Adventure Magazine Cover — page 178: what you’re looking at

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

fs" Ss he ee od > - are and will continue to be Huns. FEW words from Frank C. Robertson in connection with his story in this issue: Hatch, Idaho. Pve stuck close to the three occupations which I am most familiar with for the setting—homestead- ing,cow-punching and sheep-herding. “The Sheepgrower’s Association,’ under another name, did make a very real fight against lawless cattlemen in the range wars of several years back. Many readers will perhaps identify the Goldfield Jack referred to in the story with .the notorious _ Diamond Field Jack who was accused of killing a number of sheepherders. Diamond Field Jack, how- ever, was finally turned loose after having been several times convicted. His was one of the most famous legal battles ever fought in the Inter-moun- tain country.— FRANK C. ROBERTSON. HE letter from Wm. Mé@dans at our August 2oth Camp-Fire, protesting because some of our writers still use the -terms “Boche” and “Hun” and breathing Hun hate and threats against America, brought forth a storm of red-hot replies. I’d say Mr. Madans is a very poor propa- gandist for his cause. eHe kindles a wrath _ that will make it sort of hard for all Ger- mans who still cherish the Hun spirit. Most of us needed his letter as a warning against the enduringness of the Hun spirit, though he himself is not important. There are many Germans, here and in Germany, who are not his kind. In this country many a German-born or. German by descent ‘proved himself as good an American as anybody when the crisis came. But there are also those other Germans who were and They are a menace not only to this country but to the peace of the world. ey HERE is quite a good deal to think about. 'The Germans on the whole are by nature a kindly folk.. The Hun is a man- ufactured product, deliberately fashioned by a deliberate policy of “blood and iron” into a ruthless and inhuman beast. Years ago a minority in Germany—the junkers, the military caste—laid plans for world-con- quest, ‘Deutschland tiber Alles.”’ They had to have the German people to do the con- quering with. But the German people, as a whole, had no desire for world-conquest and were not by nature sufficiently hard and brutal to be the kind of machine needed for ‘trampling all other people into the dust. ‘It would not be enough to equip and train them for war—that would be enough fo - defensive warfare against invasion, but no enough for the far bigger job of conquerin the world at large. The German people were not sufficiently “blood and iron” to serve the junkers’ purpose. : “Very well,’ said the junkers, “we'll make them sufficiently blood and iron for our purpose. It will take a generation or so but we'll doit.” They did. By education from the cradle up. By systematic, thorough, unrelenting’ education. They saw to it that the German people drank the doctrine of ruthlessness with their mothers’ milk, breathed it from the air, absorbed it from every contact of life. Just as any of us could take one baby and in the course of years make a devil out of him, so did they take a whole people. Therefore, now that the war is three years past we still have Wm. Madans and a host of other Huns. If it was not born in them, it was bred in them, and, being ‘bred in them, it stays in them. If some Germans did not absorb the blood-and-iron doctrine or merely tolerated it, plenty of others had soaked it in for keeps. It had been educat- ed into Germans from birth, molding all of them for a while and part of them until they die. Huns had been made out of Germans. By systematic education. Well, Americans, if a whole nation of péople can be educated into a different kind of people, why can’t we do it in our country? Can’t we do as much as, the Germans can— and go them one better? If they made themselves into worse citizens, why can’t we make ourselves into better citizens? By : 176 \ Eomicbooks (EO)