of 1914,
hurled against the democracies? With an army of seven or eight million
men trained to the hour, with equipped reserves of ten or twelve million
more, with a complete network of military railroads capable of
concentrating the units of this engine of destruction wherever military
strategy shall designate, and with aeroplanes and transatlantic
submarines in proportion, what chance will the democracies have?

In the second place, it ought to be very clear that future power and
prosperity on the part of the plain people of Germany will be no bar to
securing our rights, provided, however, that this power and prosperity
is not owned and controlled by Prussian autocracy so that it can again
be forced into a huge fighting machine to put the rest of the world in
terror. The spirit of Lafayette, although its fight against such masters
is eternal, will not lead in a war of conquest or annihilation against
the German people.

"We have no quarrel with the German people," said the President of the
United States in his message of April 2, 1917. "We have no feeling
toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their
impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was not
with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon
as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples
were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged
in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who
were accustomed to use their fellowmen as pawns and tools." It was a war
determined upon by the same Menace that thrust the democrat Lafayette
into a dungeon, and which so hated democracy that when compelled to
release him it attempted to impose terms that he should be deported to
America, never again to place foot on Prussian or Austrian soil.

The corollary of this is that the best security for the rights of
democracy is the establishment of a republic in Germany. A real
republic, not a sham one. This is the one definite, concrete fact which
would make the world safer for its peoples.

When will the German people see the light? When will there be a
government of the people of Germany, for the people, and by the people?
The shades of her dead, led to the slaughter by a merciless and
heartless autocracy in a needless war, cry out for it. What say you, you
men of Germany? Among you are men whose souls are brave and strong and
true, an unnumbered