the German masses lies not the
 blood guilt. They come from smiling homes, from the castled hills of Thuringia, the vine-clad banks of the the Rhine, the plains of Prussia, the poppied fields of Bavaria. They and their kind have been rising steadily against fearful odds, helped on by
 favorable social legislation, held back by the heavy taxes imposed by the military Moloch, and by their three years of army service; ham, pered in the cities by grinding poverty and checked everywhere by iron castes. Their villages have only just begun to grow, to give signs of a development corresponding to that of the cities; to them have come a, least the harbingers of social justice; something of the prosperity of the na- tion was beginning to be theirs. But now the mother of every son between nineteen and twenty -four years must know her boy upon the firing line, to destroy the sons of some other moth- er-because the triple" alliance de- manded it. For these solid peasants, the backbone of the country, war can bring nothing save woe and debt.
 Will it avail to tell them that the Slavic peril must be combated; that in this world-war Destiny speaks and that it had to come. sooner or later? Are they not inevitably to count the cost when the slaughter is over? Will they not more than ever turn to the party of treason,' which dictates that such things shall not be? Will they not turn to anyone who teaches that it shall be taken out of the hands of one man or a group of men to say whether a nation shall return to barbarism and slay the best that is in it?
 For a German-American whose heart goes back to the country that gave him or his fathers birth, there should be no difficulty in deciding where his sympathies should lie, if he be truly an American citizen. Sor- row as he must for the German masses, if he places reason above emotion and sympathy, he can but. withhold his support from the kaiser who approved in principle the Aus- trian ultimatum to Servia and made no better than 8 dicer's oath the sol- emn promise of the empire to re- spect the neutrality of Belgium. If he be loyal to the principles of this republic the German-American can only hope that absolutism has brought about it's own downfall; that this may mark the end of kaisers, as of great armaments. If he has owed to the great minds of Ger many, it's men of peace, of knowledge, science and art, let him now pay the debt by being true to their ideals He might well remember that Goethe himself faced a German army, when it had been beaten by ragged French | to assure it that then and | there new epoch had begun.
 The immeasurable sins of the rul | CTS of Europe and their militarists can | only be eXpiated now by the begin 1 ming of a new epoch which shall mean | that the masses shall be the kings of | Europe as they are the rulers with us | today; that the last vestiges of feud- 1 alism shall be swept away to make | room for government by and for the | peoples.