Clinch Valley News

AMERICA AND THE GERMAN MENACE.

(By Walter S. Smoot.)

"Here we are away off across the Atlantic, in no danger from Germany. She will never dare attack us. She may turn the old world upside down--subjugate Russia, crush France, and better England, but she will let the new world alone."

How many Americans are thinking these things today?

And all the while how many Germans regarded America?

"The Kaiser 'stood very close to me,' says Ambassador Gerard, 'and talked very earnestly. He showed, however, great bitterness against the United States and repeatedly said, "America had better look out after the war," and "I shall stand no nonsense from America after the war."' (James W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany, 1917, pp. 251-253.)

"The Germanization of America has gone ahead too far to be interrupted. In a hundred years the American people will be conquered by the victorious German spirit, so that it will present an enormous German empire. Whoever does not believe this lacks confidence in the strength of the German spirit." (Alldeutsche Blätter, Sept. 20, 1903.)

Why should Germany hate us?

(1) Germany desires colonies in South America, in Brazil, which our Monroe Doctrine would oblige us to defend.

(2) She desires power in the Pacific and is resolved to make no such backdown there as she did during the Spanish-American war.

(3) America is the greatest existing champion of the principles of democracy and human liberty which German militarism must banish from the earth if it would live.

The lukewarm have but to read printed plans for invasion of America by men of military rank to realize the terrible menace this moment confronting their country.

"Operations against the United States of North America must be entirely different. Our main factor is our fleet. It should be so managed that a line of land operations would be in close juncture with the fleet, through which we would be in a position to seize in a short time many of these important and rich (coast) cities, to interrupt their means of supply, disorganize all governmental affairs, assume control of all useful buildings, confiscate all war and transport supplies and--lastly to impose heavy indemnities." (Freiherr von Edelshcim, operations upon the sea, trans. 1914, pp. 86-92.)

What does this mean? Simply that every American is under an immediate, terrible and personal menace, as if a barbarous and cruel invasion were coming to devastate his country as it has already devastated Belgium, France, Russia, the Balkans, and Armenia. The whole American people must resist conquest by Germany in Europe with allies if it would avoid resisting in America without allies.

Under such a menace, in such a critical hour, no American man, woman, or child has a right to the blessings of this country who will not rise to defend them when called. We must work, all of us--soldiers and civilians--with heart and soul and both hands, work for the world of our fathers, for an honest world in which nations keep their word and do not live by swagger and by threat, a world in which the spirit and philosophy of the few cannot make miserable all the rest of mankind, and in which peoples do not thus define "power:"

"Not to live and let live, but to live and direct the lives of others, that is power. To bring peoples under our national influence in order to put their affairs on a better footing, that is more power."