Life — November 19, 1914 — page 21: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

This is very complimentary to the women voters, Next April Chicago elects a Mayor and other city officers and thirty-six members of the City Council. Women vote for all these officers, and ate expected to help the city to a band of paragons. The most interesting test of woman suffrage as yet arranged for is in Chicago. 'HE Rockefeller Foundation being an autocracy, can mobilize at short notice, and has earned the grati- tude of all of us by providing about a million dollars’ worth of prompt aid for the Belgians. To have money in the bank and good credit, though cul- pable, apparently, from the standpoint of political uplift, is not half bad when something urgent has to be quickly done. Our various relief funds are doing pretty well, but the sum of all of them at this writing is not as much as this million that the Rockefeller organization will be able to rush to the front. Such relief as the Belgians need is a pretty hard strain on private benevo- lence and ought in some way to te financed. The Germans seem to have consumed or destroyed the food in Belgium and to continue the extor- tion of tribute from what is left of the Belgian cities, and to be quite willing that the Belgians should starve to death at their convenience. What Proportion of the seven million sur- viving Belgians are fugitives does not appear, but most of them seem to be in acute distress and make a huge re- lief problem, much bigger than any that has before confronted the people of this part of the world, Supplies for them must come from these States and must go to the Belgians and not to the German raiders, Distribution seems to be provided for, but there should be a Belgian credit in this coun- try to buy the supplies on an adequate scale, and though the relief funds help in that, so far they don’t help nearly enough. That’ Germany and the Germans should hate Belgium and the Bel- gians and wish to wipe them off the map is entirely reasonable. It is Bel- gium that has shown the Germans up—their utter lack of regard for solemn agreements, their ruthlessness in warfare, their greedy and pitiless ferocity in dealing with captured ter- ritory. It is Belgium and Bernhardi that cannot be explained away by the German apologists, and that have taught an observant world what to expect if Germany gets the upper hand of it, The Germans had a quarrel with France, with Russia, with Eng- land, They have fought them all hard and considerably to the admiration of bystanders. But they had no quarrel with Belgium. They trampled in on that country simply because they thought she could not help herself. Astonishing to say, they have reaped in Belgium precisely what they sowed —ruin. They are not ahead, but far behind, by their deviltry. It has de- stroyed what moral issue they had, wounded them irreparably in reputa- tion as a nation and as a people, and helped them not a whit in their mili- tary designs. We could sympathize with the Germans in many particulars of their predicament and of their as- pirations, but in their dealings with Belgium they stand damned by the opinion of mankind, indefensible, in- excusable and beaten, comicbooks.com