you a ring made out of a piece
of shell.... During the battle of Budonviller I did away with four women
and seven young girls in five minutes. The Captain had told me to
shoot these French sows, but I preferred to run my bayonet through
them"--private Johann Wenger to his German sweetheart, dated Peronne,
March 16, 1915. Germany, whose newspaper the Cologne Volkszettung
deplored the doings of her Kultur on land and sea thus: "Much as we
detest it as human beings and as Christians, yet we exult in it as
Germans."

Agreeable Germany!--whose Kaiser, if his fleet had been larger, would
have taken us by the scruff of the neck.

"Then Thou, Almighty One, send Thy lightnings!
Let dwellings and cottages become ashes in the heat of fire. Let the
people in hordes burn and drown with wife and child. May their seed be
trampled under our feet; May we kill great and small in the lust of joy.
May we plunge our daggers into their bodies, May Poland reek in the glow
of fire and ashes."

That is another verse of Germany's hymn, hate for Poland; that is her
way of taking people by the scruff of the neck; and that is what Senator
Walsh's resolution of sympathy with Ireland, Germany's contemplated
Heligoland, implies for the United States, if Germany's deferred day
should come.

Chapter XVIII: The Will to Friendship--or the Will to Hate?

Nations do not like each other. No plainer fact stares at us from the
pages of history since the beginning. Are we to sit down under this
forever? Why should we make no attempt to change this for the better in
the pages of history that are yet to be written? Other evils have been
made better. In this very war, the outcry against Germany has been
because she deliberately brought back into war the cruelties and
the horrors of more barbarous times, and with cold calculations of
premeditated science made these horrors worse. Our recoil from this deed
of hers and what it has brought upon the world is seen in our wish for a
League of Nations. The thought of any more battles, tenches, submarines,
air-raids, starvation, misery, is so unbearable to our bruised and
stricken minds, that we have put it into words whose import is, Let
us have no more of this! We have at least put it into words. That such
words, that such a League, can now grow into something more than words,
is the hope of many, the doubt of many, the belief of a few. It is the
belief of Mr. Wilson; of Mr. Taft; Lord Bryce; and o