New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1917-03-23
The Barbarians


ideas are, he should read the accounts that
are now coming of what Germans are
doing in France. We are seeing repeated
the spectacle which has come down to US
from ancient days, the spectacle OF baroa-
risn in the midst of civilization-of Ger
man barbarism in the Latin world. For two
thousand years the German has remained
at heart barbarian. The outward sem
blance Of civilization he has acquired; the
mastery of the machinery of modern times
is his. Civilization of the instrument he has
grasped, but the civilization of the heart
remains as foreign to him now as ever.
We saw this first when German armies
burst into Belgium. We saw then not
crimes committed in hot blood; not the in
cidental brutalities and shameful offend
ings of war. We saw then the cool, cal
culated, ruthless spirit; destroying, not in
anger, not in excitement, but destroying
in cold blood.
The German invaded Belgium in def
anee of all international law and human
right. Having invaded Belgium, he sought
by murder, by rape, by destruction, to
terrify the spirit and break the will of the
reople who stood between him and his
purpose.
To-day, on the plains of Northern
France, the German is destroying, not
merely those things which are valuable to
armies, not merely the roads and the
bridges, not merely the farms, but he is
ruthlessly destroying everything of
beauty, everything of value, that has de-
scended to this generation from the past.
He is turning Northern France into a
desert and into something more terrible,
and he is doing it not for military pur-
poses, but in desire to crush forever.
There can be no mistake about this.
What the German is now doing he said he
would do. Long before the war came to
illuminate for all mankind the barbarism
existing beyond the Rhine, the German
soldiers and German scholars and German
editors warned mankind at large that IN
less the world submitted to the German
will nations would be destroyed, countries
would be ravaged, all that was beautiful,
all that had historic value, would be de-
stroyed.
1t is this kind Of thing that we are
now at war with. It is this sort Of bar
barism that we have, in our turn, been
forced to fight. It is the barbarism that
murders children, rapes women, destroys
churches, defles homes, in the determine
ton 10 impose its will on the world and to
obtain for Germany that place in the
sun" which has become "a smoking ruin
and a hideous desert. There are still
americans who, in their folly and blind
ness, protest that with such thing in the
world we have no duty TO perform beyond
that of protecting our ships upon the sea
and our cities at home. There are Ameri-
cans who, in their ignorance and in their
darkness, do not yet perceive that this
German thing will destroy all that there
is Of civilization and Of humanity unless II
IS itself destroyed; that it is nothing less
than a common peril TO humanity, and
that all civilized mankind must go TO the
trenches, must seek it out as one seeks q
wild beast in its haunt and destroy it, that
there may be an end of such things as have
happened in Belgium and are taking place
in France.
We must send American soldiers 10 Eu-
rope. We must send them TO the firing
line which is the frontier Of civilization
because what We love and what we be
lieye in is impcrilled 80 long as there ex
lists in the world nation given over tc
the idea and the ideals that the Germans
pursue.
Looking backward over tho three
years Of the present world struggle, nc
thoughtful man can now fail to perceive
that what Is being fought il not war
between nations, but war between sys-
tens Of thought, conceptions Of life; be-
tween that thing which we believe 10 be
civilization and that thing which, 10 all