rld Power, must either uphold
everywhere the principles by which it had been begotten and made great
or sink into the state of an obese, helpless parasite. Its sister
republics would share its fate.

But more than this: it was the flagrant and contemptuous disregard of
all the principles of international law and common humanity by the
Imperial German Government that alarmed and incensed us. The list of
crimes and atrocities ordered in this war by the mysterious and awful
power that rules the German people--which I prefer to call, for the sake
of brevity and impersonality, the Potsdam gang--is too long to be
repeated here. The levying of unlawful tribute from captured cities and
villages; the use of old men, women, and children as a screen for
advancing troops; the extortion of military information from civilians
by cruel and barbarous methods; the burning and destruction of entire
towns as a punishment for the actual or suspected hostile deeds of
individuals, and the brutal avowal that in this punishment it was
necessary that "the innocent shall suffer with the guilty" (see the
letter of General von Nieber to the burgomaster of Wavre, August 27, and
the proclamation of Governor-General von der Goltz, September 2, 1914);
the introduction of the use of asphyxiating gas as a weapon of war (at
Ypres, April 22, 1915); the poisoning of wells; the reckless and
needless destruction of priceless monuments of art like the Cathedral of
Reims; the deliberate and treacherous violation of the Red Cross, which
is the sign of mercy and compassion for all Christendom; the bombardment
of hospitals and the cold-blooded slaughter of nurses and wounded men;
the sinking of hospital ships with their helpless and suffering
company--all these, and many other infamies committed by order of the
Potsdam gang made the heart of America hot and angry against the power
which devised and commanded such brutality. True, they were not,
technically speaking, crimes directed against the United States. They
did not injure our material interests. They injured only our souls and
the world in which we have to live. They were vivid illustrations of the
inward nature of that German Kultur whose superiority, the German
professors say, "is rooted in the unfathomable depths of its moral
constitution." (Deutsche Reden in Schwerer Zeit, II, p. 23.)

But there were two criminal blunders--or perhaps it would be more
accurate to call them two series of obstinate and st