len, and he was
patted on the back, praised for his might with his fists, and told that
that was the method he was to follow in after life.

He insisted that this sort of thing was drilled into every German boy,
and for that reason it never once even occurred to him that he had done
wrong. "After I became a man I settled in America, and as I came to
understand the spirit of American civilization it grew upon me that I
had committed a crime, and now for twenty-two years, as some atonement
for my sin, I have been supporting that crippled man and his widowed
mother."

The modern banker has become a sort of confessor, and to the banker many
sins are revealed as once to the priest. Nothing is more significant
than this German confession and his philosophy of the German atrocity.
In his own written letter concerning that crime of his boyhood this
German adds: "Had I remained in Germany no one would ever have thought
of suggesting to me that I had done wrong, and it would never have
entered into my head that I was under any obligation to the man I had
maimed. In the light of American civilization I understand the
difference, and I am seeking to atone for my sin, but all Germans have
been taught, as I was taught. The Germans, therefore, in their campaign
of frightfulness, are committing deeds which from the view-point of
American civilization are barbarous, but from the view-point of Germans
are not crimes at all."

The significance of this frank confession of a German, his story of how
America had redeemed his soul out of the spirit of force and cruelty
into the spirit of kindness, humanity and justice, reveals more of the
real nature of the German beast and the Potsdam gang than a thousand
volumes on the philosophy of German atrocities. The simple fact is that
the crimes of the Germans are abominable atrocities to us, but that
intellectually and morally the German officer and soldier simply do not
know what we mean by our horror and the wave of moral indignation that
has swept over the earth. Jesse Pomeroy used to pull canary birds apart,
and tortured children to death. But the boy was deficient in the nerve
of humanity. He simply stared with blank eyes when the judge and the
jury condemned him. He was incapable of knowing what the excitement over
the dead body was about. On the side of compassion and humanity the
German is, as it were, colour blind, is without musical sense, and the
nerves of kindness and humanity are atr