ssful in American politics will not
fail when representing us at the table of Peace.

CHAPTER XXVII

AFTER THE WAR, WHAT?

No one but a fortune teller or professional seer dares to predict
the condition of the world after this war. Only mere suggestions
can be thrown out, shadows of prophecy as to what may come.

Will the tide of emigration turn from Europe and the United
States to other countries or will people of German birth and
descent leave America to return to the Fatherland after the war?

I made it my business after I had learned German to talk to many
of the plain people in Berlin and elsewhere, to get their views.
I found that the common soldiers, especially those representing
the class of skilled workingmen in the industrial centres were
almost unanimous in saying that after the war and at the first
opportunity they intended to leave Germany, to turn from a
country capable of perpetrating this calamity on the world, a
country where they have been subject not alone to military
service but to a cruel and oppressive caste system of discipline.
I believe that Germany will enact laws against emigration and
that there will be zones of espionage on all German frontiers
designed to watch and keep back such Germans as may seek to
escape to other countries.

In Austria even more stringent laws will be necessary to keep the
unmarried males from leaving.

I know that experts of the United States Government believe at
least three millions of Slovaks, Greeks, etc., will leave America
after the war, taking with them the money they have earned, for
investment in new opportunities in the Old Country.

With this view I cannot agree. The soil of the European continent
is too poor, wages too small, hours too long, and distaste for
the military and caste systems too great, to tempt those who have
tasted the equality and the freedom of America. Why to-day an
ordinary coal miner in Pennsylvania can earn $5,000 a year--a sum
greater than the pay of a Prussian or Austrian general! Why
should this miner go back to insult and slavery?

The greatest problem of Germany comes after the war--when these
millions of men, trained for four years or more to murder, shall
return. It will be hard for them to settle down to regular work,
impossible for them to submit again to the iron discipline of
German civil life. Will they not, as Bloch predicts, possibly,
re-enact the horrors of the French Commune, or even those of the
F