Louis Raemaekers

“ It adds fuel to the flame to know that the only great period of German literature—the period of Heine himself—was when it was under the complete influence and inspiration of France.
In a true sense the whole civilized world is fighting for France, to decide whether it is to lose all that France stands for, or whether the future is to be dominated by the ugly bestial force, without conscience and without heart, which Germany represents. The world knows that if it is a case of alternatives, civilization can do without Germany, but would be eternally poor without la belle France. ”

“ The German workingmen, it is suggested, lend themselves blindly to this work of enslavement also—naturally, for it is no different for their Kaiser to rule by force and lies over non-Germans than to rule by force and lies over Germans. The face of the Kaiser shows a subconscious realization of these lies. The workers show utter unconsciousness. The rule of autocracy over themselves and the extension of that autocracy over others by means of their blood is to them as much a part of nature as the motions of sun and moon or the rise and fall of the tides! ”

“ Service of Humanity “WE have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been as secure as the faith and the freedom of the nation can make them.” ”

“ The Dungeon of Autocracy THERE is a part of Germany that longs for freedom; but that is not the Prussian part. The soul of Germany is not entirely killed by her mortal sins of money and land-lust; and Raemaekers here paints the remorseful soul, crowned with the blurred cross. Germany turns her back to the sky; she prefers to look at the dark ground of her dungeon rather than to face that light. She is chained by her own will, and yet her inmost soul revolts. ”

“ The whole policy of the Majority Socialists has been based upon that sinister principle.
The small and uninfluential but heroic minority, led by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and George Ledebour alone have exemplified the ideals of Socialism. They deserve our lasting honor as fully as the others deserve our lasting contempt.
Socialism is not dead in Germany: only the great political party of Socialism is shattered. In the hearts of the brave men and women of the Minority Socialists the sacred flame still burns. In that lies the only hope for German Socialism. ”

“ Amid a national rejoicing, a waving of flags and ringing of bells, such as are evoked by a great national festival, the Germans celebrated the Lusitania murders—the entire nation suddenly slumping into a barbarism worse than that of their ancestral Huns. The Hun was again triumphant, gloating over his unspeakable crimes, his plunders and piracies, his orgies of crime and lust—a spectacle to make the Genius of Humanity veil her face and weep tears of blood. ”

“ But we cannot measure the full extent of German Deceit unless we follow it in its varied propaganda among foreign peoples, in its spies, its instigators to violence, its corrupters of the press. It poisons food and wells; it sets fires to burn crops or forests; it hires ruffians to burn factories or blow them up, to hide bombs in ships; it incites sabotage and strikes.
So universally do Germans take to Deceit, that it has evidently become their national trait. The soul of Germany is a lost soul, which worships Satan as its master and welcomes Evil as its Good. ”

“ It is an image of ruthlessness, of frightfulness, of poison gas and traceless sinkings; of murder, pillage, spies and lies; of a black and formidable ambition for mastery on any terms and at any cost; of treachery; of a tireless industry that gets up early to fetch away by work or wile whatever in the world is worth taking from any one who has it! The current image of the German is an image of an enemy—a savage enemy. Since 1914 German descent has been terribly prejudiced. As to every man of German blood the observer asks himself: What manner of man is this? ”

“ This is what Woodrow Wilson gives. He comes as a leader, as a nucleating force, as a clear, rallying cry to the almost mystic passions that are peculiarly the dominant note of the day. He fits the need of the bloodless revolution as skin fits the hand, bringing purpose and courage to the struggle for nobler fulfilment of the hopes and aspirations that thrilled those who first sought refuge in the New World from the oppressions of the Old—the struggle for real democracy. ”

“ The poet is born the poet. Genius is an inheritance. Human character is a summation of ancestral traits. So the traitor-spy is an atavic embodiment of all that is reptilian in a line of ancestry back to the serpent of Eden.
Though after-acquaintance may camouflage him to our eyes, still the first sight, the first impression of the traitor-character has in it the temper of aversion. One who has in him the heart and taste for atrocious conduct, one who has in him the grass-lurking viper’s soul, wears a warning in his face for the safety of others. ”

“ As Washington led Americans of British blood to fight against Great Britain, as Lincoln called upon Americans of the North to fight their very brothers of the South, so Americans of German descent are now summoned to join in our country’s righteous struggle against a people of their own blood, which, under the evil spell of a dreadful obsession, and, Heaven knows! through no fault of ours, has made itself the enemy of peace and right and freedom throughout the world. ”

“ All the same, we are the only real peace-lovers in this malign and prejudiced world, which, except for us and the Austrians and the Bulgarians and the Turks, is composed exclusively of stupid ruffians who were so jealous and envious of us that they forced this war upon us, hoping to make some money out of us by annihilating us. We love peace, and are fighting for our mere existence—that is, the right to adjust our frontiers so that they will include the countries which we have conquered by the sword. ”

“ PEACE must be framed on so equitable a basis that the nations would not wish to disturb it. It must be guaranteed by destruction of Prussian military power, so that the confidence of the German people shall be put in the equity of their cause and not in the might of their armies.... Europe is again drenched with the blood of its bravest and its best, but do not forget the great succession of hallowed causes. They are the stations of the cross on the road to the emancipation of mankind. ”

“ An individual, who, with progressive malice, had broken all the laws of his country, society and God, from simple lying, through perjury, robbery, piracy, up to wholesale murder, would be destroyed—for the good of his fellowmen and as a warning to others. If he should escape the noose the quieter but no less inevitable force of public morality would destroy him. Neither man nor nation has ever long lived by force, flaunting his crimes in the face of the world, committing, threatening yet others. ”

“ The brutality, the over-weening arrogance, the hideous religious cant of the Emperor of Germany, with the touch of lunacy upon him, will live forever in Raemaekers’ portraits. The feeble senility of the late Emperor of Austria—joined as he frequently is with the Sultan and the King of Bulgaria, kindred spirits—a senility marked by the drivelling insensibility of extreme old age—those unlovely attributes are all there. As for the Crown Prince, he is known through these cartoons to millions who have never seen him and never will see him and will have only this image of him graven in their minds. ”

“ We accepted our share of responsibility for the assaulted civilization of the world, and our share of danger at the hands of its great assailant. A free people, we willingly chose the path of uttermost pain, and we chose it for the sake of our nation’s honor, our nation’s ultimate safety, and the salvation of our nation’s soul. ”

“ Let no one look for Freed Russia to be shining and beautiful. From the gloomy caverns in which they have mouldered the Russian people stagger out upon the sunlit heights of freedom weak, bent, half blind. Few of the older will ever conquer the dense ignorance in which they were kept by autocracy. Few of the characters twisted and deformed by oppression will ever become quite straight. In the behavior of this people there will be exhibited folly, fanaticism and brutality that will make the peoples born free uneasy as to the new sister. ”

“ To the God of Justice, America lifts its heart in prayer, beseeching not security for its beloved sons but vowing that the sun shall perish out of the heavens ere we and our Allies surrender our liberty, the freedom of the least of men, to the barbarism of force and the forces of barbarism. ”

“ Secret assassination is an ancient art. It has been practised in every age and in every nation and its votaries have been hunted down and exterminated by decent people. To-day, for the first time in the history of the world, we have the spectacle of stealthy death for the defenceless adopted as a government policy. For the decency and safety of mankind the allied nations have highly resolved that the government which promotes such a policy must “perish from the earth.” ”

“ In that little room Abraham Lincoln appeared as attorney for pioneer citizens who understood perfectly the promise of American democracy. The laws invoked to preserve their rights were a crystallization of the thought and the hope of liberty-loving peoples, and no settler in wilderness or prairie, no matter how humble, but felt himself a partner in the benefits of American institutions and the great tradition of English law. Every American courthouse is founded upon Magna Charta. If we are indebted for anything in our democracy to the Teutonic-Turkish combination I am unaware of it. ”

“ Both at home and abroad we must rid ourselves of all hampering and distracting illusions and stare the facts in the face. The facts are that we are at war,—the grim and grimy business of killing or being killed.
The issues involved in this war have been appealed to the sword, and he who lives by the sword must die by the sword. The time for doubt, debate, discussion or diplomacy is past. The only thing left to do is to fight,—fight for all that is in us,—fight as long as we can and as hard as we can, and until there is no fight left in our enemies. ”

“ Along with the unbelievable calamities that have come in the train of the war that in August, 1914, was shamelessly, dishonorably and with malice aforethought precipitated by the Kaiser and his fellow highwaymen, there stands out one colossal good: it has made the world increasingly ethical. The flaunting by the German military party of all that we associate with fair play, chivalry, democracy, humanity, even Christianity itself, has aroused the Allied peoples to the fact that the foundation principles of happiness are at stake. ”

“ The brutality of the Teutons—Austrians and Germans alike—their willingness, in order to win, to throw away everything we think admirable in conduct, created a reaction in America by arousing us from our laissez-faire attitude to the conviction that there can be no neutrality between right and wrong. The opportunity should not be lost to enforce this lesson upon the young, who should be taught to hate the devilish spirit by which the Teutons are obsessed. In due time, when their defeat is accomplished, a reaction will set in among themselves. ”

“ As depicted by Raemaekers, he has a figure and face of low dissipation in which degeneracy and ferocity contend for mastery. And yet all these figures harmonize with the rest of the cartoons in teaching the one overpowering lesson as to the meaning of German victory. The barbarism, the belief in might as against right, the faith in brute force, the absence of human feeling,—these cry out to us through the pencil of the great artist that a world in which Germany should be dominant would be a world of slaves in which no free man could wish to live. ”

“ The victory at the Marne which definitely stopped their latest irruption is only the latest and greatest of many such victories by which France has laid mankind under lasting obligation. And the industrial organization which supplies the armies of France with the products of farm and factory, and even produces a surplus for her allies, including the United States, is additional proof that the genius of the French race is neither decadent nor limited, but as broad as all human activity and as ardent today as when Joan of Arc inspired kings and peasants alike with her mystic fervor. ”

“ We are upholding the safety and decency of the world, which has been as deeply degraded by vandalism as when Attila swept his hordes across the ravaged face of Europe. Our young soldiers are changing guard with the war-worn veterans of France and Great Britain. Valiant and gay, they face the oppressor. “He that loveth his life shall lose it”; and these men stand ready to lay down their lives for all they hold sacred and dear. ”

“ Belgium, 1918 YOU, who on the tree of shame show forth again the Sacrifice of Calvary: you for whom scourge and thongs and the mockery of dull beasts are the circumstance of martyrdom: you who freely offered yourself that man might be saved, “yet so as by fire”:—Belgium! in the depth of your agony and the long torment of a red martyrdom, remember that the Cross of your own Passion endures only until the Resurrection that comes after the third day. ”

“ As the Light of the World has expanded these nineteen centuries, shining in the hearts of men, ever awakening new ideas of Truth, Justice, and Mercy, against every fresh gleam, promising wider horizons of human Love and Sympathy, have been arrayed the brutish hosts, with Hatred and Murder in their hardened hearts. ”