The Pulaskian., 1921-08-11

pie with the pernicious philosophy of German Kultur, which we sent millions of men and spent billions of treasure to efface from the map of the world. The menace of Menck- en lies in the fact that he is master of language cutting as rapier, and, to change the figure, redolent of bitter aloes and aqua-fortis. He possesses a keen, analytical mind which he does not hesitate, through misrepresentation, blatant conceit and supreme egotism, to employ in tra- ducing a people of whom he con- fesses the densest ignorance. Menck- en is an insufferable excrescence on the body of American literature. He hrazenly admits that he is an intel lectual anarchist, a literary Bolshevik and inferentially convicts himself as disciple of frightfulness in the field of art and letters, to ''sink without trace,'' as Won Tirpitz stands con- demned for all time as the brutal exponent of the doctrine of merciless destruction. ''In brief says he, and his remark Is reminiscent of Potsdam, ''the thing must be done with vio- lence, and without any regard what ever for tender feelings" and he further asserts that cit is combat, the noblest business of man, as of the other mammalia.'' This is the doctrine the Allies thought they had forever throttled when Prussian ego tism was humbled in the Hall of Mirrors where its brutality was made to appear in all its hideous repul- siveness. Can it be possible that we are to permit this subverter of democ- racy to SOW the seed of the upas-ree of anarchy in the soil of 'our free hearts hope and home"?
 He ruthlessly tramples upon our traditions, and, denying capacity for even approximating his superior in- tellect, admits that 'the South begins to show a very respectable fermenta- ton of aspirations and if all goes we'll will soon be producing actual ideas" All of which is the raucous mouthings of a common scold, sans sense, sans deeency, sans genuine sar- casm. It is the quintessence of silli- ness, and none knows it better than the super-egoist who uttered it. He declares that ''the professional Con- federates have paraded their dead brains long enough" " and ''the South erner is himself a walking sarcspha- gus of dead ideas, under the cul- tural dominance of bumptious and ignorant class that, before the war, had been but little raised above the negroes" He reaches the acme of insult in asserting that ''the South erner became the most idiotic pa triot ever heard of in terrestrial his tory
 The Christian institutions of the South come especially under the whitening simooms of this modern Attila; he speaks of ''the ignorant and bombastic clergy of all the low brow sects," of the rantings of the degraded clergy" asserting that ''the local evangelical divines are often plowhands raised to the black gown by way of camp meetings" of their crude and niggerish theology their "clownish activities and banal aspi- rations" The cracker and Confed- crate vote'' is ''herded' with the bar barrie theology of the Methodist and Baptist dervishes'' and ''the pious I nonsense of rowing Prohibitionists, : 'mush-headed curates and idiotic pedagogues, ; ''brummagem mounte- banks and "a gang of school marms, male and female, all dressed up as artists His superior ? wis dom is revealed in his reference to Baptist synods," classifying them A