To the success of these resources of panic the falsification of history becomes essential and the vilification of the most peace-loving people of Europe.  The past relations of England with the United States are to be blotted out, and the American people who are by blood so largely Germanic, are to be entrapped into an attitude of suspicion, hostility and resentment against the country and race from whom they have received nothing but good.  Germany is represented as the enemy, not to England’s indefensible claim to own the seas, but to American ideals on the American continent.  Just as the Teuton has become the “enemy of civilization” in the Old World because he alone has power, strength of mind, and force of purpose to seriously dispute the British hegemony of the seas, so he is assiduously represented as the only threat to American hegemony of the New World.

This, the key note of the attack on Germany, is sounded from every corner of the British Empire, wherever the Imperial editor, resting on the labours of the lash he wields against the coloured toilers in mine and camp, directs his eyes from the bent forms of these indentured slaves of dividend to the erect and stalwart frames of the new Goths who threaten the whole framework of Imperial dividend from across the North Sea.  From the Times to the obscurest news-sheet of the remotest corner of the British Dominions the word has gone forth.

The Monroe Doctrine, palladium of the Anglo-Saxon world empire, is imperilled by German ambitions, and were it not for the British fleet, America would be lost to the Americans.  Wherever Englishmen are gathered to-day their journals, appealing possibly to only a handful of readers, assert that the function of the British fleet is to exclude the European States, with Germany at their head, from South America, not because in itself that is a right and worthy end to pursue, but because that continent is earmarked for future exploitation and control by their “kinsmen” of the United States, and they need the support of those “kinsmen” in their battle against Germany.

I need quote but a single utterance from the mass of seditious libels of this character before me to show how widespread is the propaganda of falsehood and how sustained is the effort being made to poison the American mind against the only people in Europe England genuinely fears, and therefore wholeheartedly hates.

The Natal Mercury for instance, a paper written for the little town of Durban and appealing to a population of only some 30,000 whites, in a recent issue (March, 1913), devoted a leader to the approaching “Peace Centennial” of 1914, to be held in commemoration of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the second war between Great Britain and the American people in 1814.

“After all, blood is thicker than water,” quotes the Natal journal with satisfaction, and after pointing out some latter day indications of rapprochement between England and the United States, it goes on to proclaim the chief function of the British navy and the claim thereby established on the goodwill of America.