Germany's Future

1917

Columbia university has some professors who refuse to confuse moral values, among them Franklin H. Giddings, head of the department of sociology. He was recently quoted by the London Observer as follows:

"There is no reasonable doubt that Germany has lost the confidence of the civilized world. It is completely gone. I do not believe that the world will forgive Germany in a hundred years. * * * In my opinion there will be no forgiveness of Germany by the civilized world before the mature days of our grandchildren, and to obtain it then she has to show works meet for repentance."

The boycott from which Germany will suffer will not be primarily industrial and commercial, but intellectual and moral. With the most liberal trade regulations imaginable, there are millions of people in the world who, after the war, will have nothing to do with the Germans. Their isolation will not be due to any commercial pact, but to the instinctive shrinking from a nation guilty of monstrous crimes against God and man. That is a feeling that statesmen can neither create nor eliminate. Men will be unable to associate in any way with Germany as it now is, or to have any dealings with it, without feeling a sense of personal degradation and contamination. — Indianapolis News.