Read Ebook: Keeping Up with William In which the Honorable Socrates Potter Talks of the Relative Merits of Sense Common and Preferred by Bacheller Irving Williams Gaar Illustrator

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Ebook has 339 lines and 20497 words, and 7 pages

"Now is the time when all men must choose between two ideals: Behold the common sense of Germany become the sense that is common only among criminals! The sooner we recognize that, the better. They are really burglars in this great house of God we inhabit, seeking to rob it of its best possessions--Hindenburglars! the proud and merciless heart on the one hand, that of the humble and contrite heart on the other; between the Hun and the Anglo-Saxon, between evil and good. Faced by such an issue I declare myself ready to lay all that I have or may have on the old altar of our common faith.

"My friend, be of good cheer. The God of our Fathers has not been Kaisered or Krupped or hurried in the least. There is no danger that Heaven will be Teutonized.

"The shouting and the tumult dies--The captains and the kings depart--! Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice.

"An humble and a contrite heart Lord God of hosts, be with us yet.

"Lest we forget--lest we forget

"Lest we forget the innumerable dead who have nobly died, and the host of the living who with a just and common sense and love of honor have sent them forth to die. Lest we forget that we and our allies have not been above reproach; that there were signs of decadence among us--in the growing love of ease and idleness, in the tango dance of literature and lust, in the exaltation of pleasure, in a very definite degeneration of our moral fiber.

"Lest we forget that our spirit is being purified in the furnace of war and the shadow of death. Do you remember the protest of those poilus when some unclean plays were sent to the battle front for their entertainment?

"'We are not pigs'--that was the message they sent back.

"Lest we forget that the spirit of man has been lifted up out of the mud and dust of the battle lines, out of the body tortured with pain and weariness and vermin, out of the close companionship of the dead into high association on the bloody altar of liberty and sacrifice.

"Lest we forget that the spirit of our own boys shall be thus lifted up, and our duty to put our house in order and make it a fit place for them to live in when they shall have returned to it from battle-fields swept, as a soldier has written, by the cleansing winds of God."

Truth is a great teacher but she often quarrels with the cook," said Mr. Potter, while looking at his watch.

He went to the telephone and called his home and presently began to address his wife as follows:

"Hello, Betsy! Say, don't expect me 'till I come. I'm in trouble. A feller came in here and started the war all over again and there's no tellin' when it'll end. I do not want an inconclusive peace."

As he hung up the telephone his stenographer came in to say good night. Mr. Potter took his old rifle off the wall, dusted It with a desk cloth and said:

"My great grandfather used that in the battle of Lexington."

He squinted down its long barrel while he gave these instructions to his helper.

"Joe, send down to The Sign of the Flapjack, n?e Child's, and order corned beef hash and poached eggs and apple pie and coffee for two."

He turned to me and asked:

"Any amendments to propose to that ticket?"

"None," I answered.

"Then we will consider it elected. Have the table spread here by the fire, if you please."

He filled and lighted his pipe, settled down in an easy chair and began again, with his gun resting across his knees: "The superors try to square themselves by giving to the poor. It doesn't work. Often we do more harm than good by giving to the poor. Kindness, sympathy, loving counsel and the brotherly hand can accomplish much. But the charily of cold cash is a questionable thing. The girl who knits a pair of socks accomplishes a larger net result to the good than the one that gives ten pairs to charity. The girl who did the knitting really produced something. She had made the world better off by one pair of socks. There is no doubt about that. The girl who has bought and given away ten pairs has produced nothing. She has made the world in general no better off. She is a slacker. She is trying to make her money do her work for her.

"The time has come when the world in general has to be considered by each of us. Civilized humanity has been compacted into a unit. It is threatened by famine and tyranny. All the money there is can not save us from these perils unless a lot of people get busy who are now doing nothing but eat and play. Money has become a very cheap and vulgar thing--almost every one has money these days.

"The time of the great assessment has come and the Lord God is taking His inventory. Everything is being measured and valued; even your usefulness, my friend. What are you producing? Is it enough to feed and clothe yourself and family, even? Corn and potatoes and wheat and wool are more than money these days. If you don't help to produce them, you are, more or less, a dead weight.

"The idle lands in America ought to get busy. How? The rich men should begin to cultivate them. I know one such man who is growing two hundred and fifty acres of potatoes in Florida where nothing has grown before, and it is estimated his yield will be at least fifty thousand bushels. Now, that man is doing a real service to Democracy.

"When the monster of war is devouring the fruitfulness of the earth and stopping the labor of those who produce it, there is only one remedy. We must increase that fruitfulness so that there shall be enough to feed the monster and the people at home. If this is to be done, every one must work. In such a situation, the idleness of the able-bodied becomes a disgrace, and his dinner the food of remorse.

"Get busy. I do not mean that we should never play. I do mean that every day we should do a fair day's work with our hands and brain for the good of the world at large.

"The war has established two brotherhoods, my friend--that's the big thing about it. A brotherhood of democracy and a brotherhood of slaves.

"This brotherhood of slaves has been created by the leprous soul of Bill Hohenzollern. He has broken down the will of the average man in Germany and established his own in place of it. He has yoked his people with the slaves of Turkey and Bulgaria, and with them has overawed the will of the Austro-Hungarians, mostly a decent people. The will of the Kaiser has spread over middle Europe like a plague. The name of the plague is Williamism. We have caught it in America."

"In America!" I exclaimed.

"In America," Mr. Potter went on. "The quarantine officer has been bribed. He has left the door open and the plague has come in. The name of that officer is Human Conscience. Williamism can make no progress save through the carelessness or neglect of the human conscience.

"Long ago the German people turned over their consciences to the Kaiser and the Bundesrath with a license to use them as they thought best. The people said to themselves: 'The Kaiser enjoys the special protection and favor of the Lord. He is an intimate friend with a pull. He ought to be able to make a more expert use of our consciences than we could ourselves. Therefore, we will appoint him our representative and proxy at the Court of Heaven. If he and his friends decide, after due consultation with God, that we had better violate good faith and break our treaties and seize the property of other races and indulge in murder, rape, arson and piracy, we will do it. To be sure such action would seem to be wrong, but that is only because we are common cattle. We are the best herd of common cattle there is, but we are not supermen. The Bundesrath, the Kaiser and God ought to know what is right.

"Now that, in effect, is exactly what they said to themselves. A people may prosper and come to no violent trouble under such a plan. But the fact is, they are living around the crater of a moral Vesuvius.

"For two generations all seemed to be going well with the Germans. William I was a fairly decent-minded man. Bismarck was unscrupulous but careful. He stepped softly after he had bitten a chunk out of France. He held the throne in restraint until William, the Godful, jumped upon it with a wild yell of heavenly inspiration that startled the world. He was going to take no advice from Mr. Bismarck--not a bit! Right away he appointed himself secretary of war and attorney general of the Almighty. No such astonishing familiarity with omnipotence had been seen since the time of Moses.

"There is an ancient legend which says that, when Caesar invaded Gaul, an old bowman of the north, having been captured and brought to the headquarters of the great Consul, said:

"'Hello, Julius! I am with you.'

"It was like Bill Hohenzollern, only Bill didn't say 'Hello, Julius!' The whole world stood aghast.

"Bismarck stepped down and out. He must have seen what was coming.

"From the beginning there has been a flavor of the little tin god about these Hohenzollern fellers. Frederick the Great had a menacing rattle of self-assertion, like that of a Ford car going to a country picnic. His favorite dissipation was kicking soldiers. It was a way he had of advertising his superiority.

"Macaulay tells us that he needed proximity and not provocation to kick a soldier. What a brave Captain he was! Funny, isn't it, how the great Captains have managed to take care of themselves. Died on hair mattresses, every one of them except two, Gustavus Adolphus and Stonewall Jackson.

"The only man who ever insulted me by just shaking my hand was a mule-eared Hohenzollern chap known as Prince Heinrich of Prussia. I can never forget that you-to-hell air of his as he took my hand as if it was a clod of dirt, without even a look at me. I have always been sorry that I didn't invite him to the sidewalk.

"William II began to strut in the military and hot-air game as soon as he ascended the throne, and lost no opportunity to tighten his hold upon the consciences of his people.

"Let me tell you the story of

THE MISLAID CONSCIENCE.

"Sam had no quarrel with the works--no more quarrel than the Germans had with the Belgians--not a bit. He was more than satisfied with his wages and his hours and his general treatment His conscience told him that his duty was to keep at work. But he discovered suddenly that he had no right to the use of his own conscience. He had deeded it, on demand, to the Union--lock, stock and barrel. Sam had become a kind of German soldier.

"War was declared. Some of the faithful servants of the big shop were slain. Others were injured; a part of the properly was wrecked. Sam tried to do the right thing, but couldn't. He went with the German army.

"Now, a man's conscience is given to him for his own use--exclusively for his own use. There's nothing truer than this: A man's conscience is like his tooth-brush--it should have but one proprietor. You can not leave it lying around like an old pair of shoes. Your umbrella is not as easily lost. It is like your right hand. You can not lay it away--you can not lend it, and the more you use it the better it is and the less you use it the weaker it is. Either disuse or misuse will injure it and possibly deprive you of its service.

"Now, Sam's conscience got mislaid in the shuffle. He suddenly discovered that he hadn't any. I guess it was rather small at best. It was through this loss that I came to know about him. He was out of work for seven months and got to drinking. Idleness and regret and the loss of friends turned him toward the downward path of women, wine and song. He is now in a Federal prison for counterfeiting--the victim of Williamism.

"Now just what had happened to Sam had happened to every man in the German army. In that deal with the Kaiser his conscience had got mislaid. He was ready to cut off the hands of a child or torture a wounded man or shoot an inoffensive civilian. His officers encouraged him to do it and his conscience was not on duty. It had been turned over to the Kaiser and the Bundesrath. It had got lost in the shuffle.

"I have told you that William had made the ideal of Germany that of the insect. Let me be sure that you get my meaning.

"Have you watched a hive of bees in bright summer weather? Well, you will find that the workers wear out their wings in two weeks and die. The hive has only two purposes--storage and race perpetuation.

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