ly to people but even to
animals. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,
another for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the numberless
Bands of Mercy show the feeling of the people of America toward the
helpless. Americans supposed that other people were like them in this
respect. They knew of the German pensions to the widows and to the
aged, and they supposed that the efficient and enlightened Germans were
among the merciful and sympathetic to the weak and dependent. The
people of the United States knew, of course, of the Zabern incident
where two German soldiers held a crippled Alsatian cobbler while a
German officer slashed his face with his sword for laughing at
him,--they knew that the German army officers were haughty and
overbearing, but they thought this came from their training and was not
a part of the German character. Americans had read the Kaiser's
directions to the German soldiers going to China during the Boxer
uprising to "Show no mercy! Take no prisoners! Use such frightfulness
that a Chinaman will never dare look at a German again. Make a name
for yourselves as the Hun did long ago." But the Americans, or most of
them, did not believe that in the twentieth century a nation classified
among the civilized nations could or would adopt _Frightfulness_ as a
policy. But when they read of the devastation of Belgium and northern
France; of the destruction of Louvain; of whole villages of innocent
men, women, and children being wiped out; of the horrible crimes of the
sinking of the _Lusitania_, the _Falaba_, and the _Laconia_; of the
execution of Edith Cavell; of the carrying off into slavery, or worse
than slavery, of the able-bodied women and men from the conquered
territory--when Americans learned these horrors one after another, they
at last were forced to acknowledge that, like the brutal Assyrian kings
who sought to terrify their enemies into submission by standing as
conquerors upon pyramids of the slain, the modern Huns sought mastery
by _Frightfulness_.

When most Americans came to realize that Germany was fighting a war to
conquer the world, first Russia and France, then England, and then the
United States--for she had written Mexico that if she would attack the
United States, Germany and Mexico would make war and peace
together--when they came to know the German nature and the idea of the
Germans, that Might makes Right and that truth, honesty, and square
dealing l