We have long known that all German academic and scholastic officials are the creatures of the Government, as obedient to orders as any Drill Sergeant.  They seem to have sold their consciences for place.  Not a word comes from them even of regret for the massacre of civilians on false charges, for the wanton murder of children, for the wholesale rape of women, the showering of bombs upon sleeping towns in sheer cruelty of destruction.  The intellectual energies of Kultur seem concentrated on distorting the meaning of our dispatches and the speeches of our statesmen, and in manufacturing for their people and neutrals venomous falsehoods.  German Geist today is a huge machine to cram lies upon their own people, and to insinuate lies to the world around.  Their system of war is based upon lying at home and abroad, on treachery and terrorism.  They think that murdering a few civilians would terrify France into surrender, and will drive England to betray the Allies.  Their poor conscripts are told that we kill and torture prisoners; their monuments at home are bedizened with mock laurels; and neutrals are poisoned with wild inventions.

For years past their public men, have

[Illustration:  ADOLF VON HARNACK.

See Page 198]

[Illustration:  THEODORE NIEMEYER.

See Page 206]

been tricking our politicians, journalists, and professors to accept them as peaceful leaders of a higher civilization—–­ while all the while their soldiers, diplomats, and spies (the three are really but one class) were secretly courting our own royalties and society, studying our naval and military defenses, filling our homes with tens of thousands of reservists having secret orders to spy, to destroy our arsenals and roads, and even planting out bogus industries and laying concrete bases for cannon, to bombard the open towns of friendly nations.  We have been living unsuspectingly with a nation of assassins plotting to destroy us.  Did these professors of Kultur not know of this elaborate conspiracy of Kaisertum, which unites the stealthy treachery of a Mohawk or a thug to the miracles of modern science?  For years past the ideal of Kultur has been to lay down secret mines to destroy their peaceful neighbors.  Did these professors of the Fatheland not know this?  Then they are unable to grasp the most obvious facts—­the life work of their own masters under their own eyes.  And, if they did know it, and must at least know it now, and yet approve and glory in it, they must be beneath contempt.  Why argue with such hypocrites?

Not a few of us have known and watched this conspiracy for years.  I have preached this ever since the advent of Bismarckism and the new Europe that was formed forty years ago.  Not a few of us have foretold not only the tremendous attack on the British Empire designed by German sea power but the precise steps of the war upon France, through Belgium, and to be executed by an overwhelming force of sudden shock in the midst of peace.  For my part, nothing in this war since July 30 has at all surprised me, unless it be the foul cruelty with which Belgian civilians have been treated.  Indeed, in January, 1913, I wrote a warning which reads now like a summary of events that have since happened.  I was denounced as a senile alarmist by some who are now the loudest in calling to arms.  Alas! too late is their repentance.