wool, for instance. Let such
Americans reflect that commercial grievances against England can be more
readily adjusted than an absorption of all commerce by Germany can be
adjusted. Wool and everything else will belong to Mathias Erzberger
and his breed, if they carry out their intention. And the way to insure
their carrying it out is to let them split us and England and all their
competitors asunder by their ceaseless and ingenious propaganda, which
plays upon every international prejudice, historic, commercial, or
other, which is available. After August, 1914, England barred the
Kaiser's way to New York, and in 1917, we found it useful to forget
about George the Third and the Alabama. In 1853 Prussia possessed one
ship of war--her first.

In 1918 her submarines were prowling along our coast. For the moment
they are no longer there. For a while they may not be. But do you think
Germany intends that scraps of paper shall be abolished by any Treaty,
even though it contain 80,000 words and a League of Nations? She will
make of that Treaty a whole basket of scraps, if she can, and as soon
as she can. She has said so. Her workingmen are at work, industrious and
content with a quarter the pay for a longer day than anywhere else.
Let those persons who cannot get over George the Third and the Alabama
ponder upon this for a minute or two.

Chapter VI: Who Is Without Sin?

Much else is there that it were well they should ponder, and I am coming
to it presently; but first, one suggestion. Most of us, if we dig back
only fifty or sixty or seventy years, can disinter various relatives
over whose doings we should prefer to glide lightly and in silence.

Do you mean to say that you have none? Nobody stained with any shade
of dishonor? No grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-etc.
grandfather or grandmother who ever made a scandal, broke a heart, or
betrayed a trust? Every man Jack and woman Jill of the lot right back to
Adam and Eve wholly good, honorable, and courageous? How fortunate to
be sprung exclusively from the loins of centuries of angels--and to know
all about them! Consider the hoard of virtue to which you have fallen
heir!

But you know very well that this is not so; that every one of us has
every kind of person for an ancestor; that all sorts of virtue and
vice, of heroism and disgrace, are mingled in our blood; that inevitably
amidst the huge herd of our grandsires black sheep as well as white are
to