Golden Lads | Page 3

the wrongs perpetrated on helpless non-combatants by
direct military orders. He shows that the frightfulness practiced on
peasant women and children was the carrying out of a Government
policy, planned in advance, ordered from above. It was not the product
of irresponsible individual drunken soldiers. His testimony is clear on
this point. He goes still further, and shows that individual soldiers
resented their orders, and most unwillingly carried through the cruelty
that was forced on them from Berlin. In his testimony he is kindlier to
the German race, to the hosts of peasants, clerks and simple soldiers,
than the defenders of Belgium's obliteration have been. They seek to
excuse acts of infamy. But the author shows that the average German is
sorry for those acts.
It is fair to remember in reading Mr. Gleason's testimony concerning
these deeds of the German Army that he has never received a dollar of
money for anything he has spoken or written on the subject. He gave
without payment the articles on the Spy, the Atrocity, and the Steam
Roller to the New York Tribune. The profits from the lectures he has
delivered on the same subject have been used for well-known public
charities. The book itself is a gift to a war fund.
Of Mr. Gleason's testimony on atrocities I have already written (see
page 38).
What he saw was reported to the Bryce Committee by the young
British subject who accompanied him, and these atrocities, which Mr.
Gleason witnessed, appear in the Bryce Report under the heading of
Alost. It is of value to know that an American witnessed atrocities
recorded in the Bryce Report, as it disposes of the German rejoinders
that the Report is ex-parte and of second-hand rumor.
His chapter on the Spy System answers the charge that it was Belgium
who violated her own neutrality, and forced an unwilling Germany,
threatened by a ring of foes, to defend herself.
The chapter on the Steam Roller shows that the same policy of injustice
that was responsible for the original atrocities is today operating to

flatten out what is left of a free nation.
The entire book is a protest against the craven attitude of our
Government.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT. March 28, 1916.

THE CONQUERORS

THE SPY
Germany uses three methods in turning a free nation into a vassal state.
By a spy system, operated through years, she saps the national strength.
By sudden invasion, accompanied by atrocity, she conquers the
territory, already prepared. By continuing occupation, she flattens out
what is left of a once independent people. In England and North
America, she has used her first method. France has experienced both
the spy and the atrocity. It has been reserved for Belgium to be
submitted to the threefold process. I shall tell what I have seen of the
spy system, the use of frightfulness, and the enforced occupation.
It is a mistake for us to think that the worst thing Germany has done is
to torture and kill many thousands of women and children. She
undermines a country with her secret agents before she lays it waste. In
time of peace, with her spy system, she works like a mole through a
wide area till the ground is ready to cave in. She plays on the good will
and trustfulness of other peoples till she has tapped the available
information. That betrayal of hospitality, that taking advantage of
human feeling, is a baser thing than her unique savagery in war time.
During my months in Belgium I have been surrounded by evidences of
this spy system, the long, slow preparedness which Germany makes in
another country ahead of her deadly pounce. It is a silent, peaceful
invasion, as destructive as the house-to-house burning and 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