The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1917-11-28
GAN AMERICAN EQUAL PRUSSIAN
 IN ATROCITY?
Comparison of Qualities of Two Nations Made By :
 Edmund Vance Cooke.
..(By Edmund Vance Cook)

.(By Edmund Vance Cook)
 ''But for the grace of God, thera goes Isaac Watts"
 The statement has been attributed to several theologians, but Watts will serve. The story is that the speaker saw drunken vagabond pass by on his way to the galloWs, and, though the speaker had never been accused of criminal tendencies. he recognized the essential ti,.ity of the iluma:i race in his charitable exclamation
 Sfm..arly some ch..risab people arc still e-.cusing the hein.sus r:fenaes of I'russian autocracS and nlilftarism ni saying that German civilization is as his1 as ours, and that, therefore we would do the same as the Germans had done had we been in the same sit .lation as Germany was and is.
 N, ~, there is it de truth in the assertion of pr. Watts and of the Ger man apologists. Given the heredity and the environment of the vagaboDd, and Dr. Watts might have been on his way to the gallows. Given an ern- peror "by Divine right" a Reichstag without any actual governing power, @ Bundesrath with the real governing power, and the Kaiser in control of that, a militaristic training of genera tions until respect for authority and the impulse to obey. were second na- ture; given a philosophy carefully fos- tered by every educational influence (from cIaAs to university that the state is supreme and is beyond all moral law, and that therefore the o, ders of the state expressed trough it's army are to be carried out impli- citly; given the training of child, fa- thera. and grandfather that war '. mans natural state and is Gods way in the world, that oud kultur is su- preme and must be enforced upon the world for it's betterment and ours given this background, there is no reasonable doubt that you and I would be Prussianized, that the Kaiser would appear to us like the leading mel nber of the Trinity, and that Schreckicff- keit would be his prophet and his in- strument.
 The answer to this is that pr. Watts was not the vagabond and that we are not, as yet, PrussianiZed people. If the Germans had had a struggle to- ward personal and political liberty from the time of Magma Charta, a Declaration of Independence and a century and a third of self-expression in government, with an absence of militarism all the time except in rare cases of extreme national peril, the Germans might very likely have sur passed us, for we have been shame fully negligent of some of the oppor- t,Inities of democracy. Unfortunate l ly for them and for us, this has not been their history, and so today there l is apparently no oath too solemn no1 1 to be disregarded, no barbarism too heartless not be committed, no de eency too established not to be vio.
 sted by the German nation. provided
 nly that it furthers the immediate
 i'm of that nation.
 If you and I are walking down the
 street and a child obstructs our patf md I thrust it into the gutter ant .rample upon it; shall I be allowed o continue as free as you from con
 .rol because I assert that I am "a!
 ivilized'' as you are and that my psy
 hology is the same?
 We'll, Germany has gone down thu
 7ighway of the nations and, "civiliz