Germany every toll that organized injustice and inequality can wring. He is the head and front of the whole militarist and official system. From his ranks come those who live on the millions which the nation has to pay every year for the upkeep of the gigantic Army and the gigantic Fleet. It is all a gigantic, highly organized citadel of wrong. Wait a while; this War of Liberation will liberate Germany.
So it is with those of the German race themselves; but how about those others that live in the abysmal depths of racial persecution? Again put in juxtaposition the smooth, suave, unctuous language, and the hideous and logical concrete. It may be all summed up in the one word—Zabern. The Dane of Schleswig-Holstein; the Pole of Posen; the Frenchman of Alsace-Lorraine; they have all to live under the same iron heel of Prussian militarism. The gaols have often been filled; sometimes because a frank word has dared to find flaws in the shining armour of the megalomaniac who sits on the throne; sometimes because the oppressed race clings to the language or the ideals of the race whose blood flows in its veins; sometimes the rod descends from the man in the workshop or the field to the child who toddles to the school. But it is not the full gaols that represent the oppression. The chill of the cell, the grey granite of the prison wall, are not as cruel as the broad, encompassing air of ubiquitous oppression in all these provinces. Every man, every woman, every child, feels all around the rule of the harsh conqueror to the helpless conquered. Be brave, oppressed and darkened hearts; give wings to your unconquerable souls; the arms of free England and of free France are hurrying up to your prison-house, and soon the doors will be unlocked, and you will breathe the air of freedom once again.
By their fruits you shall know them. Judge, then, the wisdom and the veracity of this Prussian gospel by what has happened since this War begun; put, above all, in juxtaposition the conflicting ideals of the Prussian system and the system of the great free Empire to which we belong, for whose defence our soldiers are shedding their precious blood. There isn't a true Dane, a true Pole, a true Frenchman, within the broad dominions of the German Empire, that doesn't in his heart long for the hour when the blood-stained vulture-eagle of Prussia is stretched helpless, with broken wings and battered beak, on the ground. Nay, there is no civilized land in the world which does not look eagerly for the overthrow of that
