the killing of babies
and mothers to which it later leads.

The German military power, which is the modern Germany, is able to
obtain agents to carry out this policy, and make its will prevail, by
disseminating a new ethic, a philosophy of life, which came to
expression with Bismarck and has gone on extending its influence since
the victories of 1870-'71. The German people believe they serve a higher
God than the rest of us. We serve (very imperfectly and only part of
the time) such ideals as mercy, pity, and loyalty to the giver of the
bread we eat. The Germans serve (efficiently and all the time) the
State, a supreme deity, who sends them to spy out a land in peace time,
to build gun foundations in innocent-looking houses, buy up
poverty-stricken peasants, measure distances, win friendship, and worm
out secrets. With that information digested and those preparations
completed, the State (an entity beyond good and evil) calls on its
citizens to make war, and, in making it, to practise frightfulness. It
orders its servants to lay aside pity and burn peasants in their homes,
to bayonet women and children, to shoot old men. Of course, there are
exceptions to this. There are Germans of the vintage of '48, and later,
many of them honest and peaceable dwellers in the country which shelters
them. But the imperial system has little use for them. They do not serve
its purpose.

The issue of the war, as Belgium and France see it, is this: Are they to
live or die? Are they to be charted out once again through years till
their hidden weakness is accurately located, and then is an army to be
let loose on them that will visit a universal outrage on their children
and wives? Peace will be intolerable till this menace is removed. The
restoration of territory in Belgium and Northern France and the return
to the _status quo_ before the war, are not sufficient guarantees for
the future. The _status quo_ before the war means another insidious
invasion, carried on unremittingly month by month by business agents,
commercial travelers, genial tourists, and studious gentlemen in villas.
A crippled, broken Teutonic military power is the only guarantee that a
new army of spies will not take the road to Brussels and Paris on the
day that peace is signed. No simple solution like, "Call it all off,
we'll start in fresh; bygones are bygones," meets the real situation.
The Allied nations have been infested with a cloud of witnesses for many
years.