The Leavenworth echo. [volume] (Leavenworth, Wash.) 1904-current, 1918-11-22
RETURN GfRMANY'S COLONIES!
READ THE RECORD AND DECIDE
BY Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them
Her Colonial Record Too HOrrid
For Words


able as it reads, is yet true. Public
records confirm the facts.
While Germany whines for the re-
turn of her colonies so that she may
still have ga place in the sum-" trav-
elers acquainted with her rule in At
RIGA say she is really looking for an
outlet for the innate barbarity of her
officials. These men have rendered
themselves unspeakably odious to the
natives, and Miss Ida Vera Simonton,
African traveller and student believes
that their reinstatement would cause
a rebellion from Cairo to the cape and
endanger the life of every white man
between.
In an article to the New York Sun
Miss Simonton thus describes German
atrocities witnessed by herself:
l have seen youth and old age
chained neck to neck, ankle to ankle
and waist to waist with shakes rem
iniscent of the Middle Ages, goaded
with rifle butt and bayonet point,
--flogged with the sjambok-that dread
ed lash of rhinoceros hide-and forced
to labor from sunup to sundown on
land that had been theirs from time
out of mind.
I've seen youth and old age drop
dead in their tracks, their bodies
dragged on by their helpless compan-
ions in agony because the German
overlords would not let them rest
long enough to remove the dead body
from its shakes and give it burial.
I've seen youth and old age, women
and little children, after day of the
hardest kind of labor-road making,
Jungle clearing and working timber
crowded for the night into huge bar
racoons without windows or beds, fill
thy and virmin-ridden beyond descrip-
ton, veritable hotbeds of contagion
and disease and charnel-houses for
more wretches than could be counted.
I've seen mothers, ten minutes after
the experience of maternity, hurry
piteously to catch up with the caravan
of which they were part to avoid
the sjamboking they knew would be
theirs if they and their loads did not
arrive at given factory on given
day.
I've known girl children from five
years up the victims of German SOL
diers; I've seen girls still in child
hood set adrift in the hope that they
and their young might perish.
For the cowardly Hun hasn't the
courage of his crimes. He feared
race of Euro-Africans, race tn
would in time become powerful enough
to exact retribution. Any babies who
survived were blinded, mutilated and
poisoned for life with germs.
But the Germans bestiality was
not confined to- his treatment of his
half-caste children. To overcome the
Euro-African danger the government,
under the pretense of offering lucra-
tive positions as barmaids, typists and
telephonists, lured healthy young
German peasant girls to the colonies,
and, denied matrimony, they were
forced to live with German soldiers
and farmers. Many of these women
and children, three thousand of them,
if memory serves, were deserted by
their men when Britain and Boer in
vaded southwest Africa in the present
war.
Over the length and breadth of At
RIGA has travelled the news of Ger
manys blackest wholesale crime,
striking terror into the heart of every
black man, woman and child, and i'm
planting ineradicable hatred of the
Hun. That crime was 'the slaughter,
according to Germans own figures,
of 100000 Hereros, the most cruel,
unnecessary, and most systematic ex-
termination known to history" And
while Africa and the rest of the world
stood appalled, at this dastardly out
rage, Prof. Moritz Bonn, of Munich,
speaking before the Royal Colonial In
stitute, on January 1894, boasted:
"We have solved the native problem by
smashing tribal life" Miss Simon
ton continues:
While the Herero rebellion cost
Germany the huge sum of $15O,OOO,-
900 and more than two-thirds of the
native population, it enabled her to
introduce great numbers of troops and
vast military supplies into the colony
and otherwise prepare for The Day.
But when The Day finally arrived
in August, 1914, despite her prepara-
tions and her intriguing to foment
trouble between Briton and Boer, Ger
many was amazed and disgusted to
find Briton and Boer fighting shoul-
der to shoulder, and after nine short
nonths of the most strenuous and bit