The Blot on the Kaisers Scutcheon | Page 8

the Persian Gulf. Germans alone shall be
allowed to carry weapons, as once only the Roman was allowed to own
a spear; only Germans shall be allowed to hold title deeds to lands,
even as once only Romans could hold a field or a house in fee simple.
Old Rome won by becoming a military State.
Did not the people of Rome go forth as soldiers and return with
triumphal processions, with treasures of loot that took days to pass
along the Appian Way, while the Romans stood cheering and the
women and children sang and threw flowers in the path? Why should
not the German army, between the reaping of the wheat in July and the
threshing of the wheat in October, return from Brussels and Paris laden
with treasure, while a second triumphal procession marched down
Wilhelmstrasse?
The German peasants kindled at this dream. Why should the German
have to live always on bologna sausage, drink beer, eat sauerkraut and
live in ugly houses when the people of Paris and London drank

champagne, ate roast fowl, wore French laces and the finest English
wools? It was a wicked shame. Surely the German was intended for
something better than sauerkraut and beer!
"Two weeks and we will be in Brussels. Three weeks and we will have
Paris. Two months and we will loot London."
This was the plan. How significant that letter, taken from the dead body
of a German boy found in No Man's Land, near Compiègne.
"Within three days, Liebschen, we will be in Paris. I intend to bring you
a pocketful of Paris rings and jewels, with Paris gowns and laces."
From the body of a German boy found near Lunéville was taken this
letter saying that, with his three companions, he had picked out four
French farms and left the houses standing, and that his friends and
himself had picked out these farms as permanent homes. Later he
added that Heinrich thought it would be much better for them to wait
until they smashed England and made Canada a German colony. Then
they could own, not small French farms, but vast Canadian farms with
a hundred tenants working for him in the valleys around Toronto and
the vineyards of Winnipeg and orchards of Hudson Bay.
Most shrewd and cunning, the plotters of the Potsdam gang. They knew
how to feed the fires of envy and avarice in the German people. Every
few weeks they placed new material in the hands of every German at
home and abroad. They reminded each poor peasant and foreign
colonist that he was a superman, and that by day and by night he was to
prepare for the time when he would become the head of all the people
of the town or industry with which he was related. Poor Germans in
foreign countries dreamed their dreams of the time when they would be
appointed by the Kaiser and Foreign Minister to take charge of the
village in Mexico, the mine in Chile, or when they would be the tax
collector in some distant province.
We know now, from letters that have been found, that the German
soldiers in France carried in their pockets a description by the German
historian Curtius of the triumphal procession along the Appian Way,

when the Roman conquerors came home loaded with loot. These
skillful German plotters printed at the bottom of Curtius's description
the statement that each German soldier must look forward to a similar
return from London, Paris and Brussels to march through the streets of
Munich and Berlin.
What a dream was this German dream! What treasures were to be
brought into Berlin! What marbles and bronzes of Rodin stolen from
Paris! At last Berlin was to own beautiful paintings, for the treasures of
the Louvre were to be the Kaiser's.
Never was there such a dream dreamed by peasants who soon were to
become princes and kings and patricians. The German had exchanged
the rye bread of 1913 for the "fog bank" of 1918; had given up German
beer to grasp only empty, breaking bubbles. But it was a great dream
while it lasted. In pursuance of his hope he sacrificed three million
German boys, left dead in the fields of Flanders and France. He sent
home four million German cripples. He filled the land with vast armies
of widows and orphans.
It could not have been otherwise. There has never been, and never will
be, but one world city--Rome; and there has never been but one
world-emperor--Cæsar Augustus. There is to be one universal
kingdom--and that is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of love, justice,
peace and good-will. The German has been pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp.
A world-kingdom will come, but no Kaiser will rule over that empire
of love. In that