With the ending of the war many books will be released dealing with various questions and phases of the great struggle, some of them perhaps impartial, but the majority written to make propaganda for foreign nations with a view to rendering us dissatisfied with our country and imposing still farther upon the ignorance, indifference and credulity of the American people.
The author’s aim in the following pages has been to provide a book of ready reference on a multitude of questions which have been raised by the war. It is strictly American in that it seeks to educate those who need education in the truth about American institutions and national problems.
A blanket indictment has been found against a whole race. That race comprises upward of 26 per cent. of the American people and has been a stalwart factor in American life since the middle of the seventeenth century. This indictment has been found upon tainted evidence. As is shown in the following pages, a widespread propaganda has been, and is still, at work to sow the seeds of discord and sedition in order to reconcile us to a pre-Revolutionary political condition. This propaganda has invaded our public schools, and cannot be more effectively combatted than by education.
The contingency that the book may be decried as German propaganda has no terrors for the author, and has not deterred him from his purpose to deal with facts from an angle that has not been popular during the past five years. What is here set down is a statement of facts, directed not against institutions, but men. Men come and go; institutions endure if they are rooted in the hearts of the people.
The author believes in the sacredness and perpetuity of our institutions. He believes in the great Americans of the past, and in American traditions. He is content to have his Americanism measured by any standard applied to persons who, like Major George Haven Putnam, feel prompted to apologize to their English friends for “the treason of 1776,” or who pass unrebuked and secretly condone the statement of former Senator James Hamilton Lewis, that the Constitution is an obsolete instrument.
Statements of fact may be controverted; they cannot be disproved by an Espionage Act, however repugnant their telling may sound to the stagnant brains of those who have been uninterruptedly happy because they were spared the laborious process of thinking for themselves throughout the war, or that not inconsiderable host which derives pleasure and profit from keeping alive the hope of one day seeing their country reincorporated with “the mother country”--the mother country of 30 per cent. of the American people.
It is to arouse the patriotic consciousness of a part of the remaining 70 per cent. that this compilation of political and historical data has been undertaken.
European issues and questions have been included in so far only as they exercised a bearing on American affairs, or influenced and shaped public opinion, prejudice and conclusions. To the extent that they serve the cause of truth they are entitled to a place in these pages.
THE AUTHOR. New York City, January, 1920.
=Allied Nations in the War.=--The following countries were at war with Germany at the given dates:
Russia 1 August, 1914 France 3 August, 1914 Belgium 3 August, 1914 Great Britain 4 August, 1914 Servia 6 August, 1914 Montenegro 9 August, 1914 Japan 23 August, 1914 San Marino 24 May, 1915 Portugal 9 March, 1916 Italy 28 August, 1916 Roumania 28 August, 1916 U. S. A. 6 April, 1917 Cuba 7 April, 1917 Panama 10 April, 1917 Greece 29 June, 1917 Siam 22 July, 1917 Liberia 4 August, 1917 China 14 August, 1917 Brazil 26 October, 1917 Ecuador 8 December, 1917 Guatemala 23 April, 1918 Haiti 15 July, 1918
The following countries broke off diplomatic relations with Germany:
Bolivia April 13, 1917 Nicaragua May 18, 1917 Santo Domingo Costa Rica Sept. 21, 1917 Peru October 6, 1917 Uruguay October 7, 1917 Honduras July 22, 1918
=Alsace-Lorraine.=--Dr. E. J. Dillon, the distinguished political writer and student of European problems, in a remarkable article printed long before the end of the war, called attention to the general misunderstanding that prevails regarding Alsace-Lorraine. He said that the two houses of the Legislature in Strasburg made a statement through their respective speakers which, “however skeptically it may be received by the allied countries, is thoroughly relied upon by Germany as a deciding factor” in the vexatious question affecting those provinces.
The president of the second chamber, Dr. Ricklin (former mayor of Dammerkirch, then occupied by the French), declared solemnly in the presence of the Stadthalter that the two provinces, while desiring modification of their status within the German empire, also desired their perpetuation of their present union with it.... “The people of Alsace-Lorraine in its overwhelming majority did not desire war, and therefore did not desire this war. What it strove for was the consummation of its political status in the limits of its dependence upon the German empire, and that settled, to resume its peaceful avocations. In this respect the war has changed nothing in our country. We make this confession aloud and before all the world. May it be everywhere heard, and may peace be speedily vouchsafed us.”
“The speaker of the First Chamber, Dr. Hoeffel,” continues Dr. Dillon, “also made a pronouncement of a like tenor, of which this is the pith: ‘Alsace-Lorraine particularly has felt how heavily the war presses upon us all, but selfless sacrifice is here, too, taken for granted. Our common task has knit the imperial provinces more closely together than before, and has also drawn more tightly their links with the German Empire.’”
Under date of January 17, 1917, Mayor North, of Detweiler, was quoted in the press of that day: “Alsace-Lorraine needs no liberator. After the war, I am confident, it will know how to guard its interests without the interference of any foreign power. The sons of the country have not bled and died in vain for Germany.”
North is of old Alsatian stock, as is also Former Secretary Petri of Alsace, who said, when the issue of the war was still undecided: “In view of the military situation, the reply of the Entente to President Wilson’s peace note is simply grotesque. It could hardly have used other words if the French were in Strasburg, Metz, Mayence, etc.”
At the National Congress of United Socialists, March 24, 1913, Gustave Herve (quoting a dispatch from Brest to the New York “Times” of the day following), declared, “Alsace was German in race and civilization, and had been an ancient possession of Germany. One of the provinces naturally belonged to Germany and the other to France.”
Francis de Pressense, ex-deputy, declared: “Time has done its work. Alsace-Lorraine no longer wants to return to French rule.”
The last election to the Reichstag before the war showed that only 157,000 out of a total vote of 417,000 voted for “protesting candidates,” while 260,000 voted as Germans, not as separatists.
Though forced to live several generations under French rule, it must be observed that the people of Alsace-Lorraine never ceased to be Germans. The proper mother tongue of a people is that in which it prays. The most distinguished Catholic pulpit orator of Alsace in the last century, Abbe Muhe, who died in 1865, was able only once in his life to bring himself to preach in French; and Canon Gazeau, of Strasburg Cathedral, published in 1868 an “Essai sur la conversation de la langue Allemagne en Alsace,” in which, in the interest of religion and morals, he energetically resisted the attempt to extirpate German speech.
The population of Alsace, with the exception of the rich and comfortable, in its thoughts, words and feeling was thoroughly German. In a petition which was addressed in 1869 to the Emperor Napoleon by people of German Lorraine, we read as follows: “O, sir! How many fathers and mothers of families who earn their bread in the sweat of their brow impose upon themselves the pious but none the less heavy duty of teaching their children the catechism in German by abridging in the winter evenings their own needful hours of sleep.”
In 1869 a radical journal was established by prominent republicans of Muhlhausen in the interest of propagating agitation against the French empire among the laboring people. This paper appeared only in the German language, and justified this course in the following words: “Because the majority, yes, the very large majority, of the Alsatian people is German in thought, in feeling, in speech; receives its religious instruction in German; loves and lives according to German usages, and will not forget the German language.”
The boundary established in 1871 was the true national and racial boundary, which had been destroyed by Louis XIV when Germany, after the Thirty Years War, was too weak to defend it, but which remained the boundary in the hearts of those on both sides until the French Revolution, when executions, deportations and process of ruthless extermination finally broke the spirit of resistance in the population and made it succumb in order to save itself from extinction.
The attempt of the French to control the Rhine regions, though continued for centuries, has been a failure. “To one who has been through the documents,” writes Raymond D. B. Cahill, in “The Nation” for July 26, 1919, “an astounding thing is the French picture of their former experience in ruling the Rhinelands. The student of that period sees little which should encourage the French to attempt a repetition of that experiment. Indeed, he is impressed with the futility of the nation’s attempt to absorb a people of quite different culture. Although dealing with a people still unawakened by German patriotism, the French found eighteenth century Rhinelanders so different, so attached to their own customs and religion, that it took many years to overcome their resistance.”
It will again require the guillotine, the firebrand and the methods of violence employed during the French revolution to convert Alsace-Lorraine into a French possession. France has decisively declined to submit the question of the annexation to a plebiscite. The beautiful dream about the “redemption of our lost sons” has proved a delusion; hundreds of thousands of citizens have been transported by France in order to blot out the appearance that there was discontent. Abbe Wetterlé, once a member of the German Reichstag, and one of the leaders of the pro-French movement, in his lectures, compiled in his book, “Ce qu était l’Alsace-Lorraine et ce quelle cera; l’edition Francaise illustrée,” Paris, 1915, said: “Soldiers who had participated in the battles of 1914 and had invaded Alsace-Lorraine, returned painfully disappointed. They reported, and their stories agreed in establishing them as reliable, that the civil population of the annexed provinces had betrayed them in the most outrageous manner.”
General Rapp, a descendant of Napoleon’s famous marshal, whose family has been a resident of the province for 600 years, in a manifesto signed by him as a member of the “Executive Committee of the Republic of Alsace-Lorraine,” and addressed to Sir James Eric Drummond, general secretary of the League of Nations, says: “We, the representatives of the sovereign people of Alsace-Lorraine, protest in the name of our people against the systematic ruin of our homeland. The French government has usurped the sovereignty of Alsace-Lorraine. The sovereign people of Alsace-Lorraine was not consulted concerning the constitutional status of the future. We, representing our people, personifying its sovereignty, assume the right to speak for the interests of the people of Alsace-Lorraine before the League of Nations. We are standing today at the parting of the ways in our history. The hour has come when the people are asking, ‘Shall it be revolution or self-determination?’ Before that question is decided we appeal to the good sense of the world, which must know that until the Alsace-Lorraine question is solved beyond the limits of our country, two great nations will never know peace.”
