The Women of Germany

An Argument for my "The White Morning"

I have been asked by the Editor of The Bookman to state my authority for writing The White Morning; in other words for daring to believe that a revolution conceived and engineered by women is possible in Germany.

Before giving my own reasons, stripped of what glamor of fiction I have been able to surround the story with, I should like to say that when I began to put the idea into form I thought it was entirely my own. But while it is always pleasant to offer this sort of incense to one's vanity, I should have been more than glad to quote to my editor and publisher some reliable male authority; a man's opinion, on all momentous subjects, by force of tradition, far outweighing any theory or guess that a woman, no matter what her intimate personal experience, may advance.

Imagine then my delight, when the story was half finished, to read an article by A. Curtis Roth, in the Saturday Evening Post, in which he stated unequivocally that it was among the possibilities that the women of Germany, driven to desperation by suffering and privation, and disillusion, would arise suddenly and overturn the dynasty. Mr. Roth, who was American vice-consul at Plauen, Saxony, until we entered the war, has written some of the most enlightening and brilliant articles that have appeared on the internal conditions of any of the belligerent countries since August, 1914. He remained at his post until the last moment and then left Germany a physical wreck from malnutrition. In spite of the fact that he was an officer in the consular service of a neutral country, with ample means at his command, and standing in close personal relations with the authorities, he could not get enough to eat; and what he was forced to swallow--lest he starve--completely broke down his digestion.

On the other hand, he never ceased to observe; and having made friends of all classes of Germans, and been given facilities for observation and study of conditions enjoyed by few Americans in the Teutonic Empire at the time, he noted every phase and change, both subtle and manifest, through which these afflicted people passed during the first three years of the war. They are in far worse case now.

Later (in November) I read an article by a German, J. Koettgen, in the New York Chronicle, which was even more explicit.

Herr Koettgen is one of the agents in this country of Hermann Fernau, an eminent intellectual of Germany, who escaped into Switzerland, and wages relentless war upon the dynasty and the military caste of Prussia; which he holds categorically responsible for the world war. There is a price on Fernau's head. He dares not walk abroad without a bodyguard, and cannon are concealed among the oleanders that surround his house. Not only has he written two books, Because I am a German, and The Coming Democracy, which if circulated in Germany would prick thousands of dazed despairing