New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1916-05-07

man assault; we have insisted upon apply
ing to the German mind our own stand
ards and upon believing that the German
thought as we thought, believed as we
believed, but were temporarily and terri
bly, betrayed by military spirit and by
dynastic madness.
Nothing is less true. nothing more fatal
to just appreciation of the essential fact
in the world in which we live. These things
which we name crimes are neither acct
dents nor excuses; they are not regretted
or condemned by a majority or even a
minority of the German people. They are
accepted by Kaiser and peasant; they are
practised by Crown Prince and private SOL
der; they are a portion of what Germany
holds to be her right and her mission.
The Lusitania Massacre should have been
a final illumination for us. Blazing up as
it did it should have revealed to us the
ashes of Belgium and the ruins Of North
ern France. We should have seen in our
slain women and children the sisters and
fellows in misfortune of those who died
more shamefully in Louvain and score
more of Belgian cities. We should have
seen the German idea working here as
there and revealing in each incident the
same handiwork, the same detail. All
these things were similar as the different
impressions left by single stamp.
We did not see We have not yet as a
nation or as a people, perceived that the
German phenomenon is an attack upon
civilization by barbarism, a barbarism
which combines the science of the labora-
tory with the savagery of the jungle, but
a barbarism because it denies all those
doctrines and principles which have been
accepted after long years as the proof of
human progress and the glory of man.
kinds advance.
In France the people will show you the
atrocities of Germany committed not upon
human beings, but upon inanimate things,
the destruction of the village church and
the Rheims Cathedral, of the little thing
of beauty quite as we'll as the larger and
more famous thing, with far more en-
phasis than they will recount the horrors
suffered by women and children. In the
assault upon things beautiful because
they are beautiful, an assault provoked
neither by lust nor by passion, they recog-
nize the revelation of that which is essen
tial barbarism.
For us the Lusitania Massacre was a
beginning. 1t was only beginning, but
it was not possible then, it is hardly posi-
bic now, for men and women, living in
peace, under the protection of laws framed
to protect human liberty and human rights,
living in the full sunlight Of this Twen-
tieth Century, TO believe that suddenly
there has broken out from the depths the
frightful and the all-destroying spirit of
eras long forgotten.
We have been learning-we must con-
tinue to learn. The road of suffering and
humiliation is still long. But the Lusi-
tania was a landmark and it will endure
in American history. Our children and
cur childrens children recalling this an
niversary will think Of it as did the Ro-
mans over long generations, after the first
inroads of the barbariana had reached
their walls.
To-day is not day for anger or pas
sion. 1t is not in anger or in passion that
civilized men 90 forth to deal with wild
animals, to abolish the peril which comes
from the jungle or out of the darkness.
We do not hate Germans and we shall not
hate Germans because on this day a year
ago American men, women and children
were slain wilfully, wantonly, TO serve a
German end, slain without regard to sex
or condition, slain in the broad daylight
by German naval officers and men whose
countrymen hailed the killing as the
supreme evidence of German courage,
manhood, Kultur.
But as we view the thing without pas
sion we must see it without illusion. If
the German idea prevails all that we be-
lieve in government, in humanity, in the