It was relatively simple to put two or three of these in a pocket and casually go aboard a ship, or through the influence of simple and kindly German neighbor people, have someone else go aboard the ship and drop such a bomb into a coal bunker; or better, among the cargo. The bomb needed absolutely no attention on the part of anyone. Scheele, a competent, thorough, painstaking German scientist of Germany’s highest and best type, left nothing to chance. He experimented from time to time, and verified his experiments. He knew how thick to make that partition of tin. He could make it of just such a thickness that the acid could eat through it in two or three or four days, so that if a certain steamship carried that bomb on the high seas for two or three or four days, in the course of time the acid would eat through the tin. Then, in the combination of the chemicals, heat would be generated and a fire was absolutely certain. These things sound like the invention of a diseased mind—like the romance of some excited intellect concerning itself with unreal and impossible events belonging in another age—another world than ours. But they are true, actually true. Scheele, backed by these influential Germans in New York, backed by the diplomatic representatives of the German Government itself—we might as well say by all Germans also—actually did these things in this country. Not one, but many ships broke into flames in mid-Atlantic. Sometimes the damage was not complete, but quite frequently the loss of a merchant ship was absolute. We cannot tell how many millions of dollars of the world’s property were lost in this way through the activities of this one perverted mind. Our censorship took care of some of that. Those losses of foodstuffs, of fuel, of clothing, had to be paid for by someone. They were subtracted from the world’s useful supplies. Who paid for them? You and I and all the taxpayers of America paid for the losses. One does not know how much Scheele himself got out of it—not very much; for, two months before this war was “forced” on Germany, Scheele was ordered to sell his drug store, and did so—though he complained he was doing very well in it. His salary is not known to have been raised. One of the astonishing and disgusting developments of this war had been the knowledge gained of the unspeakable depravity and degeneracy of the German mind. There are in the Government records at Washington countless cases of German officers who, over their own signatures, have written things so foul and filthy, so low, lewd and bestial, that no pen on earth ever would rewrite them save one of their own sort. The Huns were not clean-minded fighting men, but in large percent animal-like, low, cruel, cunning, unscrupulous, unchivalrous even in their most arrogant ranks. This explains out of hand the atrocities in Belgium and France and shows what atrocities were waiting for America had this war been won by Germany.