But in addition to Hate and Socialist impotence, two things which astounded those who knew and admired the German people, were their callousness toward the deeds which have been committed by their army and navy and their savage intolerance of any other point of view except their own. I am not one of those who believe that all Germans have cloven hoofs. Bitterly as I oppose their cause in this war and fully as I hold their War Party responsible for the war, I am not prepared to believe that the Germans are either a decadent or a lost race. What I do believe is that the war has, temporarily at least, annihilated the moral qualities of the Germans and dragged them from the high estate of ethical and discriminating intelligence in which they lived in antebellum times. The Germans of Louvain, of the _Lusitania_, asphyxiating gas, liquid fire, submarine piracy, airship assassination and General Frightfulness are not the Germans among whom I spent thirteen happy, fruitful years. They are not the Germans whose main concern, as it is that of the average run of men and women in other climes, was to prosper, raise families, educate children, live comfortably, acquire a competence and enjoy life generally. These Germans no longer exist. They have been succeeded by a race of war-maddened Germans, who were told by their Imperial Chancellor that "necessity knows no law," that treaties are "scraps of paper," and who have been made to believe that, in war, there is but one thing to do--"to hack our way through"--and that, as Bismarck and the German War Book said, the enemy must be left with nothing except eyes to weep with. The Germans have been steeped in all this by their overlords, living and dead, and, being children of discipline, they have looked with unmoistened eye upon all and sundry done in the holy name of these bedrock German principles.