New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1917-05-06

phenomenon Justly. The British, like our
serves, have partially and temporarily
failed TO understand the nature of the Ger
man assault; we have insisted upon apply
ing TO the German mind our own standards
end upon believing that the Germans
thought as we thought believed as we be-
lieved. but were temporarily and terribly
betrayed by military spirit and by dy
nastic 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
accidents nor excuses; they are not re-
GREETED or condemned by a majority or
even a minority Of he German people
They are accepted by Kaiser and peasant;
they are practised by Crown Prince and
private soldier; they are portion of what
Germany holds to be her right and her
mission
The Lusitania Massacre should have
been final illumination for US. Blazing
up as it did it should have revealed to us
the ashes of Belgium and the ruins of
Northern France. We should have seen
in our slain women and children the sisters
end fellows in misfortune of those who
died more shamefully in Louvain and a
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 people, perceived that the
German phenomenon is an attack upon civ
ilization by barbarism, a barbarism which
combines the science Of the laboratory with
the savagery of the jungle, but 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 mankinds 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 as well as the larger and more
famous thing, with far more emphasis
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 recognize
the revelation of that which is essential
barbarism.
For us the Lusitania Massacre was
beginning. 1t was only beginning, but it
was not possible then, it is hardly possible
under the protection of laws framed to
protect human liberty and human rights,
living in the full sunlight of this Twentieth
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 landmark and it will endure in
American history Our children and our
chidren's children, recalling this an
niversary, will think of it as did the
Romans over long generations, after the
first inroads of the barbarians had reached
their walls.
To-day is not day for anger or passion.
1t is not in anger or in passion that civil
lied men go forth to deal with wild ami
mails, 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 year ago
American men, women and children were
slain wilfully, wantOnly, to serve a Ger
man end, slain without regard to sex or
condition, slain in the broad daylight by
German naval officers and men whose coun-
trymen 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
IL l. Al l..