ermany intends to incorporate Rotterdam in her own customs union.
"Belgium must be seized and held, as it now is, and as it is to-day it
must be in the future. The conquest of Belgium has simply been forced
upon us by the necessities of German expansion."

Von Bissing, however, recognizes the difficulty of annexing Belgium and
securing the consent of the members who shall arrange the treaty of
peace at the conclusion of the war, and this is his decision:

"Our best method, therefore, is to avoid, during the peace negotiations,
all discussion about the form of the annexation and to apply nothing
but the right of conquest. Plainly Belgium's King can never consent to
abandon his sovereignty, but we can read in Machiavelli that he who
desires to take possession of a country will be compelled to remove the
King or regent, even by killing him."

Von Bissing has torn off all masks. He himself states that he is
speaking for the Kaiser, as his most trusted friend and counsellor.
Germany intends, therefore, ultimately to kill King Albert of Belgium,
and this carries with it that the Kaiser and his War Staff believe they
have the right to kill any King or President who happens to stand in the
pathway of their ambition. Every lover of mankind whose heart is knitted
in with the poor and the weak will understand what that editor meant the
other day when he said:

"The one duty of the hour, therefore, for America, is to kill Germans,
that we may keep the rest of the world from being killed."

THE JUDAS AMONG NATIONS

II

1. The Original Plot of the Members of the Potsdam Gang

Many historic meetings, big with social disaster, are recorded in
history. Witness the meeting of the Athenian judges for the killing of
Socrates. Witness the coming together of the priests and Judas for the
piteous tragedy of the death of Jesus. Witness that midnight meeting of
the conspirators in Florence for the burning of Savonarola. Terrible
also the results of that meeting in the Potsdam Palace in 1896 that
culminated in the Pan-German Empire scheme.

What began as a spark that day has ended in a world conflagration.

In retrospect the Kaiser and his associates had many events behind them
to encourage the ambition to make Berlin a world capital, Kaiser Wilhelm
the world emperor and all the other nations and races subject peoples.

Beginning in 1860 with thirty-five millions of people and only fifteen
billions of dollars, Germany had cli