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Page 30
Here I challenged him angrily.
"Do you mean to say that we have no national spirit in America?"
"Not as Germans understand it. You live for material things, for
pleasures, for business. You are a race of money schemers, money
grovellers, lacking in high ideals and genuine spiritual life without
which patriotism is an empty word. Who ever heard of an American working
for his country unless he was paid for it?
"Think what America did in the great war! Why was your president so
wrought up in 1915 when he assailed Germany with fine phrases? Was it
because we had violated Belgium? No! When that happened he had nothing to
say, although the United States, equally with England, was a signatory of
the Hague Conference that guaranteed Belgium's integrity. Why did not
your president protest then? Why did he not use his fine phrases then?
Because the United States had suffered no material injury through
Belgium's misfortune. On the contrary, the United States was sure to gain
much of the trade that Belgium lost. And that was what he cared about,
commercial advantage. You were quick enough to protect your trade and
your money interests. You were ready enough to do anything for gold,
ready enough, by the sale of war munitions, to bring death and misery
upon half of Europe so long as you got gold from the other half. High
ideals! National spirit! There they are!"
CHAPTER IX
BOSTON OFFERS DESPERATE AND BLOODY RESISTANCE TO THE INVADERS
Our wing of the advancing German army remained in Hartford for four days,
at the end of which all signs of disorder had ceased; in fact, there was
little disorder at any time. The lesson of New Haven's resistance had
been taken to heart, and there was the discouraging knowledge that a row
of German six-inch siege-guns were trained on the city from the heights
of Elizabeth Park, their black muzzles commanding the grey towers and
golden dome of State House, the J. Pierpont Morgan Memorial, the gleaming
white new City Hall, the belching chimneys of the Underwood typewriter
works, and the brown pile of Trinity College.
There was the further restraining fact that leading citizens of Hartford
were held as hostages, their lives in peril, in James J. Goodwin's
palatial home, among these being ex-Governor Morgan G. Buckley, Mayor
Joseph H. Lawler, Bishop Chauncey B. Brewster, Dr. Flavel S. Luther,
Bishop John J. Nilan, Mrs. Richard M. Bissell, Mrs. Thomas N. Hepburn,
the Rev. Rockwell Harmon Potter, Charles Hopkins Clark, Rolland F.
Andrews, the Rev. Francis Goodwin, Thomas J. Spellacy, and Sol
Sontheimer.
So the invaders' march through New England continued. It is a pitiful
story. What could Connecticut and Massachusetts do? With all their wealth
and intelligence, with all their mechanical ingenuity, with all their
pride and patriotism, what could they do, totally unprepared, more
helpless than Belgium, against the most efficient army in Europe?
Three times, between Hartford and Springfield, unorganised bands of
Americans, armed with shotguns and rifles, lay in ambush for the
advancing enemy and fired upon them. These men declared that they would
die before they would stand by tamely and see the homes and fields of New
England despoiled by the invader. Whereupon the Germans announced, by
means of proclamations showered upon towns and villages from their
advance-guard of aeroplanes, that for every German soldier thus killed by
Americans in ambush a neighbouring town or village would be burned by
fire bombs dropped from the sky. And they carried out this threat to the
letter, so that for every act of resistance by the fathers and brothers
and sons of New England there resulted only greater suffering and
distress for the women and the children.
The average man, especially one with a wife and children, is easily cowed
when he has no hope; and presently all resistance ceased. What feeble
opposition there was in the first week dwindled to almost nothing in the
second week and to less than nothing in the third week. Stamford paid two
million dollars in gold, Bridgeport five million, New Haven five million,
Hartford twenty million, Fall River three million, Springfield five
million, Worcester two million, Providence ten million, Newport fifty
million. The smaller cities got off with half a million each, and some of
the towns paid as little as one hundred thousand dollars. But every
community paid something, and the total amount taken from New England,
including a hundred million from New Hampshire, a hundred million from
Vermont, and a hundred million from Maine, was eight hundred million
dollars, about a third of which was in gold.
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