The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-01-30
MEN, WOMEN
 AND THINGS


 Germans in America to hear Emperor north, and the Prussians as the Huns of the twentieth century. but history will show that they earned the name | by the frightfulness of their methods. It Is easy enough to call names. and still easier to make faces, but let's look the facts in the face and it will be seen that Germany is writing her own indictment before the bar of civil ization with the sword in fiery words of blood.
 In the light of what she has done to men, women and children, the nom combatants around whom international law and public morality has thrown it's protesting arm in modern warfare, it seems almost trivial to tell of her cathedral at Louvain, and the scrap ping of other priceless treasures of architecture and art.
 The daily papers, magazines and books have been filed since the be- gining of the war with the barbarous methods put in vogue by the war lords of Wilhelmstrasse. At first they were pooh poohed a unbelievable and the invention of the enemies of Germany. Bernstorn and his satellites gave out indignant interviews repudiating even the suggestion that the "Furor Teu- tonicus was anything but the bad dream of those who wished the fath- erland evil" For awile many of tho winked.
 Then came the Lusitania incident with all of it's horrors and the German ambassador, sensing the rising tide of outraged sentiment sweeping over the land, condescended to make halfway apologies and asked for a suspension of judgment until he could hear from his imperial master at Potsdam. But why reopen the cruel story of Ma chiavellian duplicity which even caused our patient President to be incapable of believing that the Kaiser, knowing of the cold blooded atrocity would seek to palliate it? Lulled to sleep we lost good time in patient waiting" and gave the slaughterers of the helpless time to get the submarines ready.
 As I look back on the happenings prior to our entry into the war, the thing which makes my blood boil is the suave manner in which the un- speakable Bernstorff played the part of a smiling hypocrite, while plotting the ruin of the government to which he had been accredited; and which had treated him so courteously, dealing with him as man of high honor when all the time he was guilty of a scoun drelism that will send his name down in American history as the Mephisto of diplomacy.
 It seems to me scarcely possible to keep his name and that of the Kaiser too constantly before the American people. Bernstorff is the archtraitor who willingly sank all ideas of com mon decency to carry out the under handed machinations of the hellish crew in power at Berlin, with the sanction and the athority of the Kaiser, who has the impiety to be forever calling on high heaven to witness to the fact that he rules by divine right and struts before his misled and blind ed people as the right-hand partner of Cod The hioh ha uded way in u,hicb ba talks of things heavenly is enough to make the angels weep.
 Tales came floating over the seas of the slave-raids, outrages on women, and the killing of old men and the maiming of innocent children, and "frightfulness" of every kind, and nota- bly, of the insane fury of devastation and destruction of private property, ing of the German army was like the cyclone destroying the forests. The passing of the German army was the plague of the locusts devouring all vegetation The passing of the German army meant the levellng of churches, Q ings and homes. The passing of the German army was accompanied by the cries of helpless old men, the low moans of ravished maidens, the wall of mothers, for their little ones. The passing of the German army was like barbaric Roman triumph with it's long train of slaves deported to work in the fields and factories and mines of the conqueror. The passing of the German army was like the rolling of the Juggernaut-it spelled ruin and death.
 If the men who did these things had done them in the lust of battle when they were obsessed by the fury of the fight, it might be possible to overlook some of the wantonness of their devil try; but when we think they were obeying orders from headquarters, and that "frightfulness" was part of the war game that had been instilled into the babe at the mothers knee. the child at school, the youth in college, and the young men in the universities, then German kultur and those raspon- sible for its propaganda must forever be pilloried and their names execrated as long as civilization lasts It is not merely enough to hold up to infamy Trietsche and Bernhardi, the twin apos-