Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 74, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 April 1918 — THE KAISER. [ARTICLE]

THE KAISER.

Starving children in many countries! Widowed young women, and old women who never again will see their sons! Millions of soldiers in the last bitter hours of mortal agony! Gnawed skulls in the slimy bottoms of many seas! The Kaiser spares his own sons, yet upon his head is the blood of ten million men. In Dante’s pifcture of hell he has no equal. He is the brutal soul of savage beasts put into human shape, the maddened dog that learned our common speech, the viper standing upright clothed as man. For vanity he set the world aflame. Too long the crown has crazed his festered brain. Why should we not hate? It is time for hate, and sacrifice born of brooding hate! Why wait till the wounded come back? Why wait till the lists of the dead come in? Sometimes, sitting at my table in the night, suddenly I think I can hear the newsboys breaknig the silence with their far away cries of “Extra! Extra!” Something tells me, “They’ve got him!” I listen again. The night is silent. The thing was born of the hope in my brain. But sometime it will be true! Then through all the world will go up a prayer of thanks! And through all eternity, the anguish that he wrought will terrify his outcast soul, as to and fro it wanders trembling through the pits of hell! I the son of a German, who loved his native land but despised its government, write this. MAX EHRMANN, In the New York Sun.