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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13635 ***
+
+THE NEW YORK TIMES
+
+CURRENT HISTORY
+
+A MONTHLY MAGAZINE
+
+THE EUROPEAN WAR
+
+VOLUME I.
+
+From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index
+
+[Illustration]
+
+NEW YORK THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY 1915
+
+Copyright 1914, 1915, By The New York Times Company
+
+
+
+ CONTENTS
+
+
+ NUMBER I.
+
+ WHAT MEN OF LETTERS SAY
+ Page
+
+ COMMON SENSE ABOUT THE WAR 11
+ _By George Bernard Shaw_
+
+ SHAW'S NONSENSE ABOUT BELGIUM 60
+ _By Arnold Bennett_
+
+ BENNETT STATES THE GERMAN CASE 63
+ _By George Bernard Shaw_
+
+ FLAWS IN SHAW'S LOGIC 65
+ _By Cunninghame Graham_
+
+ EDITORIAL COMMENT ON SHAW 66
+
+ SHAW EMPTY OF GOOD SENSE 68
+ _By Christabel Pankhurst_
+
+ COMMENT BY READING OF SHAW 73
+
+ OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT WILSON 76
+ _By George Bernard Shaw_
+
+ A GERMAN LETTER TO G. BERNARD SHAW 80
+ _By Herbert Eulenberg_
+
+ BRITISH AUTHORS DEFEND ENGLAND'S WAR 82
+ _With Facsimile Signatures_
+
+ THE FOURTH OF AUGUST--EUROPE AT WAR 87
+ _By H.G. Wells_
+
+ IF THE GERMANS RAID ENGLAND 89
+ _By H.G. Wells_
+
+ SIR OLIVER LODGE'S COMMENT 92
+
+ WHAT THE GERMAN CONSCRIPT THINKS 93
+ _By Arnold Bennett_
+
+ FELIX ADLER'S COMMENT 95
+
+ WHEN PEACE IS SERIOUSLY DESIRED 97
+ _By Arnold Bennett_
+
+ BARRIE AT BAY: WHICH WAS BROWN? 100
+ _An Interview on the War_
+
+ A CREDO FOR KEEPING FAITH 102
+ _By John Galsworthy_
+
+ HARD BLOWS, NOT HARD WORDS 103
+ _By Jerome K. Jerome_
+
+ "AS THEY TESTED OUR FATHERS" 106
+ _By Rudyard Kipling_
+
+ KIPLING AND "THE TRUCE OF THE BEAR" 107
+
+ ON THE IMPENDING CRISIS 107
+ _By Norman Angell_
+
+ WHY ENGLAND CAME TO BE IN IT 108
+ _By Gilbert K. Chesterton_
+
+ SOUTH AFRICA'S BOERS AND BRITONS 125
+ _By H. Rider Haggard_
+
+ CAPT. MARK HAGGARD'S DEATH IN BATTLE 128
+ _By H. Rider Haggard_
+
+ AN ANTI-CHRISTIAN WAR 129
+ _By Robert Bridges_
+
+ ENGLISH ARTISTS' PROTEST 130
+
+ TO ARMS! 132
+ _By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle_
+
+ CONAN DOYLE ON BRITISH MILITARISM 140
+
+ THE NEED OF BEING MERCILESS 144
+ _By Maurice Maeterlinck_
+
+ LETTERS TO DR. NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 146
+ _By Baron d'Estournelles de Constant_
+
+ THE VITAL ENERGIES OF FRANCE 153
+ _By Henri Bergson_
+
+ FRANCE THROUGH ENGLISH EYES 153
+ _With Rene Bazin's Appreciation_
+
+ THE SOLDIER OF 1914 156
+ _By Rene Doumic_
+
+ GERMANY'S CIVILIZED BARBARISM 160
+ _By Emile Boutroux_
+
+ THE GERMAN RELIGION OF DUTY 170
+ _By Gabriele Reuter_
+
+ A LETTER TO GERHART HAUPTMANN 174
+ _By Romain Rolland_
+
+ A REPLY TO ROLLAND 175
+ _By Gerhart Hauptmann_
+
+ ANOTHER REPLY TO ROLLAND 176
+ _By Karl Wolfskehl_
+
+ ARE WE BARBARIANS? 178
+ _By Gerhart Hauptmann_
+
+ TO AMERICANS FROM A GERMAN FRIEND 180
+ _By Ludwig Fulda_
+
+ APPEAL TO THE CIVILIZED WORLD 185
+ _By Professors of Germany_
+
+ APPEAL OF THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES 187
+
+ REPLY TO THE GERMAN PROFESSORS 188
+ _By British Scholars_
+
+ CONCERNING THE GERMAN PROFESSORS 192
+ _By Frederic Harrison_
+
+ THE REPLY FROM FRANCE 194
+ _By M. Yves Guyot and Prof Bellet_
+
+ TO AMERICANS IN GERMANY 198
+ _By Prof. Adolf von Harnack_
+
+ A REPLY TO PROF. HARNACK 201
+ _By Some British Theologians_
+
+ PROF. HARNACK IN REBUTTAL 203
+
+ THE CAUSES OF THE WAR 206
+ _By Theodore Niemeyer_
+
+ COMMENT BY DR. MAX WALTER 208
+
+
+
+
+ NUMBER II.
+
+ WHO BEGAN THE WAR AND WHY?
+
+
+ SPEECHES BY KAISER WILHELM II. 210
+
+ THE MIGHTY FATE OF EUROPE 219
+ _As Interpreted by Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg,
+ German Imperial Chancellor._
+
+ AUSTRIA-HUNGARY'S VERSION OF THE WAR 226
+ _By Kaiser Frawz Josef and Count Berchtold_
+
+ A GERMAN REVIEW OF THE EVIDENCE 228
+ _Certified by Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, German ex-Colonial
+ Secretary_
+
+ "TRUTH ABOUT GERMANY" 244
+ _Attested by Thirty-four German Dignitaries_
+
+ SPECULATIONS ABOUT PEACE, SEPTEMBER, 1914 273
+ _Report by James W. Gerard, American Ambassador at Berlin, to
+ President Wilson._
+
+ FIRST WARNINGS OF EUROPE'S PERIL 277
+ _Speeches by British Ministers_
+
+ GREAT BRITAIN'S MOBILIZATION 294
+ _Measures Taken Throughout the Empire Upon the Outbreak of War_
+
+ SUMMONS OF THE NATION TO ARMS 308
+ _British People Roused by Their Leaders_
+
+ TEACHINGS OF GEN. VON BERNHARDI 343
+ _By Viscount Bryce_
+
+ ENTRANCE OF FRANCE INTO THE WAR 350
+ _By President Poincare and Premier Viviani_
+
+ RUSSIA TO HER ENEMY 358
+
+ "THE FACTS ABOUT BELGIUM" 365
+ _Statement Issued by the Belgian Legation at Washington_
+
+ BELGO-BRITISH PLOT ALLEGED BY GERMANY 369
+ _Statement Issued by German Embassy at Washington, Oct. 13._
+
+ ATROCITIES OF THE WAR 374
+
+ BOMBARDMENT OF RHEIMS CATHEDRAL 392
+ _Protest Issued to Neutral Powers from French Foreign Office,
+ Bordeaux, Sept. 21._
+
+ THE SOCIALISTS' PART 397
+
+
+
+
+ NUMBER III.
+
+ WHAT AMERICANS SAY TO EUROPE
+
+
+ IN THE SUPREME COURT OF CIVILIZATION 413
+ _Argued by James M. Beck_
+
+ CRITICS DISPUTE MR. BECK 431
+
+ DEFENSE OF THE DUAL ALLIANCE--REPLY 438
+ _By Dr. Edmund von Mach_
+
+ WHAT GLADSTONE SAID ABOUT BELGIUM 448
+ _By George Louis Beer_
+
+ FIGHT TO THE BITTER END 451
+ _An Interview with Andrew Carnegie_
+
+ WOMAN AND WAR--"Shot, Tell His Mother" (Poem) 458
+ _By W.E.P. French, Captain, U.S. Army_
+
+ THE WAY TO PEACE 459
+ _An Interview with Jacob H. Schiff_
+
+ PROF. MATHER ON MR. SCHIFF 464
+
+ THE ELIOT-SCHIFF LETTERS 465
+ _By Jacob H. Schiff and Charles W. Eliot_
+
+ LA CATHEDRALE (Poem Translated by Frances C. Fay) 472
+ _By Edmond Rostand_
+
+ PROBABLE CAUSES AND OUTCOME OF THE WAR 473
+ _Series of Five Letters by Charles W. Eliot,
+ with Related Correspondence_
+
+ THE LORD OF HOSTS (Poem) 501
+ _By Joseph B. Gilder_
+
+ A WAR OF DISHONOR 502
+ _By David Starr Jordan_
+
+ MIGHT OR RIGHT 503
+ _By John Grier Hibben_
+
+ JEANNE D'ARC--1914 (Poem) 506
+ _By Alma Durant Nicholson_
+
+ THE KAISER AND BELGIUM (With controversial letters) 507
+ _By John W. Burgess_
+
+ AMERICA'S PERIL IN JUDGING GERMANY 515
+ _By William M. Sloane_
+
+ POSSIBLE PROFITS FROM WAR 526
+ _Interview with Franklin H. Giddings_
+
+ "TO AMERICANS LEAVING GERMANY" 533
+ _A German Circular_
+
+ GERMAN DECLARATIONS 534
+ _By Rudolf Eucken and Ernst Haeckel_
+
+ THE EUCKEN AND HAECKEL CHARGES 537
+ _By John Warbeke_
+
+ CONCERNING GERMAN CULTURE 541
+ _By Brander Matthews_
+
+ CULTURE VS. KULTUR 543
+ _By Frank Jewett Mather, Jr._
+
+ THE TRESPASS IN BELGIUM 545
+ _By John Grier Hibben_
+
+ APPORTIONING THE BLAME 548
+ _By Arthur v. Briesen_
+
+ PARTING (Poem) 553
+ _By Louise von Wetter_
+
+ FRENCH HATE AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY 554
+ _By Kuno Francke_
+
+ IN DEFENSE OF AUSTRIA 559
+ _By Baron L. Hengelmuller_
+
+ RUSSIAN ATROCITIES 563
+ _By George Haven Putnam_
+
+ "THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE" 565
+ _Interview with Nicholas Murray Butler_
+
+ A NEW WORLD MAP 571
+ _By Wilhelm Ostwald_
+
+ THE VERDICT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 573
+ _By Newell Dwight Hillis_
+
+ TIPPERARY (Poem) 581
+ _By John B. Kennedy_
+
+ AS AMERICA SEES THE WAR 582
+ _By Harold Begbie_
+
+ TO MELOS, POMEGRANATE ISLE (Poem) 587
+ _By Grace Harriet Macurdy_
+
+ WHAT AMERICA CAN DO 588
+ _By Lord Channing of Wellingborough_
+
+ TO A COUSIN GERMAN (Poem) 593
+ _By Adeline Adams_
+
+ WHAT THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS MAY BE 594
+ _By Irving Fisher_
+
+ EFFECTS OF WAR ON AMERICA 600
+ _By Roland G. Usher_
+
+ GERMANY OF THE FUTURE 605
+ _Interview with M. de Lapredelle_
+
+ GERMANY THE AGGRESSOR 609
+ _By Albert Sauveur_
+
+ MILITARISM AND CHRISTIANITY 610
+ _By Lyman Abbott_
+
+ VIGIL (Poem) 612
+ _By Hortense Flexner_
+
+ NIETZSCHE AND GERMAN CULTURE 613
+ _By Abraham Solomon_
+
+ BELGIUM'S BITTER NEED 614
+ _By Sir Gilbert Parker_
+
+
+
+
+ NUMBER IV.
+
+ THE WAR AT CLOSE QUARTERS
+
+
+ SIR JOHN FRENCH'S OWN STORY 619
+ _Famous Dispatches of the
+ British Commander in Chief to Lord Kitchener_
+
+ STORY OF THE "EYE WITNESS" 650
+ _By Col. E.D. Swinton of the Intelligence
+ Department of the British General Staff_
+
+ THE DAWN OF A NEW DAY (Poem) 678
+ _By Edward Neville Vose_
+
+ THE GERMAN ENTRY INTO BRUSSELS (With Map) 679
+ _By John Boon_
+
+ THE FALL OF ANTWERP 682
+ _By a Correspondent of The London
+ Daily Chronicle_
+
+ AS THE FRENCH FELL BACK ON PARIS 689
+ _By G.H. Perris_
+
+ THE RETREAT TO PARIS 691
+ _By Philip Gibbs_
+
+ A ZOUAVE'S STORY 704
+ _By Philip Gibbs_
+
+ WHEN WAR BURST ON ARRAS 707
+ _By a Special Correspondent_
+
+ THE BATTLES IN BELGIUM (With Map) 711
+ _By The Associated Press_
+
+ SEEKING WOUNDED ON BATTLE FRONT 714
+ _By Philip Gibbs_
+
+ AT THE KAISER'S HEADQUARTERS 718
+ _By Cyril Brown of The New York Times_
+
+ HOW THE BELGIANS FIGHT 725
+ _By a Correspondent of The London Daily News_
+
+ A VISIT TO THE FIRING LINE IN FRANCE 727
+ _By a Correspondent of The New York Times_
+
+ UNBURIED DEAD STREW LORRAINE (With Map) 729
+ _By Philip Gibbs_
+
+ ALONG THE GERMAN LINES NEAR METZ 731
+ _By The Associated Press_
+
+ THE SLAUGHTER IN ALSACE 736
+ _By John H. Cox_
+
+ RENNENKAMPF ON THE RUSSIAN BORDER 738
+ _By a Correspondent of The London
+ Daily Chronicle_
+
+ THE FIRST FIGHT AT LODZ (With Map) 740
+ _By Perceval Gibbon_
+
+ THE FIRST INVASION OF SERBIA (With Map) 742
+ _By a Correspondent of The London Standard_
+
+ THE ATTACK ON TSING-TAU 745
+ _By Jefferson Jones_
+
+ THE GERMAN ATTACK ON TAHITI 748
+ _As Told by Miss Geni La France, an Eyewitness_
+
+ THE BLOODLESS CAPTURE OF GERMAN SAMOA 749
+ _By Malcolm Ross, F.R.G.S._
+
+ HOW THE CRESSY SANK 752
+ _By Edgar Rowan_
+
+ GERMAN STORY OF THE HELIGOLAND FIGHT 754
+ _By a Special Correspondent of The New York Times_
+
+ THE SINKING OF THE CRESSY AND THE HOGUE 755
+ _By the Senior Surviving Officers,
+ Commander Bertram W.L. Nicholson and
+ Commander Reginald A. Norton_
+
+ THE SINKING OF THE HAWKE 757
+ _By a Correspondent of The London
+ Daily Chronicle_
+
+ THE EMDEN'S LAST FIGHT 758
+ _By the Cable Operator at Cocos Islands_
+
+ CROWDS SEE THE NIGER SINK 760
+ _By a Correspondent of The London
+ Daily Chronicle_
+
+ LIEUTENANT WEDDIGEN'S OWN STORY 762
+ _By Herbert B. Swope and Capt. Lieut. Otto
+ Weddigen_
+
+ THE SOLILOQUY OF AN OLD SOLDIER (Poem) 764
+ _By O.C.A. Child_
+
+ THE EFFECTS OF WAR IN FOUR COUNTRIES 765
+ _By Irvin S. Cobb_
+
+ HOW PARIS DROPPED GAYETY 767
+ _By Anne Rittenhouse_
+
+ PARIS IN OCTOBER 770
+ _From The London Times_
+
+ FRANCE AND ENGLAND AS SEEN IN WAR TIME 772
+ _Interview with F. Hopkinson Smith_
+
+ THE HELPLESS VICTIMS 776
+ _By Mrs. Nina Larrey Duryee_
+
+ A NEW RUSSIA MEETS GERMANY 777
+ _By Perceval Gibbon_
+
+ BELGIAN CITIES GERMANIZED 780
+ _By Cyril Brown of The New York Times_
+
+ THE BELGIAN RUIN 786
+ _By J.H. Whitehouse, M.P._
+
+ THE WOUNDED SERB 788
+ _From The London Times_
+
+ SPY ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 790
+ _British Home Office Communication_
+
+ CHRONOLOGY OF THE WAR 793
+
+ THE MEN OF THE EMDEN (Poem) 816
+ _By Thomas R. Ybarra_
+
+
+
+
+ NUMBER V.
+
+ THE NEW RUSSIA SPEAKS
+
+
+ AN APPEAL BY RUSSIAN AUTHORS, ARTISTS AND ACTORS 817
+ _With Their Signatures_
+
+ RUSSIA IN LITERATURE 819
+ _By British Men of Letters_
+
+ RUSSIA AND EUROPE'S WAR 821
+ _By Paul Vinogradoff_
+
+ RUSSIAN APPEAL FOR THE POLES 825
+ _By A. Konovalov of the Russian Duma_
+
+ I AM FOR PEACE (Poem) 826
+ _By Lurana Sheldon_
+
+ UNITED RUSSIA 827
+ _By Peter Struve_
+
+ PRINCE TRUBETSKOI'S APPEAL TO RUSSIANS 830
+ _To Help the Polish Victims of War_
+
+ HOW PROHIBITION CAME TO RUSSIA 831
+ _An Interview with the Reformer Tchelisheff_
+
+ INFLUENCE OF THE WAR UPON RUSSIAN INDUSTRY 834
+ _By the Russian Ministry of Commerce_
+
+ DECLARATION OF THE RUSSIAN INDUSTRIAL INTERESTS 835
+
+ A RUSSIAN FINANCIAL AUTHORITY ON THE WAR 836
+ _By Prof. Migoulin_
+
+ PROPOSED INTERNAL LOANS OF RUSSIA 837
+ (_Prof. Migoulin's Plan_)
+
+ HOW RUSSIAN MANUFACTURERS FEEL 838
+ _Digested from Russkia Vedomosti_
+
+ NEW SOURCES OF REVENUE NEEDED 839
+ _By A. Sokolov_
+
+ OUR RUSSIAN ALLY 840
+ _By Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace_
+
+ CONFISCATION OF GERMAN PATENTS 849
+ _By the Russian Ministry of Commerce_
+
+ A RUSSIAN INCOME TAX 850
+ _Proposed by the Ministry of Finance_
+
+ TOOLS OF THE RUSSIAN JUGGERNAUT 851
+ _By M.J. Bonn_
+
+ FATE OF THE JEWS IN POLAND 854
+ _By Georg Brandes_
+
+ COMMERCIAL TREATIES AFTER THE WAR 863
+ _By P. Maslov_
+
+ PHOTOGRAPHIC REVIEW OF THE WAR 865
+ _48 War Pictures Printed in Rotogravure_
+
+ PATRIOTISM AND ENDURANCE 913
+ _The Pastoral Letter of Cardinal D.J. Mercier,
+ Archbishop of Malines_
+
+ APPEAL TO AMERICA FOR BELGIUM (Poem) 924
+ _By Thomas Hardy_
+
+ WITH THE GERMAN ARMY 925
+ _By Cyril Brown_
+
+ STORY OF THE MAN WHO FIRED ON RHEIMS CATHEDRAL 928
+
+ RICHARD HARDING DAVIS'S COMMENT 931
+
+ THE GERMAN AIRMEN 932
+
+ GERMAN GENERALS TALK OF THE WAR 934
+
+ SWIFT REVERSAL TO BARBARISM 939
+ _By Vance Thompson_
+
+ CIVIL LIFE IN BERLIN 943
+ _From The London Times_
+
+ BELGIAN BOY TELLS STORY OF AERSCHOT 945
+ _From The New York Times_
+
+ THE NEUTRALS (Poem) 948
+ _By Beatrice Barry_
+
+ FIFTEEN MINUTES ON THE YSER 949
+ _From The New York Times_
+
+ SEEING NIEUPORT UNDER SHELL FIRE 951
+ _From The New York Times_
+
+ RAID ON SCARBOROUGH SEEN FROM A WINDOW 954
+ _By Ruth Kauffmann_
+
+ HOW THE BARONESS HID HER HUSBAND ON A VESSEL 956
+ _From The New York Times_
+
+ WARSAW SWAMPED WITH REFUGEES 957
+ _By H.W. Bodkinson_
+
+ AFTER THE RUSSIAN ADVANCE IN GALICIA 958
+ _From The London Times_
+
+ OFFICER IN BATTLE HAD LITTLE FEELING 959
+ _By The Associated Press_
+
+ THE BATTLE OF NEW YEAR'S DAY 961
+ _By Perceval Gibbon_
+
+ BASS'S STORY 963
+ _From The New York Times_
+
+ THE WASTE OF GERMAN LIVES 964
+ _By Perceval Gibbon_
+
+ THE FLIGHT INTO SWITZERLAND 966
+ _By Ethel Therese Hugh_
+
+ ONCE FAIR BELGRADE IS A SKELETON CITY 969
+ _From The New York Times_
+
+ LETTERS AND DIARIES 971
+ _A Group of Soldiers' Letters_
+
+ "CHANT OF HATE AGAINST ENGLAND" 984
+ _How Ernst Lissauer's Lines were
+ "Sung to Pieces" in Germany_
+
+ ANSWERING THE "CHANT OF HATE" 988
+ _By Beatrice M. Barry_
+
+ ENGLAND CAUSED THE WAR 989
+ _By T. von Bethmann-Hollweg, German
+ Imperial Chancellor_
+
+ A SONG OF THE SIEGE GUN (Poem) 992
+ _By Katharine Drayton Mayrant Simons, Jr._
+
+ WHY ENGLAND FIGHTS GERMANY 993
+ _By Hilaire Belloc_
+
+ AT THE VILLA ACHILLEION, CORFU (Poem) 999
+ _By H.T. Sudduth_
+
+ GERMANY'S STRATEGIC RAILWAYS (With Map) 1000
+ _By Walter Littlefield_
+
+ GLORY OF WAR (Poem) 1004
+ _By Adeline Adams_
+
+ CHRONOLOGY OF THE WAR 1007
+
+
+
+
+ NUMBER VI.
+
+ THE CALDRON OF THE BALKANS
+
+
+ HOW TURKEY WENT TO WAR 1025
+
+ SERBIA AND HER NEIGHBORS 1036
+
+ LITTLE MONTENEGRO SPEAKS 1043
+
+ BULGARIA'S ATTITUDE 1044
+
+ GREECE'S WATCHFUL WAITING 1050
+
+ WHERE RUMANIA STANDS IN THE CRISIS 1054
+
+ EXIT ALBANIA? 1062
+
+ THE WAR IN THE BALKANS 1068
+ _By A.T. Polyzoides_
+
+ THE EUROPEAN WAR AS SEEN BY CARTOONISTS 1073
+
+ GERMANY VS. BELGIUM 1101
+ _Case of the Secret Military Documents
+ Presented by Both Sides_
+
+ THE BIG AND THE GREAT (Poem) 1114
+ _By William Archer_
+
+ "FROM THE BODY OF THIS DEATH" (Poem) 1119
+ _By Sidney Low_
+
+ "A SCRAP OF PAPER" 1120
+ _By Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg
+ and Sir Edward Grey_
+
+ THE KAISER AT DONCHERY 1125
+ _By The Associated Press_
+
+ HAIL! A HYMN TO BELGIUM (Music by F.H. Cowen) 1126
+ _By John Galsworthy_
+
+ HOLLAND'S FUTURE (With Map) 1128
+ _By H.G. Wells_
+
+ FRENCH OFFICIAL REPORT ON GERMAN ATROCITIES 1133
+
+ A FRENCH MAYOR'S PUNISHMENT 1163
+ _By The Associated Press_
+
+ WE WILL FIGHT TO THE END 1164
+ _By Premier Viviani of France_
+
+ _NUITS BLANCHES_ 1166
+ _By H.S. Haskins_
+
+ UNCONQUERED FRANCE 1167
+ _From the Bulletin Francais_
+
+ FOUR MONTHS OF WAR (With Map) 1169
+ _From the Bulletin des Armees_
+
+ LONG LIVE THE ALLIES! 1174
+ _By Claude Monet_
+
+ UNITED STATES FAIR TO ALL 1175
+ _By William J. Bryan,
+ American Secretary of State_
+
+ THE HOUSE WITH SEALED DOORS (Poem) 1183
+ _By Edith M. Thomas_
+
+ SEIZURES OF AMERICAN CARGOES 1184
+ _By William J. Bryan,
+ American Secretary of State_
+
+ GERMAN CROWN PRINCE TO AMERICA 1187
+ _By The Associated Press_
+
+ THE OFFICIAL BRITISH EXPLANATION 1188
+ _By Sir Edward Grey_
+
+ ITALY AND THE WAR (With Map) 1192
+ _By William Roscoe Thayer_
+
+ HE HEARD THE BUGLES CALLING (Poem) 1198
+ _By Carey C.D. Briggs_
+
+ GERMAN SOLDIERS WRITE HOME 1199
+
+ WAR CORRESPONDENCE 1207
+
+ THE BROKEN ROSE (TO KING ALBERT) 1210
+ _By Annie Vivanti Chartres_
+
+ THE HEROIC LANGUAGE (Poem) 1216
+ _By Alice Meynell_
+
+ CHRONOLOGY OF THE WAR 1224
+
+ TO HIS MAJESTY KING ALBERT (Poem) 1228
+ _By William Watson_
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE BERNARD SHAW]
+
+[Illustration: ARNOLD BENNETT. _See Page_ 60]
+
+
+
+
+"Common Sense About the War"
+
+By George Bernard Shaw.
+
+
+I.
+
+ "_Let a European war break out--the war, perhaps, between the
+ Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, which so many journalists
+ and politicians in England and Germany contemplate with criminal
+ levity. If the combatants prove to be equally balanced, it may,
+ after the first battles, smoulder on for thirty years. What will be
+ the population of London, or Manchester, or Chemnitz, or Bremen, or
+ Milan, at the end of it_?" ("The Great Society," by Graham Wallas.
+ June, 1914.)
+
+ (_Copyright, 1914, By The New York Times Company._)
+
+
+The time has now come to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write
+soberly about the war. At first the mere horror of it stunned the more
+thoughtful of us; and even now only those who are not in actual contact
+with or bereaved relation to its heartbreaking wreckage can think sanely
+about it, or endure to hear others discuss it coolly. As to the
+thoughtless, well, not for a moment dare I suggest that for the first
+few weeks they were all scared out of their wits; for I know too well
+that the British civilian does not allow his perfect courage to be
+questioned; only experienced soldiers and foreigners are allowed the
+infirmity of fear. But they certainly were--shall I say a little upset?
+They felt in that solemn hour that England was lost if only one single
+traitor in their midst let slip the truth about anything in the
+universe. It was a perilous time for me. I do not hold my tongue easily;
+and my inborn dramatic faculty and professional habit as a playwright
+prevent me from taking a one-sided view even when the most probable
+result of taking a many-sided one is prompt lynching. Besides, until
+Home Rule emerges from its present suspended animation, I shall retain
+my Irish capacity for criticising England with something of the
+detachment of a foreigner, and perhaps with a certain slightly malicious
+taste for taking the conceit out of her. Lord Kitchener made a mistake
+the other day in rebuking the Irish volunteers for not rallying faster
+to the defense of "their country." They do not regard it as their
+country yet. He should have asked them to come forward as usual and help
+poor old England through a stiff fight. Then it would have been all
+right.
+
+Having thus frankly confessed my bias, which you can allow for as a
+rifleman allows for the wind, I give my views for what they are worth.
+They will be of some use; because, however blinded I may be by prejudice
+or perversity, my prejudices in this matter are not those which blind
+the British patriot, and therefore I am fairly sure to see some things
+that have not yet struck him.
+
+And first, I do not see this war as one which has welded Governments and
+peoples into complete and sympathetic solidarity as against the common
+enemy. I see the people of England united in a fierce detestation and
+defiance of the views and acts of Prussian Junkerism. And I see the
+German people stirred to the depths by a similar antipathy to English
+Junkerism, and anger at the apparent treachery and duplicity of the
+attack made on them by us in their extremest peril from France and
+Russia. I see both nations duped, but alas! not quite unwillingly duped,
+by their Junkers and Militarists into wreaking on one another the wrath
+they should have spent in destroying Junkerism and Militarism in their
+own country. And I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and
+Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many
+years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as
+the dominant military power in the world. No doubt the heroic remedy for
+this tragic misunderstanding is that both armies should shoot their
+officers and go home to gather in their harvests in the villages and
+make a revolution in the towns; and though this is not at present a
+practicable solution, it must be frankly mentioned, because it or
+something like it is always a possibility in a defeated conscript army
+if its commanders push it beyond human endurance when its eyes are
+opening to the fact that in murdering its neighbours it is biting off
+its nose to vex its face, besides riveting the intolerable yoke of
+Militarism and Junkerism more tightly than ever on its own neck. But
+there is no chance--or, as our Junkers would put it, no danger--of our
+soldiers yielding to such an ecstasy of common sense. They have enlisted
+voluntarily; they are not defeated nor likely to be; their
+communications are intact and their meals reasonably punctual; they are
+as pugnacious as their officers; and in fighting Prussia they are
+fighting a more deliberate, conscious, tyrannical, personally insolent,
+and dangerous Militarism than their own. Still, even for a voluntary
+professional army, that possibility exists, just as for the civilian
+there is a limit beyond which taxation, bankruptcy, privation, terror,
+and inconvenience cannot be pushed without revolution or a social
+dissolution more ruinous than submission to conquest. I mention all
+this, not to make myself wantonly disagreeable, but because military
+persons, thinking naturally that there is nothing like leather, are now
+talking of this war as likely to become a permanent institution like the
+Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's, forgetting, I think, that the
+rate of consumption maintained by modern military operations is much
+greater relatively to the highest possible rate of production
+maintainable under the restrictions of war time than it has ever been
+before.
+
+
+*The Day of Judgment.*
+
+The European settlement at the end of the war will be effected, let us
+hope, not by a regimental mess of fire-eaters sitting around an up-ended
+drum in a vanquished Berlin or Vienna, but by some sort of Congress in
+which all the Powers (including, very importantly, the United States of
+America) will be represented. Now I foresee a certain danger of our
+being taken by surprise at that Congress, and making ourselves
+unnecessarily difficult and unreasonable, by presenting ourselves to it
+in the character of Injured Innocence. We shall not be accepted in that
+character. Such a Congress will most certainly regard us as being, next
+to the Prussians (if it makes even that exception), the most quarrelsome
+people in the universe. I am quite conscious of the surprise and scandal
+this anticipation may cause among my more highminded (_hochnaesig_, the
+Germans call it) readers. Let me therefore break it gently by
+expatiating for a while on the subject of Junkerism and Militarism
+generally, and on the history of the literary propaganda of war between
+England and Potsdam which has been going on openly for the last forty
+years on both sides. I beg the patience of my readers during this
+painful operation. If it becomes unbearable, they can always put the
+paper down and relieve themselves by calling the Kaiser Attila and Mr.
+Keir Hardie a traitor twenty times or so. Then they will feel, I hope,
+refreshed enough to resume. For, after all, abusing the Kaiser or Keir
+Hardie or me will not hurt the Germans, whereas a clearer view of the
+political situation will certainly help us. Besides, I do not believe
+that the trueborn Englishman in his secret soul relishes the pose of
+Injured Innocence any more than I do myself. He puts it on only because
+he is told that it is respectable.
+
+
+*Junkers All.*
+
+What is a Junker? Is it a German officer of twenty-three, with offensive
+manners, and a habit of cutting down innocent civilians with his sabre?
+Sometimes; but not at all exclusively that or anything like that. Let us
+resort to the dictionary. I turn to the _Encyclopaedisches Woerterbuch_
+of Muret Sanders. Excuse its quaint German-English.
+
+*Junker* = Young nobleman, younker, lording, country squire, country
+gentleman, squirearch. *Junkerberrschaft* = squirearchy, landocracy.
+*Junkerleben* = life of a country gentleman, (_figuratively_) a jolly
+life. *Junkerpartei* = country party. *Junkerwirtschaft* = doings of the
+country party.
+
+Thus we see that the Junker is by no means peculiar to Prussia. We may
+claim to produce the article in a perfection that may well make Germany
+despair of ever surpassing us in that line. Sir Edward Grey is a Junker
+from his topmost hair to the tips of his toes; and Sir Edward is a
+charming man, incapable of cutting down even an Opposition front
+bencher, or of telling a German he intends to have him shot. Lord Cromer
+is a Junker. Mr. Winston Churchill is an odd and not disagreeable
+compound of Junker and Yankee: his frank anti-German pugnacity is
+enormously more popular than the moral babble (Milton's phrase) of his
+sanctimonious colleagues. He is a bumptious and jolly Junker, just as
+Lord Curzon is an uppish Junker. I need not string out the list. In
+these islands the Junker is literally all over the shop.
+
+It is very difficult for anyone who is not either a Junker or a
+successful barrister to get into an English Cabinet, no matter which
+party is in power, or to avoid resigning when we strike up the drum. The
+Foreign Office is a Junker Club. Our governing classes are
+overwhelmingly Junker: all who are not Junkers are riff-raff whose only
+claim to their position is the possession of ability of some sort:
+mostly ability to make money. And, of course, the Kaiser is a Junker,
+though less true-blue than the Crown Prince, and much less autocratic
+than Sir Edward Grey, who, without consulting us, sends us to war by a
+word to an ambassador and pledges all our wealth to his foreign allies
+by a stroke of his pen.
+
+
+*What Is a Militarist?*
+
+Now that we know what a Junker is, let us have a look at the
+Militarists. A Militarist is a person who believes that all real power
+is the power to kill, and that Providence is on the side of the big
+battalions. The most famous Militarist at present, thanks to the zeal
+with which we have bought and quoted his book, is General Friedrich von
+Bernhardi. But we cannot allow the General to take precedence of our own
+writers as a Militarist propagandist. I am old enough to remember the
+beginning of the anti-German phase of that very ancient propaganda in
+England. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 left Europe very much
+taken aback. Up to that date nobody was afraid of Prussia, though
+everybody was a little afraid of France; and we were keeping "buffer
+States" between ourselves and Russia in the east. Germany had indeed
+beaten Denmark; but then Denmark was a little State, and was abandoned
+in her hour of need by those who should have helped her, to the great
+indignation of Ibsen. Germany had also beaten Austria; but somehow
+everybody seems able to beat Austria, though nobody seems able to draw
+the moral that defeats do not matter as much as the Militarists think,
+Austria being as important as ever. Suddenly Germany beat France right
+down into the dust, by the exercise of an organized efficiency in war of
+which nobody up to then had any conception. There was not a State in
+Europe that did not say to itself: "Good Heavens! what would happen if
+she attacked _us_?" We in England thought of our old-fashioned army and
+our old-fashioned commander George Ranger (of Cambridge), and our War
+Office with its Crimean tradition of imbecility; and we shook in our
+shoes. But we were not such fools as to leave it at that. We soon
+produced the first page of the Bernhardian literature: an anonymous
+booklet entitled _The Battle of Dorking_. It was not the first page of
+English Militarist literature: you have only to turn back to the burst
+of glorification of war which heralded the silly Crimean campaign
+(Tennyson's _Maud_ is a surviving sample) to find paeans to Mars which
+would have made Treitschke blush (perhaps they did); but it was the
+first page in which it was assumed as a matter of course that Germany
+and not France or Russia was England's natural enemy. _The Battle of
+Dorking_ had an enormous sale; and the wildest guesses were current as
+to its authorship. And its moral was "To arms; or the Germans will
+besiege London as they besieged Paris." From that time until the
+present, the British propaganda of war with Germany has never ceased.
+The lead given by _The Battle of Dorking_ was taken up by articles in
+the daily press and the magazines. Later on came the Jingo fever
+(anti-Russian, by the way; but let us not mention that just now),
+Stead's _Truth About the Navy_, Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, the suppression
+of the Channel Tunnel, Mr. Robert Blatchford, Mr. Garvin, Admiral Maxse,
+Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, _The National Review_, Lord Roberts,
+the Navy League, the imposition of an Imperialist Foreign Secretary on
+the Liberal Cabinet, Mr. Wells's _War in the Air_ (well worth re-reading
+just now), and the Dreadnoughts. Throughout all these agitations the
+enemy, the villain of the piece, the White Peril, was Prussia and her
+millions of German conscripts. At first, in _The Battle of Dorking_
+phase, the note was mainly defensive. But from the moment when the
+Kaiser began to copy our Armada policy by building a big fleet, the
+anti-German agitation became openly aggressive; and the cry that the
+German fleet or ours must sink, and that a war between England and
+Germany was bound to come some day, speedily ceased to be merely a cry
+with our Militarists and became an axiom with them. And what our
+Militarists said our Junkers echoed; and our Junker diplomatists played
+for. The story of how they manoeuvred to hem Germany and Austria in with
+an Anglo-Franco-Russian combination will be found told with soldierly
+directness and with the proud candor of a man who can see things from
+his own side only in the article by Lord Roberts in the current number
+of _The Hibbert Journal_ (October, 1914). There you shall see also,
+after the usual nonsense about Nietzsche, the vision of "British
+administrators bearing the White Man's Burden," of "young men, fresh
+from the public schools of Britain, coming eagerly forward to carry on
+the high traditions of Imperial Britain in each new dependency which
+comes under our care," of "our fitness as an Imperial race," of "a great
+task committed to us by Providence," of "the will to conquer that has
+never failed us," of our task of "assuming control of one-fifth of the
+earth's surface and the care of one in five of all the inhabitants of
+the world." Not a suggestion that the inhabitants of the world are
+perhaps able to take care of themselves. Not even a passing recollection
+when that White Man's Burden is in question that the men outside the
+British Empire, and even inside the German Empire, are by no means
+exclusively black. Only the _sancta simplicitas_ that glories in "the
+proud position of England," the "sympathy, tolerance, prudence and
+benevolence of our rule" in the east (as shown, the Kaiser is no doubt
+sarcastically remarking, in the Delhi sedition trial), the chivalrous
+feeling that it is our highest duty to save the world from the horrible
+misfortune of being governed by anybody but those young men fresh from
+the public schools of Britain. Change the words Britain and British to
+Germany and German, and the Kaiser will sign the article with
+enthusiasm. _His_ opinion, _his_ attitude (subject to that merely verbal
+change) word for word.
+
+
+*Six of One: Half-a-Dozen of The Other.*
+
+Now, please observe that I do not say that the agitation was
+unreasonable. I myself steadily advocated the formation of a formidable
+armament, and ridiculed the notion that, we, who are wasting hundreds of
+millions annually on idlers and wasters, could not easily afford double,
+treble, quadruple our military and naval expenditure. I advocated the
+compulsion of every man to serve his country, both in war and peace. The
+idlers and wasters perceiving dimly that I meant the cost to come out of
+their pockets and meant to use the admission that riches should not
+exempt a man from military service as an illustration of how absurd it
+is to allow them to exempt him from civil service, did not embrace my
+advocacy with enthusiasm; so I must reaffirm it now lest it should be
+supposed that I am condemning those whose proceedings I am describing.
+Though often horribly wrong in principle, they were quite right in
+practice as far as they went. But they must stand to their guns now that
+the guns are going off. They must not pretend that they were harmless
+Radical lovers of peace, and that the propaganda of Militarism and of
+inevitable war between England and Germany is a Prussian infamy for
+which the Kaiser must be severely punished. That is not fair, not true,
+not gentlemanly. We began it; and if they met us half-way, as they
+certainly did, it is not for us to reproach them. When the German
+fire-eaters drank to The Day (of Armageddon) they were drinking to the
+day of which our Navy League fire-eaters had first said "It's bound to
+come." Therefore, let us have no more nonsense about the Prussian Wolf
+and the British Lamb, the Prussian Machiavelli and the English
+Evangelist. We cannot shout for years that we are boys of the bulldog
+breed, and then suddenly pose as gazelles. No. When Europe and America
+come to settle the treaty that will end this business (for America is
+concerned in it as much as we are), they will not deal with us as the
+lovable and innocent victims of a treacherous tyrant and a savage
+soldiery. They will have to consider how these two incorrigibly
+pugnacious and inveterately snobbish peoples, who have snarled at one
+another for forty years with bristling hair and grinning fangs, and are
+now rolling over with their teeth in one another's throats, are to be
+tamed into trusty watch-dogs of the peace of the world. I am sorry to
+spoil the saintly image with a halo which the British Jingo journalist
+sees just now when he looks in the glass; but it must be done if we are
+to behave reasonably in the imminent day of reckoning.
+
+And now back to Friedrich von Bernhardi.
+
+
+*General Von Bernhardi.*
+
+Like many soldier-authors, Friedrich is very readable; and he maintains
+the good and formidable part of the Bismarck tradition: that is, he is
+not a humbug. He looks facts in the face; he deceives neither himself
+nor his readers; and if he were to tell lies--as he would no doubt do as
+stoutly as any British, French, or Russian officer if his country's
+safety were at stake--he would know that he was telling them. Which last
+we think very bad taste on his part, if not downright wickedness.
+
+It is true that he cites Frederick the Great as an exemplary master of
+war and of _Weltpolitik_. But his chief praise in this department is
+reserved for England. It is from our foreign policy, he says, that he
+has learnt what our journalists denounce as "the doctrine of the bully,
+of the materialist, of the man with gross ideals: a doctrine of
+diabolical evil." He frankly accepts that doctrine from us (as if our
+poor, honest muddle-heads had ever formulated anything so intellectual
+as a doctrine), and blames us for nothing but for allowing the United
+States to achieve their solidarity and become formidable to us when we
+might have divided them by backing up the South in the Civil War. He
+shows in the clearest way that if Germany does not smash England,
+England will smash Germany by springing at her the moment she can catch
+her at a disadvantage. In a word he prophesies that we, his great
+masters in _Realpolitik_, will do precisely what our Junkers have just
+made us do, It is we who have carried out the Bernhardi programme: it is
+Germany who has neglected it. He warned Germany to make an alliance with
+Italy, Austria, Turkey, and America, before undertaking the subjugation,
+first of France, then of England. But a prophet is not without honour
+save in his own country; and Germany has allowed herself to be caught
+with no ally but Austria between France and Russia, and thereby given
+the English Junkers their opportunity. They have seized it with a
+punctuality that must flatter Von Bernhardi, even though the compliment
+be at the expense of his own country. The Kaiser did not give them
+credit for being keener Junkers than his own. It was an unpleasant,
+indeed an infuriating surprise. All that a Kaiser could do without
+unbearable ignominy to induce them to keep their bulldogs off and give
+him fair play with his two redoubtable foes, he did. But they laughed
+Frederick the Great's laugh and hurled all our forces at him, as he
+might have done to us, on Bernhardian principles, if he had caught us at
+the same disadvantage. Officially, the war is Junker-cut-Junker,
+militarist-cut-Militarist; and we must fight it out, not
+_Heuchler_-cut-Hypocrite, but hammer and tongs.
+
+
+*Militarist Myopia.*
+
+Unofficially, it is quite another matter. Democracy, even
+Social-Democracy, though as hostile to British Junkers as to German
+ones, and under no illusion as to the obsolescence and colossal
+stupidity of modern war, need not lack enthusiasm for the combat, which
+may serve their own ends better than those of their political opponents.
+For Bernhardi the Brilliant and our own very dull Militarists are alike
+mad: the war will not do any of the things for which they rushed into
+it. It is much more likely to do the things they most dread and
+deprecate: in fact, it has already swept them into the very kind of
+organization they founded an Anti-Socialist League to suppress. To shew
+how mad they are, let us suppose the war carries out their western
+program to the last item. Suppose France rises from the war victorious,
+happy and glorious, with Alsace and Lorraine regained, Rheims cathedral
+repaired in the best modern trade style, and a prodigious indemnity in
+her pocket! Suppose we tow the German fleet into Portsmouth, and leave
+Hohenzollern metaphorically under the heel of Romanoff and actually in a
+comfortable villa in Chislehurst, the hero of all its tea parties and
+the judge of all its gymkhanas! Well, cry the Militarists, suppose it by
+all means: could we desire anything better? Now I happen to have a
+somewhat active imagination; and it flatly refuses to stop at this
+convenient point. I must go on supposing. Suppose France, with its
+military prestige raised once more to the Napoleonic point, spends its
+indemnity in building an invincible Armada, stronger and nearer to us
+than the German one we are now out to destroy! Suppose Sir Edward Grey
+remonstrates, and Monsieur Delcasse replies, "Russia and France have
+humbled one Imperial Bully, and are prepared to humble another. I have
+not forgotten Fashoda. Stop us if you can; or turn, if you like, for
+help to the Germany we have smashed and disarmed!" Of what use will all
+this bloodshed be then, with the old situation reproduced in an
+aggravated form, the enemy closer to our shores, a raid far more
+feasible, the tradition of "natural enmity" to steel the foe, and
+Waterloo to be wiped out like Sedan? A child in arms should be able to
+see that this idiotic notion of relaxing the military pressure on us by
+smashing this or that particular Power is like trying to alter the
+pressure of the ocean by dipping up a bucket of water from the North Sea
+and pouring it into the Bay of Biscay.
+
+I purposely omit more easterly supposings as to what victorious Russia
+might do. But a noble emancipation of Poland and Finland at her own
+expense, and of Bosnia and Harzegovina at Austria's, might easily
+suggest to our nervous Militarists that a passion for the freedom of
+Egypt and India might seize her, and remind her that we were Japan's
+ally in the day of Russia's humiliation in Manchuria. So there at once
+is your Balance of Power problem in Asia enormously aggravated by
+throwing Germany out of the anti-Russian scale and grinding her to
+powder. Even in North Africa--but enough is enough. You can _durchhauen_
+your way out of the frying pan, but only into the fire. Better take
+Nietzsche's brave advice, and make it your point of honour to "live
+dangerously." History shews that it is often the way to live long.
+
+
+*Learning Nothing: Forgetting Everything.*
+
+But let me test the Militarist theory, not by a hypothetical future, but
+by the accomplished and irrevocable past. Is it true that nations must
+conquer or go under, and that military conquest means prosperity and
+power for the victor and annihilation for the vanquished? I have already
+alluded in passing to the fact that Austria has been beaten repeatedly:
+by France, by Italy, by Germany, almost by everybody who has thought it
+worth while to have a whack at her; and yet she is one of the Great
+Powers; and her alliance has been sought by invincible Germany. France
+was beaten by Germany in 1870 with a completeness that seemed
+impossible; yet France has since enlarged her territory whilst Germany
+is still pleading in vain for a place in the sun. Russia was beaten by
+the Japanese in Manchuria on a scale that made an end forever of the old
+notion that the West is the natural military superior of the East; yet
+it is the terror of Russia that has driven Germany into her present
+desperate onslaught on France; and it is the Russian alliance on which
+France and England are depending for their assurance of ultimate
+success. We ourselves confess that the military efficiency with which we
+have so astonished the Germans is the effect, not of Waterloo and
+Inkerman, but of the drubbing we got from the Boers, who we aid probably
+have beaten us if we had been anything like their own size. Greece has
+lately distinguished herself in war within a few years by a most
+disgraceful beating of the Turks. It would be easy to multiply instances
+from remoter history: for example, the effect on England's position of
+the repeated defeats of our troops by the French under Luxembourg in the
+Balance of Power War at the end of the seventeenth century differed
+surprisingly little, if at all, from the effect of our subsequent
+victories under Marlborough. And the inference from the Militarist
+theory that the States which at present count for nothing as military
+Powers necessarily count for nothing at all is absurd on the face of it.
+Monaco seems to be, on the whole, the most prosperous and comfortable
+State in Europe.
+
+In short, Militarism must be classed as one of the most inconsiderately
+foolish of the bogus "sciences" which the last half century has produced
+in such profusion, and which have the common characteristic of revolting
+all sane souls, and being stared out of countenance by the broad facts
+of human experience. The only rule of thumb that can be hazarded on the
+strength of actual practice is that wars to maintain or upset the
+Balance of Power between States, called by inaccurate people Balance of
+Power wars, and by accurate people Jealousy of Power wars, never
+establish the desired peaceful and secure equilibrium. They may exercise
+pugnacity, gratify spite, assuage a wound to national pride, or enhance
+or dim a military reputation; but that is all. And the reason is, as I
+shall shew very conclusively later on, that there is only one way in
+which one nation can really disable another, and that is a way which no
+civilized nation dare even discuss.
+
+*Are We Hypocrites?*
+
+And now I proceed from general considerations to the diplomatic history
+of the present case, as I must in order to make our moral position
+clear. But first, lest I should lose all credit by the startling
+incompatibility between the familiar personal character of our statesmen
+and the proceedings for which they are officially responsible, I must
+say a word about the peculiar psychology of English statesmanship, not
+only for the benefit of my English readers (who do not know that it is
+peculiar just as they do not know that water has any taste because it is
+always in their mouths), but as a plea for a more charitable
+construction from the wider world.
+
+We know by report, however unjust it may seem to us, that there is an
+opinion abroad, even in the quarters most friendly to us, that our
+excellent qualities are marred by an incorrigible hypocrisy. To France
+we have always been Perfidious Albion. In Germany, at this moment, that
+epithet would be scorned as far too flattering to us. Victor Hugo
+explained the relative unpopularity of _Measure for Measure_ among
+Shakespeare's plays on the ground that the character of the hypocrite
+Angelo was a too faithful dramatization of our national character.
+Pecksniff is not considered so exceptional an English gentleman in
+America as he is in England.
+
+Now we have not acquired this reputation for nothing. The world has no
+greater interest in branding England with this particular vice of
+hypocrisy than in branding France with it; yet the world does not cite
+Tartuffe as a typical Frenchman as it cites Angelo and Pecksniff as
+typical Englishmen. We may protest against it as indignantly as the
+Prussian soldiers protest against their equally universal reputation for
+ferocity in plunder and pillage, sack and rapine; but there is something
+in it. If you judge an English statesman, by his conscious intentions,
+his professions, and his personal charm, you will often find him an
+amiable, upright, humane, anxiously truthful man. If you judge him, as a
+foreigner must, solely on the official acts for which he is responsible,
+and which he has to defend in the House of Commons for the sake of his
+party, you will often be driven to conclude that this estimable
+gentleman is, in point of being an unscrupulous superprig and fool,
+worse than Caesar Borgia and General Von Bernhardi rolled into one, and
+in foreign affairs a Bismarck in everything except commanding ability,
+blunt common sense, and freedom from illusion as to the nature and
+object of his own diplomacy. And the permanent officials in whose hands
+he is will probably deserve all that and something to spare. Thus you
+will get that amazing contrast that confronts us now between the
+Machiavellian Sir Edward Grey of the Berlin newspapers and the amiable
+and popular Sir Edward Grey we know in England. In England we are all
+prepared to face any World Congress and say, "We know that Sir Edward
+Grey is an honest English gentleman, who meant well as a true patriot
+and friend of peace; we are quite sure that what he did was fair and
+right; and we will not listen to any nonsense to the contrary." The
+Congress will reply, "We know nothing about Sir Edward Grey except what
+he did; and as there is no secret and no question as to what he did, the
+whole story being recorded by himself, we must hold England responsible
+for his conduct, whilst taking your word for the fact, which has no
+importance for us, that his conduct has nothing to do with his
+character."
+
+
+*Our Intellectual Laziness.*
+
+The general truth of the situation is, as I have spent so much of my
+life in trying to make the English understand, that we are cursed with a
+fatal intellectual laziness, an evil inheritance from the time when our
+monopoly of coal and iron made it possible for us to become rich and
+powerful without thinking or knowing how; a laziness which is becoming
+highly dangerous to us now that our monopoly is gone or superseded by
+new sources of mechanical energy. We got rich by pursuing our own
+immediate advantage instinctively; that is, with a natural childish
+selfishness; and when any question of our justification arose, we found
+it easy to silence it with any sort of plausible twaddle (provided it
+flattered us, and did not imply any trouble or sacrifice) provided by
+our curates at £70 a year, or our journalists at a penny a line, or
+commercial moralists with axes to grind. In the end we became fatheaded,
+and not only lost all intellectual consciousness of what we were doing,
+and with it all power of objective self-criticism, but stacked up a
+lumber of pious praises for ourselves which not only satisfied our
+corrupted and half atrophied consciences, but gave us a sense that there
+is something extraordinarily ungentlemanly and politically dangerous in
+bringing these pious phrases to the test of conduct. We carried Luther's
+doctrine of Justification by Faith to the insane point of believing that
+as long as a man says what we have agreed to accept as the right thing
+it does not matter in the least what he actually does. In fact, we do
+not clearly see why a man need introduce the subject of morals at all,
+unless there is something questionable to be whitewashed. The
+unprejudiced foreigner calls this hypocrisy: that is why we call him
+prejudiced. But I, who have been a poor man in a poor country,
+understand the foreigner better.
+
+Now from the general to the particular. In describing the course of the
+diplomatic negotiations by which our Foreign Office achieved its design
+of at last settling accounts with Germany at the most favourable moment
+from the Militarist point of view, I shall have to exhibit our Secretary
+of State for Foreign Affairs as behaving almost exactly as we have
+accused the Kaiser of behaving. Yet I see him throughout as an honest
+gentleman, "perplexed in the extreme," meaning well, revolted at the
+last moment by the horror of war, clinging to the hope that in some
+vague way he could persuade everybody to be reasonable if they would
+only come and talk to him as they did when the big Powers were kept out
+of the Balkan war, but hopelessly destitute of a positive policy of any
+kind, and therefore unable to resist those who had positive business in
+hand. And do not for a moment imagine that I think that the conscious
+Sir Edward Grey was Othello, and the subconscious, Iago. I do think that
+the Foreign Office, of which Sir Edward is merely the figure head, was
+as deliberately and consciously bent on a long deferred Militarist war
+with Germany as the Admiralty was; and that is saying a good deal. If
+Sir Edward Grey did not know what he wanted, Mr. Winston Churchill was
+in no such perplexity. He was not an "ist" of any sort, but a
+straightforward holder of the popular opinion that if you are threatened
+you should hit out, unless you are afraid to. Had he had the conduct of
+the affair he might quite possibly have averted the war (and thereby
+greatly disappointed himself and the British public) by simply
+frightening the Kaiser. As it was, he had arranged for the co-operation
+of the French and British fleets; was spoiling for the fight; and must
+have restrained himself with great difficulty from taking off his coat
+in public whilst Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey were giving the country
+the assurances which were misunderstood to mean that we were not bound
+to go to war, and not more likely to do so than usual. But though Sir
+Edward did not clear up the misunderstanding, I think he went to war
+with the heavy heart of a Junker Liberal (such centaurs exist) and not
+with the exultation of a Junker Jingo.
+
+I may now, without more than the irreducible minimum of injustice to Sir
+Edward Grey, proceed to tell the story of the diplomatic negotiations as
+they will appear to the Congress which, I am assuming, will settle the
+terms on which Europe is to live more or less happily ever after.
+
+*Diplomatic History of the War.*
+
+The evidence of how the Junker diplomatists of our Foreign Office let us
+in for the war is in the White Paper, Miscellaneous No. 6 (1914),
+containing correspondence respecting the European crisis, and since
+reissued, with a later White Paper and some extra matter, as a penny
+bluebook in miniature. In these much-cited and little-read documents we
+see the Junkers of all the nations, the men who have been saying for
+years "It's bound to come," and clamouring in England for compulsory
+military service and expeditionary forces, momentarily staggered and not
+a little frightened by the sudden realization that it has come at last.
+They rush round from foreign office to embassy, and from embassy to
+palace, twittering "This is awful. Can't you stop it? Won't you be
+reasonable? Think of the consequences," etc., etc. One man among them
+keeps his head and looks the facts in the face. That man is Sazonoff,
+the Russian Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He keeps steadily trying to
+make Sir Edward Grey face the inevitable. He says and reiterates, in
+effect, "You know very well that you cannot keep out of a European war.
+You know you are pledged to fight Germany if Germany attacks France. You
+know that your arrangments for the fight are actually made; that already
+the British army is commanded by a Franco-British Council of War; that
+there is no possible honourable retreat for you. You know that this old
+man in Austria, who would have been superannuated years ago if he had
+been an exciseman, is resolved to make war on Servia, and sent that
+silly forty-eight hours ultimatum when we were all out of town so that
+he could begin fighting before we could get back to sit on his head. You
+know that he has the Jingo mob of Vienna behind him. You know that if he
+makes war, Russia must mobilize. You know that France is bound to come
+in with us as you are with France. You know that the moment we mobilize,
+Germany, the old man's ally, will have only one desperate chance of
+victory, and that is to overwhelm our ally, France, with one superb rush
+of her millions, and then sweep back and meet us on the Vistula. You
+know that nothing can stop this except Germany remonstrating with
+Austria, and insisting on the Servian case being dealt with by an
+international tribunal and not by war. You know that Germany dares not
+do this, because her alliance with Austria is her defence against the
+Franco-Russian alliance, and that she does not want to do it in any
+case, because the Kaiser naturally has a strong class prejudice against
+the blowing up of Royal personages by irresponsible revolutionists, and
+thinks nothing too bad for Servia after the assassination of the
+Archduke. There is just one chance of avoiding Armageddon: a slender
+one, but worth trying. You averted war in the Algeciras crisis, and
+again in the Agadir crisis, by saying you would fight. Try it again. The
+Kaiser is stiffnecked because he does not believe you are going to fight
+this time. Well, convince him that you are. The odds against him will
+then be so terrible that he may not dare to support the Austrian
+ultimatum to Servia at such a price. And if Austria is thus forced to
+proceed judicially against Servia, we Russians will be satisfied; and
+there will be no war."
+
+Sir Edward could not see it. He is a member of a Liberal Government, in
+a country where there is no political career for the man who does not
+put his party's tenure of office before every other consideration. What
+would _The Daily News_ and _The Manchester Guardian_ have said had he,
+Bismarck-like, said bluntly: "If war once breaks out, the old score
+between England and Prussia will be settled, not by ambassadors' tea
+parties and Areopaguses, but by blood and iron?" In vain did Sazonoff
+repeat, "But if you are going to fight, as you know you are, why not say
+so?" Sir Edward, being Sir Edward and not Winston Churchill or Lloyd
+George, could not admit that he was going to fight. He might have
+forestalled the dying Pope and his noble Christian "I bless peace" by a
+noble, if heathen, "I fight war." Instead, he persuaded us all that he
+was under no obligation whatever to fight. He persuaded Germany that he
+had not the slightest serious intention of fighting. Sir Owen Seaman
+wrote in _Punch_ an amusing and witty No-Intervention poem. Sporting
+Liberals offered any odds that there would be no war for England. And
+Germany, confident that with Austria's help she could break France with
+one hand and Russia with the other if England held aloof, let Austria
+throw the match into the magazine.
+
+
+*The Battery Unmasked.*
+
+Then the Foreign Office, always acting through its amiable and popular
+but confused instrument Sir Edward, unmasked the Junker-Militarist
+battery. He suddenly announced that England must take a hand in the war,
+though he did not yet tell the English people so, it being against the
+diplomatic tradition to tell them anything until it is too late for them
+to object. But he told the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, caught
+in a death trap, pleaded desperately for peace with Great Britain. Would
+we promise to spare Germany if Belgium were left untouched? No. Would we
+say on what conditions we would spare Germany? No. Not if the Germans
+promised not to annex French territory? No. Not even if they promised
+not to touch the French colonies? No. Was there no way out? Sir Edward
+Grey was frank. He admitted there was just one chance; that Liberal
+opinion might not stand the war if the neutrality of Belgium were not
+violated. And he provided against that chance by committing England to
+the war the day before he let the cat out of the bag in Parliament.
+
+All this is recorded in the language of diplomacy in the White Paper on
+or between the lines. That language is not so straightforward as my
+language; but at the crucial points it is clear enough. Sazonoff's tone
+is politely diplomatic in No. 6; but in No. 17 he lets himself go. "I do
+not believe that Germany really wants war; but her attitude is decided
+by yours. If you take your stand firmly with France and Russia there
+will be no war. If you fail them now, rivers of blood will flow, and you
+will in the end be dragged into war." He was precisely right; but he did
+not realize that war was exactly what our Junkers wanted. They did not
+dare to tell themselves so; and naturally they did not dare to tell him
+so. And perhaps his own interest in war was too strong to make him
+regret the rejection of his honest advice. To break up the Austrian
+Empire and achieve for Russia the Slav Caliphate of South-East Europe
+whilst defeating Prussia with the help of France and of Russia's old
+enemy and Prussia's old ally England, was a temptation so enormous that
+Sazonoff, in resisting it so far as to shew Sir Edward Grey frankly the
+only chance of preventing it, proved himself the most genuine
+humanitarian in the diplomatic world.
+
+
+*Number 123.*
+
+The decisive communication between Sir Edward Grey and Prince Lichnowsky
+is recorded in the famous No. 123. With the rather childish subsequent
+attempt to minimize No. 123 on the ground that the Prince was merely an
+amiable nincompoop who did not really represent his fiendish sovereign,
+neither I nor any other serious person need be concerned. What is beyond
+all controversy is that after that conversation Prince Lichnowsky could
+do nothing but tell the Kaiser that the _Entente_, having at last got
+his imperial head in chancery, was not going to let him off on any
+terms, and that it was now a fight to a finish between the British and
+German empires. Then the Kaiser said: "We are Germans. God help us!"
+When a crowd of foolish students came cheering for the war under his
+windows, he bade them go to the churches and pray. His telegrams to the
+Tsar (the omission of which from the penny bluebook is, to say the
+least, not chivalrous) were dignified and pathetic. And when the
+Germans, taking a line from the poet they call "unser Shakespeare,"
+said: "Come the four quarters of the world in arms and we shall shock
+them," it was, from the romantic militarist point of view, fine. What
+Junker-led men could do they have since done to make that thrasonical
+brag good. But there is no getting over the fact that, in Tommy Atkins's
+phrase, they had asked for it. Their Junkers, like ours, had drunk to
+The Day; and they should not have let us choose it after riling us for
+so many years. And that is why Sir Edward had a great surprise when he
+at last owned up in Parliament.
+
+
+*How the Nation Took It.*
+
+The moment he said that we could not "stand aside with our arms folded"
+and see our friend and neighbour France "bombarded and battered," the
+whole nation rose to applaud him. All the Foreign Office distrust of
+public opinion, the concealment of the Anglo-French plan of campaign,
+the disguise of the _Entente_ in a quaker's hat, the duping of the
+British public and the Kaiser with one and the same prevarication, had
+been totally unnecessary and unpopular, like most of these ingenuities
+which diplomatists think subtle and Machiavellian. The British Public
+had all along been behind Mr. Winston Churchill. It had wanted Sir
+Edward to do just what Sazonoff wanted him to do, and what I, in the
+columns of _The Daily News_ proposed he should do nine months ago (I
+must really be allowed to claim that I am not merely wise after the
+event), which was to arm to the teeth regardless of an expense which to
+us would have been a mere fleabite, and tell Germany that if she, laid a
+finger on France we would unite with France to defeat her, offering her
+at the same time as consolation for that threat, the assurance that we
+would do as much to France if she wantonly broke the peace in the like
+fashion by attacking Germany. No unofficial Englishman worth his salt
+wanted to snivel hypocritically about our love of peace and our respect
+for treaties and our solemn acceptance of a painful duty, and all the
+rest of the nauseous mixture of school-master's twaddle, parish magazine
+cant, and cinematograph melodrama with which we were deluged. We were
+perfectly ready to knock the Kaiser's head off just to teach him that if
+he thought he was going to ride roughshod over Europe, including our new
+friends the French, and the plucky little Belgians, he was reckoning
+without old England. And in this pugnacious but perfectly
+straightforward and human attitude the nation needed no excuses because
+the nation honestly did not know that we were taking the Kaiser at a
+disadvantage, or that the Franco-Russian alliance had been just as much
+a menace to peace as the Austro-German one. But the Foreign Office knew
+that very well, and therefore began to manufacture superfluous,
+disingenuous, and rather sickening excuses at a great rate. The nation
+had a clean conscience, and was really innocent of any aggressive
+strategy: the Foreign Office was redhanded, and did not want to be found
+out. Hence its sermons.
+
+
+*Mr. H.G. Wells Hoists the Country's Flag.*
+
+It was Mr. H.G. Wells who at the critical moment spoke with the nation's
+voice. When he uttered his electric outburst of wrath against "this
+drilling, trampling foolery in the heart of Europe" he gave expression
+to the pent-up exasperation of years of smouldering revolt against swank
+and domineer, guff and bugaboo, calling itself blood and iron, and
+mailed fist, and God and conscience and anything else that sounded
+superb. Like Nietzsche, we were "fed up" with the Kaiser's imprisonments
+of democratic journalists for _Majestaetsbeleidigung_ (monarch
+disparagement), with his ancestors, and his mission, and his gospel of
+submission and obedience for poor men, and of authority, tempered by
+duelling, for rich men. The world had become sore-headed, and desired
+intensely that they who clatter the sword shall perish by the sword.
+Nobody cared twopence about treaties: indeed, it was not for us, who had
+seen the treaty of Berlin torn up by the brazen seizure of Bosnia and
+Herzegovina by Austria in 1909, and taken that lying down, as Russia
+did, to talk about the sacredness of treaties, even if the wastepaper
+baskets of the Foreign Offices were not full of torn up "scraps of
+paper," and a very good thing too; for General von Bernhardi's
+assumption that circumstances alter treaties is not a page from
+Machiavelli: it is a platitude from the law books. The man in the street
+understood little or nothing about Servia or Russia or any of the cards
+with which the diplomatists were playing their perpetual game of Beggar
+my Neighbour. We were rasped beyond endurance by Prussian Militarism and
+its contempt for us and for human happiness and common sense; and we
+just rose at it and went for it. We have set out to smash the Kaiser
+exactly as we set out to smash the Mahdi. Mr. Wells never mentioned a
+treaty. He said, in effect: "There stands the monster all freedom-loving
+men hate; and at last we are going to fight it." And the public, bored
+by the diplomatists, said: "Now you're talking!" We did not stop to ask
+our consciences whether the Prussian assumption that the dominion of the
+civilized earth belongs to German culture is really any more bumptious
+than the English assumption that the dominion of the sea belongs to
+British commerce. And in our island security we were as little able as
+ever to realize the terrible military danger of Germany's geographical
+position between France and England on her west flank and Russia on her
+east: all three leagued for her destruction; and how unreasonable it was
+to ask Germany to lose the fraction of a second (much less Sir Maurice
+de Runsen's naïve "a few days' delay") in dashing at her Western foe
+when she could obtain no pledge as to Western intentions. "We are now in
+a state of necessity; and Necessity knows no law," said the Imperial
+Chancellor in the Reichstag. "It is a matter of life and death to us,"
+said the German Minister for Foreign Affairs to our Ambassador in
+Berlin, who had suddenly developed an extraordinary sense of the
+sacredness of the Treaty of London, dated 1839, and still, as it
+happened, inviolate among the torn fragments of many subsequent and
+similar "scraps of paper." Our Ambassador seems to have been of Sir
+Maurice's opinion that there could be no such tearing hurry. The Germans
+could enter France through the line of forts between Verdun and Toul if
+they were really too flustered to wait a few days on the chance of Sir
+Edward Grey's persuasive conversation and charming character softening
+Russia and bringing Austria to conviction of sin. Thereupon the Imperial
+Chancellor, not being quite an angel, asked whether we had counted the
+cost of crossing the path of an Empire fighting for its life (for these
+Militarist statesmen do really believe that nations can be killed by
+cannon shot). That was a threat; and as we cared nothing about Germany's
+peril, and wouldn't stand being threatened any more by a Power of which
+we now had the inside grip, the fat remained in the fire, blazing more
+fiercely than ever. There was only one end possible to such a clash of
+high tempers, national egotisms, and reciprocal ignorances.
+
+
+*Delicate Position of Mr. Asquith.*
+
+It seemed a splendid chance for the Government to place itself at the
+head of the nation. But no British Government within my recollection has
+ever understood the nation. Mr. Asquith, true to the Gladstonian
+tradition (hardly just to Gladstone, by the way) that a Liberal Prime
+Minister should know nothing concerning foreign politics and care less,
+and calmly insensible to the real nature of the popular explosion, fell
+back on 1839, picking up the obvious barrister's point about the
+violation of the neutrality of Belgium, and tried the equally obvious
+barrister's claptrap about "an infamous proposal" on the jury. He
+assured us that nobody could have done more for peace than Sir Edward
+Grey, though the rush to smash the Kaiser was the most popular thing Sir
+Edward had ever done.
+
+Besides, there was another difficulty. Mr. Asquith himself, though
+serenely persuaded that he is a Liberal statesman, is, in effect, very
+much what the Kaiser would have been if he had been a Yorkshireman and a
+lawyer, instead of being only half English and the other half
+Hohenzollern, and an anointed emperor to boot. As far as popular
+liberties are concerned, history will make no distinction between Mr.
+Asquith and Metternich. He is forced to keep on the safe academic ground
+of Belgium by the very obvious consideration that if he began to talk of
+the Kaiser's imprisonments of editors and democratic agitators and so
+forth, a Homeric laughter, punctuated with cries of, "How about
+Denshawai?" "What price Tom Mann?" "Votes for women!" "Been in India
+lately?" "Make McKenna Kaiser," "Or dear old Herbert Gladstone," etc.,
+etc., would promptly spoil that pose. The plain fact is that, Militarism
+apart, Germany is in many ways more democratic in practice than England;
+indeed the Kaiser has been openly reviled as a coward by his Junkers
+because he falls short of Mr. Asquith in calm indifference to Liberal
+principles and blank ignorance of working-class sympathies, opinions,
+and interests.
+
+Mr. Asquith had also to distract public attention from the fact that
+three official members of his Government, all men of unquestioned and
+conspicuous patriotism and intellectual honesty, walked straight out
+into private life on the declaration of war. One of them, Mr. John
+Burns, did so at an enormous personal sacrifice, and has since
+maintained a grim silence far more eloquent than the famous speech
+Germany invented for him. It is not generally believed that these three
+statesmen were actuated by a passion for the violation of Belgian
+neutrality.
+
+On the whole, it was impossible for the Government to seize its grand
+chance and put itself at the head of the popular movement that responded
+to Sir Edward Grey's declaration: the very simple reason being that the
+Government does not represent the nation, and is in its sympathies just
+as much a Junker government as the Kaiser's. And so, what the Government
+cannot do has to be done by unofficial persons with clean and brilliant
+anti-Junker records like Mr. Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Neil Lyons,
+and Mr. Jerome K. Jerome. Neither Mr. Asquith nor Sir Edward Grey can
+grasp, as these real spokesmen of their time do, the fact that we just
+simply want to put an end to Potsdamnation, both at home and abroad.
+Both of them probably think Potsdam a very fine and enviable
+institution, and want England to out-Potsdam Potsdam and to monopolize
+the command of the seas; a monstrous aspiration. We, I take it, want to
+guarantee that command of the sea which is the common heritage of
+mankind to the tiniest State and the humblest fisherman that depends on
+the sea for a livelihood. We want the North Sea to be as safe for
+everybody, English or German, as Portland Place.
+
+
+*The Need for Recrimination.*
+
+And now somebody who would rather I had not said all this (having
+probably talked dreadful nonsense about Belgium and so forth for a month
+past) is sure to ask: "Why all this recrimination? What is done is done.
+Is it not now the duty of every Englishman to sink all differences in
+the face of the common peril?" etc., etc. To all such prayers to be
+shielded from that terrible thing, the truth, I must reply that history
+consists mainly of recrimination, and that I am writing history because
+an accurate knowledge of what has occurred is not only indispensable to
+any sort of reasonable behaviour on our part in the face of Europe when
+the inevitable day of settlement comes, but because it has a practical
+bearing on the most perilously urgent and immediate business before us:
+the business of the appeal to the nation for recruits and for enormous
+sums of money. It has to decide the question whether that appeal shall
+be addressed frankly to our love of freedom, and our tradition (none the
+less noble and moving because it is so hard to reconcile with the
+diplomatic facts) that England is a guardian of the world's liberty, and
+not to bad law about an obsolete treaty, and cant about the diabolical
+personal disposition of the Kaiser, and the wounded propriety of a
+peace-loving England, and all the rest of the slosh and tosh that has
+been making John Bull sick for months past. No doubt at first, when we
+were all clasping one another's hands very hard and begging one another
+not to be afraid, almost anything was excusable. Even the war notes of
+Mr. Garvin, which stood out as the notes of a gentleman amid a welter of
+scurrilous rubbish and a rather blackguardly _Punch_ cartoon mocking the
+agony of Berlin (_Punch_ having turned its non-interventionist coat very
+promptly), had sometimes to run: "We know absolutely nothing of what is
+happening at the front, except that the heroism of the British troops
+will thrill the ages to the last syllable of recorded time," or words to
+that effect. But now it is time to pull ourselves together; to feel our
+muscle; to realize the value of our strength and pluck; and to tell the
+truth unashamed like men of courage and character, not to shirk it like
+the official apologists of a Foreign Office plot.
+
+
+*What Germany Should Have Done.*
+
+And first, as I despise critics who put people in the wrong without
+being able to set them right, I shall, before I go any further with my
+criticism of our official position, do the Government and the Foreign
+Office the service of finding a correct official position for them; for
+I admit that the popular position, though sound as far as it goes, is
+too crude for official use. This correct official position can be found
+only by considering what Germany should have done, and might have done
+had she not been, like our own Junkers, so fascinated by the Militarist
+craze, and obsessed by the chronic Militarist panic, that she was "in
+too great hurry to bid the devil good morning." The matter is simple
+enough: she should have entrusted the security of her western frontier
+to the public opinion of the west of Europe and to America, and fought
+Russia, if attacked, with her rear not otherwise defended. The
+Militarist theory is that we, France and England, would have immediately
+sprung at her from behind; but that is just how the Militarist theory
+gets its votaries into trouble by assuming that Europe is a chess board.
+Europe is not a chess board; but a populous continent in which only a
+very few people are engaged in military chess; and even those few have
+many other things to consider besides capturing their adversary's king.
+Not only would it have been impossible for England to have attacked
+Germany under such circumstances; but if France had done so England
+could not have assisted her, and might even have been compelled by
+public opinion to intervene by way of a joint protest from England and
+America, or even by arms, on her behalf if she were murderously pressed
+on both flanks. Even our Militarists and diplomatists would have had
+reasons for such an intervention. An aggressive Franco-Russian hegemony,
+if it crushed Germany, would be quite as disagreeable to us as a German
+one. Thus Germany would at worst have been fighting Russia and France
+with the sympathy of all the other Powers, and a chance of active
+assistance from some of them, especially those who share her hostility
+to the Russian Government. Had France not attacked her--and though I am
+as ignorant of the terms of the Franco-Russian alliance as Sir Edward
+Grey is strangely content to be, I cannot see how the French Government
+could have justified to its own people a fearfully dangerous attack on
+Germany had Russia been the aggressor--Germany would have secured fair
+play for her fight with Russia. But even the fight with Russia was not
+inevitable. The ultimatum to Servia was the escapade of a dotard: a
+worse crime than the assassination that provoked it. There is no reason
+to doubt the conclusion in Sir Maurice de Bunsen's despatch (No. 161)
+that it could have been got over, and that Russia and Austria would have
+thought better of fighting and come to terms. Peace was really on the
+cards; and the sane game was to play for it.
+
+
+*The Achilles Heel of Militarism.*
+
+Instead, Germany flew at France's throat, and by incidentally invading
+Belgium gave us the excuse our Militarists wanted to attack her with the
+full sympathy of the nation. Why did she do this stupid thing? Not
+because of the counsels of General von Bernhardi. On the contrary, he
+had warned her expressly against allowing herself to be caught between
+Russia and a Franco-British combination until she had formed a
+counterbalancing alliance with America, Italy, and Turkey. And he had
+most certainly not encouraged her to depend on England sparing her: on
+the contrary, he could not sufficiently admire the wily ruthlessness
+with which England watches her opportunity and springs at her foe when
+the foe is down. (He little knew, poor man, how much he was flattering
+our capacity for Realpolitik!) But he had reckoned without his creed's
+fatal and fundamental weakness, which is, that as Junker-Militarism
+promotes only stupid people and snobs, and suppresses genuine realists
+as if they were snakes, it always turns out when a crisis arrives that
+"the silly people don't know their own silly business." The Kaiser and
+his ministers made an appalling mess of their job. They were inflamed by
+Bernhardi; but they did not understand him. They swallowed his flattery,
+but did not take in his strategy or his warnings. They knew that when
+the moment came to face the Franco-Russian alliance, they were to make a
+magnificient dash at France and sweep her pieces off the great chess
+board before the Russians had time to mobilize; and then return and
+crush Russia, leaving the conquest of England for another day. This was
+honestly as much as their heads could hold at one time; and they were
+helplessly unable to consider whether the other conditions postulated by
+Bernhardi were present, or indeed, in the excitement of their
+schoolboyish imaginations, to remember whether he had postulated any at
+all. And so they made their dash and put themselves in the wrong at
+every point morally, besides making victory humanly impossible for
+themselves militarily. That is the nemesis of Militarism: the Militarist
+is thrown into a big game which he is too stupid to be able to play
+successfully. Philip of Spain tried it 300 years ago; and the ruin he
+brought on his empire has lasted to this day. He was so stupid that
+though he believed himself to be the chosen instrument of God (as sure a
+sign of a hopeless fool in a man who cannot see that every other man is
+equally an instrument of that Power as it is a guarantee of wisdom and
+goodwill in the man who respects his neighbor as himself) he attempted
+to fight Drake on the assumption that a cannon was a weapon that no real
+gentleman and good Catholic would condescend to handle. Louis XIV. tried
+again two centuries ago, and, being a more frivolous fool, got beaten by
+Marlborough and sent his great-grandson from the throne to the
+guillotine. Napoleon tried it 100 years ago. He was more dangerous,
+because he had prodigious personal ability and technical military skill;
+and he started with the magnificent credential of the French Revolution.
+All that carried him farther than the Spanish bigot or the French fop;
+but he, too, accreted fools and knaves, and ended defeated in St. Helena
+after pandering for twenty years to the appetite of idiots for glory and
+bloodshed; waging war as "a great game"; and finding in a field strewn
+with corpses "un beau spectacle." In short, as strong a magnet to fools
+as the others, though so much abler.
+
+
+*Our Own True Position*.
+
+Now comes the question, in what position did this result of a mad theory
+and a hopelessly incompetent application of it on the part of Potsdam
+place our own Government? It left us quite clearly in the position of
+the responsible policeman of the west. There was nobody else in Europe
+strong enough to chain "the mad dog." Belgium and Holland, Norway and
+Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland could hardly have been expected to take
+that duty on themselves, even if Norway and Sweden had not good reason
+to be anti-Russian, and the Dutch capitalists were not half convinced
+that their commercial prosperity would be greater under German than
+under native rule. It will not be contended that Spain could have done
+anything; and as to Italy, it was doubtful whether she did not consider
+herself still a member of the Triple Alliance. It was evidently England
+or nobody. For England to have refrained, from hurling herself into the
+fray, horse, foot, and artillery, was impossible from every point of
+view. From the democratic point of view it would have meant an
+acceptance of the pretension of which Potsdam, by attacking the French
+Republic, had made itself the champion: that is, the pretension of the
+Junker class to dispose of the world on Militarist lines at the expense
+of the lives and limbs of the masses. From the international Socialist
+point of view, it would have been the acceptance of the extreme
+nationalist view that the people of other countries are foreigners, and
+that it does not concern us if they choose to cut one another's throats.
+Our Militarist Junkers cried "If we let Germany conquer France it will
+be our turn next." Our romantic Junkers added "and serve us right too:
+what man will pity us when the hour strikes for us, if we skulk now?"
+Even the wise, who loathe war, and regard it as such a dishonour and
+disgrace in itself that all its laurels cannot hide its brand of Cain,
+had to admit that police duty is necessary and that war must be made on
+such war as the Germans had made by attacking France in an avowed
+attempt to substitute a hegemony of cannon for the comity of nations.
+There was no alternative. Had the Foreign Office been the International
+Socialist Bureau, had Sir Edward Grey been Jaures, had Mr. Ramsay
+MacDonald been Prime Minister, had Russia been Germany's ally instead of
+ours, the result would still have been the same: we must have drawn the
+sword to save France and smash Potsdam as we smashed and always must
+smash Philip, Louis, Napoleon, _et hoc genus omne_.
+
+The case for our action is thus as complete as any _casus belli_ is ever
+likely to be. In fact its double character as both a democratic and
+military (if not Militarist) case makes it too complete; for it enables
+our Junkers to claim it entirely for themselves, and to fake it with
+pseudo-legal justifications which destroy nine-tenths of our credit, the
+military and legal cases being hardly a tenth of the whole: indeed, they
+would not by themselves justify the slaughter of a single Pomeranian
+grenadier. For instance, take the Militarist view that we must fight
+Potsdam because if the Kaiser is victorious, it will be our turn next!
+Well: are we not prepared to fight always when our turn comes? Why
+should not we also depend on our navy, on the extreme improbability of
+Germany, however triumphant, making two such terrible calls on her
+people in the same generation as a war involves, on the sympathy of the
+defeated, and on the support of American and European public opinion
+when our turn comes, if there is nothing at stake now but the difference
+between defeat and victory in an otherwise indifferent military
+campaign? If the welfare of the world does not suffer any more by an
+English than by a German defeat who cares whether we are defeated or
+not? As mere competitors in a race of armaments and an Olympic game
+conducted with ball cartridge, or as plaintiffs in a technical case of
+international law (already decided against us in 1870, by the way, when
+Gladstone had to resort to a new treaty made _ad hoc_ and lapsing at the
+end of the war) we might as well be beaten as not, for all the harm that
+will ensue to anyone but ourselves, or even to ourselves apart from our
+national vanity. It is as the special constables of European life that
+we are important, and can send our men to the trenches with the
+assurance that they are fighting in a worthy cause. In short, the Junker
+case is not worth twopence: the Democratic case, the Socialist case, the
+International case is worth all it threatens to cost.
+
+
+*The German Defence to Our Indictment.*
+
+What is the German reply to this case? Or rather, how would the Germans
+reply to it if their official Militarist and Kaiserist panjandrums had
+the wit to find the effective reply? Undoubtedly they would say that our
+Social-Democratic professions are all very fine, but that our conversion
+to them is suspiciously sudden and recent. They would remark that it is
+a little difficult for a nation in deadly peril to trust its existence
+to a foreign public opinion which has not only never been expressed by
+the people who really control England's foreign policy, but is flatly
+opposed to all their known views and prejudices. They would ask why,
+instead of making an _Entente_ with France and Russia and refusing to
+give Germany any assurance concerning its object except that we would
+not pledge ourselves to remain neutral if the Franco-Russian _Entente_
+fell on Germany, we did not say straight out in 1912 (when they put the
+question flatly to us), and again last July when Sazonoff urged us so
+strongly to shew our hand, that if Germany attacked France we should
+fight her, Russia or no Russia (a far less irritating and provocative
+attitude), although we knew full well that an attack on France through
+Belgium would be part of the German program if the Russian peril became
+acute. They would point out that if our own Secretary for Foreign
+Affairs openly disclaimed any knowledge of the terms of the
+Franco-Russian alliance, it was hard for a German to believe that they
+were wholly fit for publication. In short, they would say "If you were
+so jolly wise and well intentioned before the event, why did not your
+Foreign Minister and your ambassadors in Berlin and Vienna and St.
+Petersburg--we beg pardon, Petrograd--invite us to keep the peace and
+rely on western public opinion instead of refusing us every pledge
+except the hostile one to co-operate with France against us in the North
+Sea, and making it only too plain to us that your policy was a Junker
+policy as much as ours, and that we had nothing to hope from your
+goodwill? What evidence had we that you were playing any other game than
+this Militarist chess of our own, which you now so piously renounce, but
+which none of you except a handful of Socialists whom you despise and
+Syndicalists whom you imprison on Militarist pretexts has opposed for
+years past, though it has been all over your Militarist anti-German
+platforms and papers and magazines? Are your Social-Democratic
+principles sincere, or are they only a dagger you keep up your sleeve to
+stab us in the back when our two most formidable foes are trying to
+garotte us? If so, where does your moral superiority come in, hypocrites
+that you are? If not, why, we repeat, did you not make them known to all
+the world, instead of making an ambush for us by your senseless
+silence?"
+
+I see no reply to that except a frank confession that we did not know
+our own minds; that we came to a knowledge of them only when Germany's
+attack on France forced us to make them up at last; that though
+doubtless a chronic state of perfect lucidity and long prevision on our
+part would have been highly convenient, yet there is a good deal to be
+said for the policy of not fording a stream until you come to it; and
+that in any case we must entirely decline to admit that we are more
+likely than other people to do the wrong thing when circumstances at
+last oblige us to think and act. Also that the discussion is idle on the
+shewing of the German case itself; for whether the Germans assumed us to
+be unscrupulous Militarists or conscientious Democrats they were bound
+to come to the same conclusion: namely, that we should attack them if
+they attacked France; consequently their assumption that we would not
+interfere must have been based on the belief that we are simply
+"contemptible," which is the sort of mistake people have to pay for in
+this wicked world.
+
+On the whole, we can hector our way in the Prussian manner out of that
+discussion well enough, provided we hold our own in the field. But the
+Prussian manner hardly satisfies the conscience. True, the fact that our
+diplomatists were not able to discover the right course for Germany does
+not excuse Germany for being unable to find it for herself. Not that it
+was more her business than ours: it was a European question, and should
+have been solved by the united counsels of all the ambassadors and
+Foreign Offices and chanceries. Indeed it could not have been stably
+solved without certain assurances from them. But it was, to say the
+least, as much Germany's business as anyone else's, and terribly urgent
+for her: "a matter of life and death," the Imperial Chancellor thought.
+Still, it is not for us to claim moral superiority to Germany. It was
+for us a matter of the life and death of many Englishmen; and these
+Englishmen are dead because our diplomatists were as blind as the
+Prussians. The war is a failure for secret Junker diplomacy, ours no
+less than the enemy's. Those of us who have still to die must be
+inspired, not by devotion to the diplomatists, but, like the Socialist
+hero of old on the barricade, by the vision of "human solidarity." And
+if he purchases victory for that holy cause with his blood, I submit
+that we cannot decently allow the Foreign Office to hang up his martyr's
+palm over the War Office Mantelpiece.
+
+
+*The First Penalty of Disingenuousness.*
+
+The Foreign Office, however, can at lease shift its ground, and declare
+for the good cause instead of belittling it with quibbling excuses. For
+see what the first effect of the nonsense about Belgium has been! It
+carried with it the inevitable conclusion that when the last German was
+cleared off Belgian soil, peace-loving England, her reluctant work in
+this shocking war done, would calmly retire from the conflict, and leave
+her Allies to finish the deal with Potsdam. Accordingly, after Mr.
+Asquith's oration at the Mansion House, the Allies very properly
+insisted on our signing a solemn treaty between the parties that they
+must all stand together to the very end. A pitifully thin attempt has
+been made to represent that the mistrusted party was France, and that
+the Kaiser was trying to buy her off. All one can say to that is that
+the people who believe that any French Government dare face the French
+people now with anything less than Alsace and Lorraine as the price of
+peace, or that an undefeated and indeed masterfully advancing German
+Kaiser (as he seemed then) dare offer France such a price, would believe
+anything. Of course we had to sign; but if the Prime Minister had not
+been prevented by his own past from taking the popular line, we should
+not have been suspected of a possible backing-out when the demands of
+our sanctimoniousness were satisfied. He would have known that we are
+not vindicating a treaty which by accident remains among the fragments
+of treaties of Paris, of Prague, of Berlin, of all sorts of places and
+dates, as the only European treaty that has hitherto escaped flat
+violation: we are supporting the war as a war on war, on military
+coercion, on domineering, on bullying, on brute force, on military law,
+on caste insolence, on what Mrs. Fawcett called insensable deviltry
+(only to find the papers explaining apologetically that she, as a lady,
+had of course been alluding to war made by foreigners, not by England).
+Some of us, remembering the things we have ourselves said and done, may
+doubt whether Satan can cast out Satan; but as the job is not exactly
+one for an unfallen angel, we may as well let him have a try.
+
+
+*The Blank Cheque.*
+
+In the meantime behold us again hopelessly outwitted by Eastern
+diplomacy as a direct consequence of this ill-starred outburst of
+hypocrisy about treaties! Everybody has said over and over again that
+this war is the most tremendous war ever waged. Nobody has said that
+this new treaty is the most tremendous blank cheque we have ever been
+forced to sign by our Parliamentary party trick of striking moral
+attitudes. It is true that Mr. J.A. Hobson realised the situation at
+once, and was allowed to utter a little croak in a corner; but where was
+the trumpet note of warning that should have rung throughout the whole
+Press? Just consider what the blank cheque means. France's draft on it
+may stop at the cost of recovering Alsace and Lorraine. We shall have to
+be content with a few scraps of German colony and the heavy-weight
+championship. But Russia? When will she say "Hold! Enough!" Suppose she
+wants not only Poland, but Baltic Prussia? Suppose she wants
+Constantinople as her port of access to the unfrozen seas, in addition
+to the dismemberment of Austria? Suppose she has the brilliant idea of
+annexing all Prussia, for which there is really something to be said by
+ethnographical map-makers, Militarist madmen, and Pan-Slavist
+megalomaniacs? It may be a reasonable order; but it is a large one; and
+the fact that we should have been committed to it without the knowledge
+of Parliament, without discussion, without warning, without any sort of
+appeal to public opinion or democratic sanction, by a stroke of Sir
+Edward Grey's pen within five weeks of his having committed us in the
+same fashion to an appalling European war, shews how completely the
+Foreign Office has thrown away all pretence of being any less absolute
+than the Kaiser himself. It simply offers _carte blanche_ to the armies
+of the Allies without a word to the nation until the cheque is signed.
+The only limit there is to the obligation is the certainty that the
+cheque will be dishonoured the moment the draft on it becomes too heavy.
+And that may furnish a virtuous pretext for another war between the
+Allies themselves. In any case no treaty can save each Ally from the
+brute necessity of surrendering and paying up if beaten, whether the
+defeat is shared by the others or not. Did I not say that the sooner we
+made up our minds to the terms of the treaty of peace, so that we might
+know what we were fighting for, and how far we were bound to go, the
+better? Instead of which we sign a ridiculous "scrap of paper" to save
+ourselves the intolerable fatigue of thought.
+
+
+*Belgium Crucified Between the European Powers.*
+
+And now, before I leave the subject of Belgium, what have we done for
+Belgium? Have we saved her soil from invasion? Were we at her side with
+half a million men when the avalanche fell on her? Or were we safe in
+our own country praising her heroism in paragraphs which all contrived
+to convey an idea that the Belgian soldier is about four feet high, but
+immensely plucky for his size? Alas, when the Belgian soldier cried:
+"Where are the English?" the reply was "a mass of concrete as large as a
+big room," blown into the air by a German siege gun, falling back and
+crushing him into the earth we had not succeeded in saving from the
+worst of the horrors of war. We have not protected Belgium: Belgium has
+protected us at the cost of being conquered by Germany. It is now our
+sacred duty to drive the Germans out of Belgium. Meanwhile we might at
+least rescue her refugees by a generous grant of public money from the
+caprices of private charity. We need not press our offer to lend her
+money: German capitalists will do that for her with the greatest
+pleasure when the war is over. I think the Government realizes that now;
+for I note the after-thought that a loan from us need not bear interest.
+
+Now that we begin to see where we really are, what practical morals can
+we draw?
+
+
+*Unpreparedness the Price of Secrecy.*
+
+First, that our autocratic foreign policy, in which the Secretary for
+Foreign Affairs is always a Junker, and makes war and concludes war
+without consulting the nation, or confiding in it, or even refraining
+from deceiving it as to his intentions, leads inevitably to a disastrous
+combination of war and unpreparedness for war. Wars are planned which
+require huge expeditionary armies trained and equipped for war. But as
+such preparation could not be concealed from the public, it is simply
+deferred until the war is actually declared and begun, at the most
+frightful risk of such an annihilation of our little peace army as we
+escaped by the skin of our teeth at Mons and Cambrai. The military
+experts tell us that it takes four months to make an infantry and six to
+make a cavalry soldier. And our way of getting an army able to fight the
+German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army,
+and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us
+into wholesale enlistment, voluntary or (better still from the Junker
+point of view) compulsory. It seems to me that a nation which tolerates
+such insensate methods and outrageous risks must shortly perish from
+sheer lunacy. And it is all pure superstition: the retaining of the
+methods of Edward the First in the reign of George the Fifth. I
+therefore suggest that the first lesson of the war is that the Secretary
+of State for Foreign Affairs be reduced to the level of a simple Prime
+Minister, or even of a constitutional monarch, powerless to fire a
+single shot or sign a treaty without the authority of the House of
+Commons, all diplomatic business being conducted in a blaze of
+publicity, and the present regulation which exacts the qualification of
+a private income of at least £400 a year for a position in the
+Diplomatic Service replaced by a new regulation that at least half the
+staff shall consist of persons who have never dined out at the houses of
+hosts of higher rank than unfashionable solicitors or doctors.
+
+In these recommendations I am not forgetting that an effective check on
+diplomacy is not easy to devise, and that high personal character and
+class disinterestedness (the latter at present unattainable) on the part
+of our diplomatists will be as vital as ever. I well know that diplomacy
+is carried on at present not only by official correspondence meant for
+possible publication and subject to an inspection which is in some
+degree a responsible inspection, but by private letters which the King
+himself has no right to read. I know that even in the United States,
+where treaties and declarations of war must be made by Parliament, it is
+nevertheless possible for the President to bring about a situation in
+which Congress, like our House of Commons in the present instance, has
+no alternative but to declare war. But though complete security is
+impracticable, it does not follow that no precautions should be taken,
+or that a democratic tradition is no safer than a feudal tradition. A
+far graver doubt is raised by the susceptibility of the masses to war
+fever, and the appalling danger of a daily deluge of cheap newspapers
+written by nameless men and women whose scandalously low payment is a
+guarantee of their ignorance and their servility to the financial
+department, controlled by a moneyed class which not only curries favour
+with the military caste for social reasons, but has large direct
+interests in war as a method of raising the price of money, the only
+commodity the moneyed class has to sell. But I am quite unable to see
+that our Junkers are less susceptible to the influence of the Press than
+the people educated by public elementary schools. On the contrary, our
+Democrats are more fool-proof than our Plutocrats; and the ravings our
+Junkers send to the papers for nothing in war time would be dear at a
+halfpenny a line. Plutocracy makes for war because it offers prizes to
+Plutocrats: Socialism makes for peace because the interests it serves
+are international. So, as the Socialist side is the democratic side, we
+had better democratize our diplomacy if we desire peace.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+*RECRUITING.*
+
+
+And now as to the question of recruiting. This is pressing, because it
+is not enough for the Allies to win: we and not Russia must be the
+decisive factor in the victory, or Germany will not be fairly beaten,
+and we shall be only rescued _proteges_ of Russia instead of the
+saviours of Western Europe. We must have the best army in Europe; and we
+shall not get it under existing arrangements. We are passing out of the
+first phase of the war fever, in which men flock to the colours by
+instinct, by romantic desire for adventure, by the determination not, as
+Wagner put it, "to let their lives be governed by fear of the end," by
+simple destitution through unemployment, by rancour and pugnacity
+excited by the inventions of the Press, by a sense of duty inculcated in
+platform orations which would not stand half an hour's discussion, by
+the incitements and taunts of elderly non-combatants and maidens with a
+taste for mischief, and by the verses of poets jumping at the cheapest
+chance in their underpaid profession. The difficulty begins when all the
+men susceptible to these inducements are enlisted, and we have to draw
+on the solid, sceptical, sensible residuum who know the value of their
+lives and services and liberties, and will not give them except on
+substantial and honourable conditions. These Ironsides know that it is
+one thing to fight for your country, and quite another to let your wife
+and children starve to save our rich idlers from a rise in the supertax.
+They also know that it is one thing to wipe out the Prussian drill
+sergeant and snob officer as the enemies of manhood and honour, and
+another to let that sacred mission be made an excuse for subjecting us
+to exactly the same tyranny in England. They have not forgotten the "On
+the knee" episode, nor the floggings in our military prisons, nor the
+scandalous imprisonment of Tom Mann, nor the warnings as to military law
+and barrack life contained even in Robert Blatchford's testimony that
+the army made a man of him.
+
+
+*What the Labour Party Owes to the Army.*
+
+And here is where the Labour Party should come in. The Labour Party's
+business is to abolish the Militarist soldier, who is only a quaint
+survival of the King's footman (himself a still quainter survival of the
+medieval baron's retainer), and substitute for him a trained combatant
+with full civil rights, receiving the Trade Union rate of wages proper
+to a skilled worker at a dangerous trade. It must co-operate with the
+Trade Unions in fixing this moral minimum wage for the citizen soldier,
+and in obtaining for him a guarantee that the wage shall continue until
+he obtains civil employment on standard terms at the conclusion of the
+war. It must make impossible the scandal of a monstrously rich peer (his
+riches, the automatic result of ground land-landlordism, having "no
+damned nonsense of merit about them") proclaiming the official weekly
+allowance for the child of the British soldier in the trenches. That
+allowance is eighteenpence, being less than one third of the standard
+allowance for an illegitimate child under an affiliation order. And the
+Labour Party must deprive the German bullet of its present double effect
+in killing an Englishman in France and simultaneously reducing his
+widow's subsistence from a guinea a week to five shillings. Until this
+is done we are simply provoking Providence to destroy us.
+
+I wish I could say that it is hardly necessary to add that Trade
+Unionism must be instituted in the Army, so that there shall be
+accredited secretaries in the field to act as a competent medium of
+communication between the men on service and the political
+representatives of their class at the War Office (for I shall propose
+this representative innovation presently). It will shock our colonels;
+but I know of no bodies of men for whom repeated and violent shocking is
+more needed and more likely to prove salutary than the regimental masses
+of the British army. One rather pleasant shock in store for them is the
+discovery that an officer and a gentleman, whose sole professional
+interest is the honour and welfare of his country, and who is bound to
+the mystical equality of life-and-death duty for all alike, will get on
+much more easily with a Trade Union secretary than a commercial employer
+whose aim is simply private profit and who regards every penny added to
+the wages of his employees as a penny taken off his own income. Howbeit,
+whether the colonels like it or not--that is, whether they have become
+accustomed to it or not--it has to come, and its protection from Junker
+prejudice is another duty of the Labour Party. The Party as a purely
+political body must demand that the defender of his country shall retain
+his full civil rights unimpaired; that, the unnecessary, mischievous,
+dishonourable and tyrannical slave code called military law, which at
+its most savagely stern point produced only Wellington's complaint that
+"it is impossible to get a command obeyed in the British Army," be
+carted away to the rubbish heap of exploded superstitions; and that if
+Englishmen are not to be allowed to serve their country in the field as
+freely as they do in the numerous civil industries in which neglect and
+indiscipline are as dangerous as they are in war, their leaders and
+Parliamentary representatives will not recommend them to serve at all.
+In wartime these things may not matter: discipline either goes by the
+board or keeps itself under the pressure of the enemy's cannon; and
+bullying sergeants and insolent officers have something else to do than
+to provoke men they dislike into striking them and then reporting them
+for two years' hard labour without trial by jury. In battle such
+officers are between two fires. But soldiers are not always, or even
+often, at war; and the dishonour of abdicating dearly-bought rights and
+liberties is a stain both on war and peace. Now is the time to get rid
+of that stain. If any officer cannot command men without it, as
+civilians and police inspectors do, that officer has mistaken his
+profession and had better come home.
+
+
+*Obsolete Tests in the Army.*
+
+Another matter needs to be dealt with at the same time. There are
+immense numbers of atheists in this country; and though most of them,
+like the Kaiser, regard themselves as devout Christians, the best are
+intellectually honest enough to object to profess beliefs they do not
+hold, especially in the solemn act of dedicating themselves to death in
+the service of their country. Army form E 501 A (September, 1912)
+secured to these the
+
+[Illustration: JOHN GALSWORTHY. (_Photo by E.O. Hoppe_.) _See Page_
+102]
+
+[Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING _(Photo by E.O. Hoppe_.) _See Page_ 106]
+
+benefit of the Bradlaugh Affirmation Act of 1888, as the enlisting
+soldier said simply "I, So and So, do make Oath, &c." But recruits are
+now confronted with another form (E 501, June, 1914) running "I, So and
+So, swear by Almighty God, &c." On September 1st, at Lord Kitchener's
+call, a civil servant obtained leave to enlist and had the oath put to
+him, in this form by the attesting officer. He offered to swear in the
+1912 form. This was refused; and we accordingly lost a recruit of just
+that sturdily conscientious temper which has made the most formidable
+soldiers known to history. I am bound to add, however, that the
+attesting officer, on being told that the oath would be a blasphemous
+farce to the conscience of the recruit, made no difficulty about that,
+and was quite willing to accept him if he, on his part, would oblige by
+professing what he did not believe. Thus a Ghoorka's religious
+conscience is respected: an Englishman's is insulted and outraged.
+
+But, indeed, all these oaths are obstructive and useless superstitions.
+No recruit will hesitate to pledge his word of honour to fight to the
+death for his country or for a cause with which he sympathizes; and that
+is all we require. There is no need to drag in Almighty God and no need
+to drag in the King. Many an Irishman, many a colonial Republican, many
+an American volunteer who would fight against the Prussian monarchy
+shoulder to shoulder with the French Republicans with a will, would
+rather not pretend to do it out of devotion to the British throne. To
+vanquish Prussia in this war we need the active aid or the sympathy of
+every Republican in the world. America, for instance, sympathizes with
+England, but classes the King with the Kaiser as an obsolete
+institution. Besides, even from the courtly point of view the situation
+is a delicate one. Why emphasize the fact that, formally speaking, the
+war is between two grandsons of Albert the Good, that thoroughbred
+German whose London monument is so much grander than Cromwell's?
+
+The Labour Party should also set its face firmly against the abandonment
+of Red Cross work and finance, or the support of soldiers' families, or
+the patrolling of the streets, to amateurs who regard the war as a
+wholesome patriotic exercise, or as the latest amusement in the way of
+charity bazaars, or as a fountain of self-righteousness. Civil
+volunteering is needed urgently enough: one of the difficulties of war
+is that it creates in certain departments a demand so abnormal that no
+peace establishment can cope with it. But the volunteers should be
+disciplined and paid: we are not so poor that we need spunge on anyone.
+And in hospital and medical service war ought not at present to cost
+more than peace would if the victims of our commercial system were
+properly tended, and our Public Health service adequately extended and
+manned. We should therefore treat our Red Cross department as if it were
+destined to become a permanent service. No charity and no amateur
+anarchy and incompetence should be tolerated. As to allowing that
+admirable detective agency for the defence of the West End against
+begging letter writers, the Charity Organization Society to touch the
+soldier's home, the very suggestion is an outrage. The C.O.S., the Poor
+Law, and the charitable amateur, whether of the patronizing or prying or
+gushing variety, must be kept as far from the army and its folk as if
+they were German spies. The business of our fashionable amateurs is to
+pay Income Tax and Supertax. This time they will have to pay through the
+nose, vigorously wrung for that purpose by the House of Commons; so they
+had better set their own houses in order and leave the business of the
+war to be officially and responsibly dealt with and paid for at full
+standard rates.
+
+
+*Wanted: Labour Representation in the War Office.*
+
+But parliamentary activity is not sufficient. There must be a more
+direct contact between representative Labour and the Army, because
+Parliament can only remedy grievances, and that not before years of
+delay and agitation elapse. Even then the grievances are not dealt with
+on their merits; for under our party system, which is the most
+abominable engine for the perversion and final destruction of all
+political conscience ever devized by man, the House of Commons never
+votes on any question but whether the Government shall remain in office
+or give the Opposition a turn, no matter what the pretext for the
+division may be. Only in such emergencies as the present, when the
+Government is forced to beg the Labour members to help them to recruit,
+is there a chance of making reasonable conditions for the soldier.
+
+
+*The Four Inoculations.*
+
+It is therefore necessary that the War Office should have working class
+representatives on all committees and councils which issue notices to
+the public. There is at present, it would seem, not a single person in
+authority there who has the faintest notion of what the immense majority
+of possible British recruits are thinking about. The results have been
+beyond description ludicrous and dangerous. Every proclamation is
+urgently worded so as to reassure recruits with £5,000 a year and repel
+recruits with a pound a week. On the very day when the popular Lord
+Kitchener, dropping even the _et rex meus_ of Wolsey, frankly asked the
+nation for 100,000 men for his army, and when it was a matter of life
+and death that every encouragement should be held out to working men to
+enlist, the War Office decided that this was the psychological moment to
+remind everybody that soldiers on active service often die of typhoid
+fever, and to press inoculation on the recruits pending the officially
+longed-for hour when Sir Almroth Wright's demand for compulsion can be
+complied with. I say nothing here about the efficacy of inoculation.
+Efficacious or not, Sir Almroth Wright himself bases his demand for
+compulsion on the ground that it is hopeless to expect the whole army to
+submit to it voluntarily. That being so, it seems to me that when men
+are hesitating on the threshold of the recruiting station, only a German
+spy or our War Office (always worth ten thousand men to our enemies)
+would seize that moment to catch the nervous postulant by the sleeve and
+say, "Have you thought of the danger of dysentery?" The fact that the
+working class forced the Government, very much against its doctor-ridden
+will, to abolish compulsory vaccination, shews the extent to which its
+households loathe and dread these vaccines (so called, but totally
+unconnected with cows or Jenner) which, as they are continually reminded
+by energetic anti-inoculation propagandists in largely circulated
+journals and pamphlets, not to mention ghastly photographs of disfigured
+children, sometimes produce worse effects than the diseases they are
+supposed to prevent. Indifferent or careless recruits are easily induced
+to submit to inoculation by little privileges during the ensuing
+indisposition or by small money bribes; and careful ones are
+proselytized by Sir Almroth's statistics; but on the whole both
+inoculation and amateur medical statistics are regarded with suspicion
+by the poor; and the fact that revaccination is compulsory in the
+regular army, and that the moral pressure applied to secure both typhoid
+inoculation and vaccination both in the regular army and the
+Territorials is such as only a few stalwarts are able to resist, is
+deeply resented. At present the inoculation mania has reached the pitch
+of proposing no less than four separate inoculations: revaccination,
+typhoid, cholera, and--Sir Almroth's last staggerer--inoculation against
+wounds! When the War Office and its medical advisers have been
+successfully inoculated against political lunacy, it will be time enough
+to discuss such extravagances. Meanwhile, the sooner the War Office
+issues a proclamation that no recruit will be either compelled or
+importuned to submit to any sort of inoculation whatever against his
+will, the better for the recruiting, and the worse for the enemy.
+
+
+*The War Office Bait of Starvation.*
+
+But this blunder was a joke compared to the next exploit of the War
+Office. It suddenly began to placard the country with frantic assurances
+to its five-thousand-a-year friends that they would be "discharged with
+all possible speed THE MINUTE THE WAR IS OVER." Only considerations of
+space restrained them, I presume, from adding "LAWN TENNIS, SHOOTING,
+AND ALL THE DELIGHTS OF FASHIONABLE LIFE CAN BE RESUMED IMMEDIATELY ON
+THE FIRING OF THE LAST SHOT." Now what does this mean to the wage
+worker? Simply that the moment he is no longer wanted in the trenches he
+will be flung back into the labour market to sink or swim without an
+hour's respite. If we had had a Labour representative or two to help in
+drawing up these silly placards--I am almost tempted to say if we had
+had any human being of any class with half the brains of a rabbit
+there--the placards would have contained a solemn promise that no single
+man should be discharged at the conclusion of the war, save at his own
+request, until a job had been found for him in civil life. I ask the
+heavens, with a shudder, do these class-blinded people in authority
+really intend to take a million men out of their employment; turn them
+into soldiers; and then at one blow hurl them back, utterly unprovided
+for, into the streets?
+
+But a War Office capable of placarding Lord Roberts's declaration that
+the men who are enlisting are doing "what all able-bodied men in the
+kingdom should do" is clearly ignorant enough for anything. I do not
+blame Lord Roberts for his oratorical flourish: we have all said things
+just as absurd on the platform in moments of enthusiasm. But the
+officials who reproduced it in cold blood would have us believe that
+soldiers live on air; that ammunition drops from heaven like manna; and
+that an army could hold the field for twenty-four hours without the
+support of a still more numerous body of civilians working hard to
+support it. Sane men gasp at such placards and ask angrily, "What sort
+of fools do you take us for?" I have in my hand a copy of _The Torquay
+Times_ containing a hospitable invitation to soldiers' wives to call at
+the War Office, Whitehall, S.W., if they desire "assistance and
+explanation of their case." The return fare from Torquay to London is
+thirty shillings and sixpence third class; but the War Office no doubt
+assumes that all soldiers' wives keep motor cars. Still, let us be just
+even to the War Office. It did _not_ ask the soldiers' wives for forms
+of authorization to pay the separation allowance to their bankers every
+six months. It actually offered the money monthly!
+
+
+*Delusive Promises.*
+
+The middle and upper classes are nearly as bad as the War Office. They
+talk of keeping every man's place open for him until the end of the war.
+Obviously this is flatly impossible. Some places can be kept, and no
+doubt are being kept. Some functions are suspended by the war and cannot
+be resumed until the troops return to civil life and resume them.
+Employers are so hardened to the daily commercial necessity for
+discharging men without a thought as to what is to become of them that
+they are quite ready to undertake to sack the replacers when the troops
+come back. Also the return of peace may be followed by a revival of
+trade in which employment may not be hard to find, even by discharged
+soldiers, who are always passed over in the labour market in favour of
+civilians, as those well know who have the task of trying to find places
+for them. But these considerations do not justify an attempt to persuade
+recruits that they can go off soldiering for months--they are told by
+Lord Kitchener that it will probably be for years--and then come back
+and walk to their benches or into their offices and pick up their work
+as if they had left only the night before. The very people who are
+promising this are raising the cry "business as usual" in the same
+breath. How can business be carried on as usual, or carried on at all,
+on unoccupied office stools and at counters with no men behind them?
+Such rubbish is an insult to the recruit's intelligence. These promises
+of keeping places open were made to the men who enlisted for South
+Africa, and were of course broken, as a promise to supply green cheese
+by quarrying the moon would have been broken. New employees must be
+found to do the work of the men who are in the field; and these new ones
+will not all be thrown into the street when the war is over to make room
+for discharged soldiers, even if a good many of these soldiers are not
+disqualified by their new training and habits for their old employment.
+I repeat, there is only one assurance that can be given to the recruits
+without grossly and transparently deluding them; and that is that they
+shall not be discharged, except at their own request, until civil
+employment is available for them.
+
+
+*Funking Controversy.*
+
+This is not the only instance of the way in which, under the first scare
+of the war, we shut our eyes and opened our mouths to every folly. For
+example, there was a cry for the suspension of all controversy in the
+face of the national danger. Now the only way to suspend controversial
+questions during a period of intense activity in the very departments in
+which the controversy has arisen is to allow them all to be begged.
+Perhaps I should not object if they were all begged in favour of my own
+side, as, for instance, the question of Socialism was begged in favour
+of Socialism when the Government took control of the railways; bought up
+all the raw sugar; regulated prices; guaranteed the banks; suspended the
+operation of private contracts; and did all the things it had been
+declaring utterly and eternally Utopian and imposible when Socialists
+advocated them. But it is now proposed to suspend all popular liberties
+and constitutional safeguards; to muzzle the Press, and actually to have
+no contests at bye-elections! This is more than a little too much. We
+have submitted to have our letters, our telegrams, our newspapers
+censored, our dividends delayed, our trains cut off, our horses and even
+our houses commandeered, our streets darkened, our restaurants closed,
+and ourselves shot dead on the public highways if we were slow to
+realize that some excited person bawling in the distance was a sentry
+challenging us. But that we are to be politically gagged and enslaved as
+well; that the able-bodied soldier in the trenches, who depends on the
+able-minded civilian at home to guard the liberties of his country and
+protect him from carelesness or abuse of power by the authorities whom
+he must blindly and dumbly obey, is to be betrayed the moment his back
+is turned to his fellow-citizens and his face to the foe, is not
+patriotism: it is the paralysis of mortal funk: it is the worst kind of
+cowardice in the face of the enemy. Let us hear no more of it, but
+contest our elections like men, and regain the ancient political
+prestige of England at home as our expeditionary force has regained it
+abroad.
+
+The Labour Party, then, need have no hesitation in raising all the
+standing controversies between Democracy and Junkerism in their acutest
+form, and taking advantage of the war emergency to press them to a
+series of parliamentary victories for Labour, whether in negotiations
+with the Government whips, in divisions on the floor of the House, or in
+strenuously contested bye-elections. No doubt our Junkers will try to
+disarm their opponents by representing that it would be in the last
+degree unfair, un-English, and ungentlemanly on the part of the Labour
+members to seize any tactical advantage in parliamentary warfare, and
+most treacherous and unpatriotic to attack their country (meaning the
+Junker Party) when it is at war. Some Labour members will be easily
+enough gulled in this way: it would be laughable, if the consequences
+were not so tragic, to see how our parliamentary beginners from the
+working class succumb to the charm of the Junker appeal. The Junkers
+themselves are not to be coaxed in this manner: it is no use offering
+tracts to a missionary, as the poor Kaiser found when he tried it on.
+The Labour Party will soon learn the value of these polite
+demonstrations that it is always its duty not to hamper the governing
+classes in their very difficult and delicate and dangerous task of
+safeguarding the interests of this great empire: in short, to let itself
+be gammoned by elegant phrases and by adroit practisings on its personal
+good-nature, its inveterate proletarian sentimentality, and its secret
+misgivings as to the correctness of its manners. The Junkers have
+already taken the fullest advantage of the war to paralyze democracy. If
+the Labour members do not take a vigorous counter-offensive, and fight
+every parliamentary trench to the last division, the Labour Movement
+will be rushed back as precipitately as General von Kluck rushed the
+Allies back from Namur to the gates of Paris. In truth, the importance
+of the war to the immense majority of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans
+lies in the possibility that when Junkers fall out common men may come
+by their own.
+
+
+
+
+*III.*
+
+*THE TERMS OF PEACE.*
+
+
+*Natural Limits to Duration of the War.*
+
+
+So much for the recruiting. Now for the terms of peace. It is time to
+take that subject in hand; for Lord Kitchener's notion that we are going
+to settle down to years of war as we did a century ago is soldierly, but
+not sensible. It is, of course, physically possible for us to continue
+for twenty years digging trenches and shelling German troops and shoving
+German armies back when they are not shoving us, whilst old women pull
+turnips and tend goats in the fire zones across which soldiers run to
+shelter. But we cannot afford to withdraw a million male adults who have
+passed a strictish health test from the work of parentage for several
+years unless we intend to breed our next generation from parents with
+short sight, varicose veins, rotten teeth, and deranged internal organs.
+Soldiers do not think of these things: "theirs not to reason why: theirs
+but to do and die"; but sensible civilians have to. And even soldiers
+know that you cannot make ammunition as fast as you can burn it, nor
+produce men and horses as instantaneously as you can kill them by
+machinery. It would be well, indeed, if our papers, instead of writing
+of ten-inch shells, would speak of £1,000 shells, and regimental bands
+occasionally finish the National Anthem and the Brabançonne and the
+Marseillaise with the old strain, "That's the way the money goes: Pop
+goes the Ten Inch." It is easy to rebuke Mr. Norman Angell and Herr
+Bloch for their sordid references to the cost of war; and Mr. H.G. Wells
+is profoundly right in pointing out that the fact that war does not pay
+commercially is greatly to its credit, as no high human activity ever
+does pay commercially. But modern war does not even pay its way. Already
+our men have "pumped lead" into retreating Germans who had no lead left
+to pump back again; and sooner or later, if we go on indefinitely, we
+shall have to finish the job with our fists, and congratulate ourselves
+that both Georges Carpentier and Bombardier Wells are on our side. This
+war will stop when Germany throws up the sponge, which will happen long
+before she is utterly exhausted, but not before we ourselves shall be
+glad enough of a rest. Nations are like bees: they cannot kill except at
+the cost of their own lives.
+
+The question of terms will raise a fierce controversy. At the extremes
+of our public opinion we have two temperaments, first, our gentlemen,
+our sportsmen, our daredevils, our _preux chevaliers_. To these the
+notion of reviling your enemy when he is up; kicking him when he is
+knocked down by somebody else; and gouging out his eyes, cutting out his
+tongue, hewing off his right arm, and stealing all his money, is
+abhorrent and cowardly. These gallants say, "It is not enough that we
+can fight Germany to-day. We can fight her any day and every day. Let
+her come again and again and yet again. We will fight her one to three;
+and if she comes on ten to one, as she did at Mons, we will mill on the
+retreat, and drive her back again when we have worn her down to our
+weight. If her fleet will not come out to fight us because we have too
+many ships, we will send all the odds in our favour back to Portsmouth
+and fight ship to ship in the North Sea, and let the bravest and best
+win." That is how gallant fighters talk, and how Drake is popularly
+(though erroneously) supposed to have tackled the Armada.
+
+
+*The Ignoble Attitude of Cruel Panic.*
+
+But we are not all _preux chevaliers._ We have at the other extremity
+the people who are craving for loot and vengeance, who clamour for the
+humiliation and torture of the enemy, who rave against the village
+burnings and shootings by the Prussians in one column and exult in the
+same proceedings by the Russians in another, who demand that German
+prisoners of war shall be treated as criminals, who depict our Indian
+troops as savage cutthroats because they like to think of their enemies
+being mauled in the spirit of the Indian Mutiny, who shriek that the
+Kaiser must be sent to Devil's Island because St. Helena is too good for
+him, and who declare that Germany must be so maimed and trodden into the
+dust that she will not be able to raise her head again for a century.
+Let us call these people by their own favourite name, Huns, even at the
+risk of being unjust to the real Huns. And let us send as many of them
+to the trenches as we can possibly induce to go, in the hope that they
+may presently join the lists of the missing. Still, as they rather cling
+to our soil, they will have to be reckoned with when the settlement
+comes. But they will not count for much then. Most of them will be
+heartily ashamed of what they said in those first three or four weeks of
+blue funk (I am too timid myself not to make allowances for that most
+distressing and universal, but fortunately transient effect of war); and
+most of those who are not will be ashamed to bear malice publicly.
+
+
+*The Commercial Attitude.*
+
+Far more weighty in the matter will be the intermediate sections. First,
+our commercial main body, which thinks that chivalry is not business,
+and that rancour is childish, but cannot see why we should not make the
+Germans pay damages and supply us with some capital to set the City
+going again, forgetting that when France did that after 1871 for Berlin,
+Berlin was set going so effectually that it went headlong to a colossal
+financial smash, whilst the French peasant who had provided the capital
+from his old stocking throve soberly on the interest at the expense of
+less vital classes. Unfortunately Germany has set the example of this
+kind of looting. Prussian generals, like Napoleon's marshals, have
+always been shameless brigands, keeping up the seventeenth and
+eighteenth century tradition of making cities bribe them to refrain from
+sack and pillage and even billeting, and being quite incapable of the
+magnificence of the great Condé (or was it Turenne?), who refused a
+payment offered by a city on the ground that he had not intended to
+march through it. Blucher's fury when Wellington would not allow him to
+plunder Paris, and his exclamation when he saw London "What a city to
+loot!" is still regarded as fair soldiering; and the blackmail levied
+recently by the Prussian generals on the Belgian and French towns they
+have occupied must, I suppose, be let pass as ransom, not as ordinary
+criminal looting. But if the penalty of looting be thus spared, the
+Germans can hardly complain if they are themselves held to ransom when
+the fortunes of war go against them. Liège and Lille and Antwerp and the
+rest must be paid their money back with interest; and there will be a
+big builder's bill at Rheims. But we should ourselves refrain strictly
+from blackmail. We should sell neither our blood nor our mercy. If we
+sell either we are as much brigands as Blucher.
+
+
+*Vindictive Damages.*
+
+And we must not let ourselves be tempted to soil our hands under pretext
+of vindictive damages. The man who thinks that all the money in Germany
+could pay for the life of a single British drummer boy ought to be shot
+merely as an expression of the feeling that he is unfit to live. We
+stake our blood as the Germans stake theirs; and in that _ganz
+besonderes Saft_ alone should we [missing text]r accept payment. We had
+better **[missing text]y to the Kaiser at the end of the **[missing
+text] "Scoundrel: you can never replace **[missing text] Louvain
+library, nor the sculpture of Rheims; and it follows logically that you
+shall empty your pockets into ours." Much better say: "God forgive us
+all!" If we cannot rise to this, and must soil our hands with plunder,
+at least let us call it plunder, and not profane our language and our
+souls by giving it fine names.
+
+
+*Our Annihilationists.*
+
+Then we shall have the Militarists, who will want to have Germany "bled
+to the white," dismembered and maimed, so that she may never do it
+again. Well, that is quite simple, if you are Militarist enough to do
+it. Loading Germany with debt will not do it. Towing her fleet into
+Portsmouth or sinking it will not do it. Annexing provinces and colonies
+will not do it. The effective method is far shorter and more practical.
+What has made Germany formidable in this war? Obviously her
+overwhelmingly superior numbers. That was how she rushed us back almost
+to the gates of Paris. The organization, the readiness, the sixteen-inch
+howitzer helped; but it was the multitudinous _Kanonenfutter_ that
+nearly snowed us under. The British soldier at Cambrai and Le Cateau
+killed and killed until his rifle was too hot to hold and his hand was
+paralyzed with slayer's cramp; but still they came and came.
+
+
+*Why Not Kill the German Women?*
+
+Well, there is no obscurity about that problem. Those Germans who took
+but an instant to kill had taken the travail of a woman for
+three-quarters of a year to breed, and eighteen years to ripen for the
+slaughter. All we have to do is to kill, say, 75 per cent, of all the
+women in Germany under 60. Then we may leave Germany her fleet and her
+money, and say "Much good may they do you." Why not, if you are really
+going in to be what you, never having read "this Neech they talk of,"
+call a Nietzschean Superman? War is not an affair of sentiment. Some of
+our newspapers complain that the Germans kill the wounded and fire on
+field hospitals and Red Cross Ambulances. These same newspapers fill
+their columns with exultant accounts of how our wounded think nothing of
+modern bullet wounds and hope to be back at the front in a week, which I
+take to be the most direct incitement to the Germans to kill the wounded
+that could be devized. It is no use being virtuously indignant: "stone
+dead hath no fellow" is an English proverb, not a German one. Even the
+killing of prisoners is an Agincourt tradition. Now it is not more
+cowardly to kill a woman than to kill a wounded man. And there is only
+one reason why it is a greater crime to kill a woman than a man, and why
+women have to be spared and protected when men are exposed and
+sacrificed. That reason is that the destruction of the women is the
+destruction of the community. Men are comparatively of no account: kill
+90 per cent, of the German men, and the remaining 10 per cent. can
+repeople her. But kill the women, and _Delenda est Carthago_. Now this
+is exactly what our Militarists want to happen to Germany. Therefore the
+objection to killing women becomes in this case the reason for doing it.
+Why not? No reply is possible from the Militarist, disable-your-enemy
+point of view. If disablement is your will, there is your way, and the
+only effectual way. We really must not call the Kaiser and Von Bernhardi
+disciples of the mythical Neech when they have either overlooked or
+shrunk from such a glaring "biological necessity." A pair of puling
+pious sentimentalists if you like. But Supermen! Nonsense. O, my brother
+journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call them sheep led by snobs,
+call them beggars on horseback, call them sausage eaters, depict them in
+the good old English fashion in spectacles and comforter, seedy overcoat
+buttoned over paunchy figure, playing the contrabass tuba in a street
+band; but do not flatter them with the heroic title of Superman, and
+hold up as magnificent villainies worthy of Milton's Lucifer these
+common crimes of violence and raid and lust that any drunken blackguard
+can commit when the police are away, and that no mere multiplication can
+dignify. As to Nietzsche, with his Polish hatred of Prussia (who
+heartily reciprocated the sentiment), when did he ever tell the Germans
+to allow themselves to be driven like sheep to the slaughter in millions
+by mischievous dolts who, being for the most part incapable of reading
+ten sentences of a philosophic treatise without falling asleep, allow
+journalists as illiterate as themselves to persuade them that he got his
+great reputation by writing a cheap gospel for bullies? Strictly between
+ourselves, we also are an illiterate people; but we may at least hold
+our tongues about matters we don't understand, and not say in the face
+of Europe that the English believe that the composer of Parsifal was a
+Militarist Prussian (he was an exiled revolutionist); that Nietzsche was
+a diciple of Wagner (Nietzsche preferred the music of Bizet, a
+Frenchman); and that the Kaiser is a disciple of Nietzsche, who would
+have laughed his childish pietism to scorn.
+
+
+*The Simple Answer.*
+
+Nietzsche would certainly have agreed that we must kill the German women
+if we mean business when we talk of destroying Germany. But he would
+also have answered my Why not?, which is more than any consistent
+Militarist can. Indeed, it needs no philosopher to give the answer. The
+first ordinary anti-Militarist human person you meet will tell you that
+it would be too horrible; that life would be unbearable if people did
+such things. And he would be quite right; so please let us hear no more
+of kicking your enemy when he is down so that he may be unable to rise
+for a whole century. We may be unable to resist the temptation to loot
+Germany more or less if we conquer her. We are already actively engaged
+in piracy against her, stealing her ships and selling them in our prize
+courts, instead of honestly detaining them until the war is over and
+keeping a strict account of them. When gentlemen rise in the House of
+Commons and say that they owe Germans money and do not intend to pay it,
+one must face the fact that there will be a strong popular demand for
+plunder. War, after all, is simply a letting loose of organized murder,
+theft, and piracy on a foe; and I have no doubt the average Englishman
+will say to me what Falstaff said to Pistol concerning his share in the
+price of the stolen fan: "Reason, you rogue, reason: do you think I'll
+endanger my soul _gratis_?" To which I reply, "If you can't resist the
+booty, take it frankly, and know yourself for half patriot, half
+brigand; but don't talk nonsense about disablement. Cromwell tried it in
+Ireland. He had better have tried Home Rule. And what Cromwell could not
+do to Ireland we cannot do to Germany."
+
+
+*The Sensible People.*
+
+Finally we come to the only body of opinion in which there is any hope
+of civilization: the opinion of the people who are bent, not on
+gallantry nor revenge nor plunder nor pride nor panic nor glory nor any
+of the invidiousnesses of patriotism, but on the problem of how to so
+redraw the map of Europe and reform its political constitutions that
+this abominable crime and atrocious nuisance, a European war, shall not
+easily occur again. The map is very important; for the open sores which
+have at last suppurated and burst after having made the world uneasy for
+years, were produced by altering the colour of Alsace and Lorraine and
+of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the map. And the new map must be settled,
+not by conquest, but by consent of the people immediately concerned. One
+of the broken treaties of Europe which has been mentioned less
+frequently of late than the Belgian treaty is the treaty of Prague, by
+which a plebiscite was to have been taken on the subject of the
+nationality of Schleswig and Holstein. That plebiscite has never been
+taken. It may have to be taken, with other plebiscites, before this war
+is settled.
+
+
+*German Unity Inviolable.*
+
+But here let me warn those who are hoping for a disintegrated Germany
+like that which Thackeray ridiculed, that their hopes are vain. The
+southern Germans, the, friendliest, most easy-going people in the world
+(as far as I know the world) dislike the Prussians far more heartily
+than we do; but they know that they are respected and strong and big as
+part of United Germany, and that they were weak and despised and petty
+as separate kingdoms. Germany will hold together. No doubt the Germans
+may reasonably say to the Prussian drill sergeant and his master
+Hohenzollern, "A nice mess you have made of your job after all we have
+endured from you because we believed you could make us invincible. We
+thought that if you were hard masters you were at any rate good
+grenadiers; but here are these piffling little Belgians and these
+Russians who were beaten by the Japanese, and these English who made
+such a poor show against a handful of Boer farmers, fighting and
+organizing just as well as you. So, as the French and English are
+organized as a republic and an extremely limited monarchy, we will try
+how that sort of constitution will suit us." But they will not break up:
+on the contrary, they are much more likely to extend the German
+community by incorporating German Austria. And as this would raise the
+question whether Hohenzollern or Hapsburg should rule the roost, the
+simplest solution would be to get rid of them both, and take the sooner
+or later inevitable step into the democratic republican form of
+Government to which Europe is visibly tending, though "this king
+business," as my American correspondents call it, has certain
+conveniences when it is limited and combined with an aristocracy also
+limited by primogeniture and politically controlled by a commonalty into
+which all but the eldest brothers in the aristocratic families fall,
+thus making the German segregation of the _adel_ class impossible. Such
+a monarchy, especially when the monarch is a woman, as in Holland today,
+and in England under Victoria, is a fairly acceptable working substitute
+for a formal republic in old civilizations with inveterate monarchical
+traditions, absurd as it is in new and essentially democratic States. At
+any rate, it is conceivable that the western allies might demand the
+introduction of some such political constitution in Germany and Austria
+as a guarantee; for though the demand would not please Russia, some of
+Russia's demands will not please us; and there must be some give and
+take in the business.
+
+
+*Limits of Constitutional Interference.*
+
+Let us consider this possibility for a moment. First, it must be firmly
+postulated that civilized nations cannot have their political
+constitutions imposed on them from without if the object of the
+arrangement is peace and stability. If a victorious Germany were to
+attempt to impose the Prussian constitution on France and England, they
+would submit to it just as Ireland submitted to Dublin Castle, which, to
+say the least, would not be a millennial settlement. Profoundly as we
+are convinced that our Government of India is far better than any native
+Indian government could be (the assumption that "natives" could govern
+at all being made for the sake of argument with due reluctance), it is
+quite certain that until it becomes as voluntary as the parliamentary
+government of Australia, and has been modified accordingly, it will
+remain an artificial, precarious, and continually threatening political
+structure. Nevertheless, we need not go to the opposite extreme and
+conclude that a political constitution must fit a country so accurately
+that it must be home-made to measure. Europe has a stock of ready-made
+constitutions, both Monarchical and Republican, which will fit any
+western European nation comfortably enough. We are at present
+considerably bothered by the number of Germans who, though their own
+country and constitution is less than a day's journey away, settle here
+and marry Englishwomen without feeling that our constitution is
+unbearable. Englishmen are never tired of declaring that "they do things
+better abroad" (as a matter of fact they often do), and that the ways of
+Prussia are smarter than the ways of Paddington. It is therefore quite
+possible that a reach-me-down constitution proposed, not by the
+conquerors, but by an international congress with no interest to serve
+but the interests of peace, might prove acceptable enough to a nation
+thoroughly disgusted with its tyrants.
+
+
+*Physician: Heal Thyself.*
+
+Now a congress which undertook the Liberalization of Germany would
+certainly not stop there. If we invite a congress to press for a
+democratization of the German constitution, we must consent to the
+democratization of our own. If we send the Kaiser to St. Helena (or
+whatever the title of the Chiselhurst villa may be) we must send Sir
+Edward Grey there, too. For if on the morrow of the peace we may all
+begin to plot and plan one another's destruction over again in the
+secrecy of our Foreign Office, so that in spite of Parliament and free
+democratic institutions the Foreign Secretary may at any moment step
+down from the Foreign Office to the House of Commons and say, "I
+arranged yesterday with the ambassador from Cocagne that England is to
+join his country in fighting Brobdingnag; so vote me a couple of hundred
+millions, and off with you to the trenches," we shall be just where we
+were before as far as any likelihood of putting an end to war is
+concerned. The congress will certainly ask us to pledge ourselves that
+if we shake the mailed fist at all we shall shake it publicly, and that
+though we may keep our sword ready (let me interject in passing that
+disarmament is all nonsense: nobody is going to disarm after this
+experience) it shall be drawn by the representatives of the nation, and
+not by Junker diplomatists who despise and distrust the nation, and have
+planned war behind its back for years. Indeed they will probably demur
+to its being drawn even by the representative of the nation until the
+occasion has been submitted to the judgment of the representatives of
+the world, or such beginnings of a world representative body as may be
+possible. That is the true _Weltpolitik_.
+
+
+*The Hegemony of Peace.*
+
+For the main business of the settlement, if it is to have any serious
+business at all, must be the establishment of a Hegemony of Peace, as
+desired by all who are really capable of high civilization, and
+formulated by me in the daily Press in a vain attempt to avert this
+mischief whilst it was brewing. Nobody took the smallest public notice
+of me; so I made a lady in a play say "Not bloody likely," and instantly
+became famous beyond the Kaiser, beyond the Tsar, beyond Sir Edward
+Grey, beyond Shakespeare and Homer and President Wilson, the papers
+occupying themselves with me for a whole week just as they are now
+occupying themselves with the war, and one paper actually devoting a
+special edition to a single word in my play, which is more than it has
+done for the Treaty of London (1839). I concluded then that this was a
+country which really could not be taken seriously. But the habits of a
+lifetime are not so easily broken; and I am not afraid to produce
+another dead silence by renewing my good advice, as I can easily recover
+my popularity by putting still more shocking expressions into my next
+play, especially now that events have shewn that I was right on the
+point of foreign policy.
+
+
+*East Is East; and West Is West.*
+
+I repeat, then, that there should be a definite understanding that
+whatever may happen or not happen further east, England, France, and
+Germany solemnly pledge themselves to maintain the internal peace of the
+west of Europe, and renounce absolutely all alliances and engagements
+that bind them to join any Power outside the combination in military
+operations, whether offensive or defensive, against one inside it. We
+must get rid of the monstrous situation that produced the present war.
+France made an alliance with Russia as a defence against Germany.
+Germany made an alliance with Austria as a defence against Russia.
+England joined the Franco-Russian alliance as a defence against Germany
+and Austria. The result was that Germany became involved in a quarrel
+between Austria and Russia. Having no quarrel with France, and only a
+second-hand quarrel with Russia, she was, nevertheless, forced to attack
+France in order to disable her before she could strike Germany from
+behind when Germany was fighting France's ally, Russia. And this attack
+on France forced England to come to the rescue of England's ally,
+France. Not one of the three nations (as distinguished from their tiny
+Junker-Militarist cliques) wanted to fight; for England had nothing to
+gain and Germany had everything to lose, whilst France had given up hope
+of her Alsace-Lorraine _revanche_, and would certainly not have hazarded
+a war for it. Yet because Russia, who has a great deal to gain by
+victory and nothing except military prestige to lose by defeat, had a
+quarrel with Austria over Servia, she has been able to set all three
+western friends and neighbours shedding "rivers of blood" from one
+another's throats; an outrageous absurdity. Fifty years ago the notion
+of England helping Russia and Japan to destroy Germany would have seemed
+as suicidal as Canada helping the Apaches to destroy the United States
+of America; and though we now think much better of the Japanese (and
+also, by the way, of the Apaches), that does not make us any the more
+patient with the man who burns down his own street because he admires
+the domestic architecture of Yokohama, especially when the fire
+presently spreads to the cathedral of Rheims. It is bad enough that we
+should have betrayed oriental Persia to oriental Russia as we did (and
+get nothing for our pains but what we deserved); but when it comes to
+sacrificing occidental Germany to her as well, we are sharpening a knife
+for our own occidental throat. The Russian Government is the open enemy
+of every liberty we boast of. Charles I.'s unsuccessful attempt to
+arrest five members of the House of Commons for disagreeing with him is
+ancient history here: it occurred 272 years ago; but the Tsar's
+successful attempt to arrest thirty members of the Duma and to punish
+them as dangerous criminals is a fact of to-day. Under Russian
+government people whose worst crime is to find _The Daily News_ a
+congenial newspaper are hanged, flogged, or sent to Siberia as a matter
+of daily routine; so that before 1906 even the articles in _The Times_
+on such events as the assassinations of Bobrikoff and the Grand Duke
+were simply polite paraphrases of "Serve him right." It may be asked why
+our newspapers have since ceased to report examples of Russia's
+disregard of the political principles we are supposed to stand for. The
+answer is simple. It was in 1906 that we began to lend Russia money, and
+Russia began to advertise in _The Times_. Since then she has been
+welcome to flog and hang her H.G. Wellses and Lloyd Georges by the dozen
+without a word of remonstrance from our plutocratic Press, provided the
+interest is paid punctually. Russia has been embraced in the large
+charity of cosmopolitan capital, the only charity that does not begin at
+home.
+
+
+*The Russian Russians and Their Prussian Tsars.*
+
+And here I must save my face with my personal friends who are either
+Russians or discoverers of the soul of the Russian people. I hereby
+declare to Sasha Kropotkin and Cunninghame Graham that my heart is with
+their Russia, the Russia of Tolstoy and Turgenieff and Dostoieffsky, of
+Gorki and Tchekoff, of the Moscow Art Theatre and the Drury Lane Ballet,
+of Peter Kropotkin and all the great humanitarians, great artists, and
+charming people whom their very North German Tsars exile and imprison
+and flog and generally do what in them lies to suppress and abolish. For
+the sake of Russian Russia, I am prepared to strain every point in
+Prussian Russia's favour. I grant that the Nihilists, much as we loved
+them, were futile romantic people who could have done nothing if
+Alexander II. had abdicated and offered them the task of governing
+Russia instead of persecuting them and being finally blown to bits by
+them. I grant that the manners of the Fins to the Russians are described
+as insufferable both by the Swedes and the Russians, and that we never
+listened to the Russian side of that story. I am ready to grant Gilbert
+Murray's plea that the recent rate of democratic advance has been
+greater in Russia than anywhere else in Europe, though it does remind me
+a little of the bygone days when the Socialists, scoring 20 votes at one
+general election and forty at the next, were able to demonstrate that
+their gain of 100 per cent. was immensely in excess of the wretched two
+or three per cent. that was the best the Unionists or Liberals could
+shew. I am willing to forget how short a time it is since Sir Henry
+Campbell-Bannerman said: "The Duma is dead: long live the Duma!" and
+since we refused to allow the Tsar to land in England when his ship was
+within gangway's length of our shore, on which occasion I myself held up
+the Anglo-Russian agreement for the partition of Persia to the
+execration of a crowd in Trafalgar Square, whilst our Metropolitan
+Police snatched the _l'sarbeleidigend_ English newspapers from the
+sellers and tore them up precisely in the Cossack manner. I have an
+enormous relish for the art of Russia; I perceive a spirit in Russia
+which is the natural antidote to Potsdamnation; and I like most of the
+Russians I know quite unaffectedly. I could find it in my heart to
+reproach the Kaiser for making war on the Russia of these delightful
+people, just as I like to think that at this very moment good Germans
+may be asking him how he can bring himself to discharge shrapnel at the
+England of Bernard Shaw and Cunninghame Graham. History may not forgive
+him for it; but the practical point at the moment is that he does it,
+and no doubt attributes the perfidy of England to the popularity of our
+works. And as we have to take the Kaiser as we find him, and not as the
+Hohenzollern legend glorifies him, I have to take the Tsar as I find
+him. When we fight the Kaiser we are not fighting Bach and Wagner and
+Strauss, to whom we have just joyfully surrendered without a blow at the
+battle of Queen's Hall, but all the forces in Germany that made things
+hard for Wagner and Strauss. And when we fight for the Tsar we are not
+fighting for Tolstoy and Gorki, but for the forces that Tolstoy
+thundered against all his life and that would have destroyed him had he
+not been himself a highly connected Junker as well as a revolutionary
+Christian. And if I doubt whether the Tsar would feel comfortable as a
+member of a Democratic League of Peace, I am not doubting the good
+intent of Kropotkin: I am facing the record of Kropotkin's imperial
+jailer, and standing on the proud fact that England is the only country
+in Europe, not excepting even France, in which Kropotkin has been
+allowed to live a free man, and had his birthday celebrated by public
+meetings all over the country, and his articles welcomed by the leading
+review. In point of fact, it is largely on Kropotkin's account that I
+regard the Tsar as a gentleman of slightly different views to President
+Wilson, and hate the infamous tyranny of which he is the figurehead as I
+hate the devil. And I know that practically all our disinterested and
+thoughtful supporters of the war feel deeply uneasy about the Russian
+alliance. At all events, I should be trifling grossly with the facts of
+the situation if I pretended that the most absolute autocracy in Europe,
+commanding an inexhaustible army in an invincible country with a
+dominion stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, may not, if it
+achieves a military success against the most dreaded military Power in
+Europe, be stirred to ambitions far more formidable to western liberty
+and human welfare than those of which Germany is now finding out the
+vanity after worrying herself and everyone else with them for forty
+years. When all is said that can be said for Russia, the fact remains
+that a forcibly Russianized German province would be just such another
+open sore in Europe as Alsace-Lorraine, Poland, Macedonia or Ireland. It
+is useless to dream of guarantees: if Russia undertook to govern
+democratically she would not be able to redeem her promise: she would do
+better with primitive Communism. Her city populations may be as capable
+of Democracy as our own (it is, alas! not saying much); but the
+overwhelming mass of peasants to whom the Tsar is a personal God will
+for a long time to come make his bureaucracy irresistible. As against
+Russian civilization German and Austrian civilization is our
+civilization: there is no getting over that. A constitutional kingship
+of Poland and a sort of Caliphate of the Slavs in remapped southeastern
+Europe, with that access to warm sea water which is Russia's common
+human right, valid against all Balances of Power and Keys to India and
+the like, must be her reward for her share in the war, even if we have
+to nationalize Constantinople to secure it to her. But it cannot be too
+frankly said at the outset that any attempt to settle Europe on the
+basis of the present hemming in of a consolidated Germany and German
+Austria by a hostile combination of Russia and the extreme states
+against it, would go to pieces by its own inherent absurdity, just as it
+has already exploded most destructively by its own instability. Until
+Russia becomes a federation of several separate democratic States, and
+the Tsar is either promoted to the honourable position of hereditary
+President or else totally abolished, the eastern boundary of the League
+of Peace must be the eastern boundary of Swedish, German, and Italian
+civilization; and Poland must stand between it and the quite different
+and for the moment unassimilable, civilization of Russia, whose
+friendship we could not really keep on any other terms, as a closer
+alliance would embarrass her as much as it would embarrass us.
+Meanwhile, we must trust to the march of Democracy to de-Russianize
+Berlin and de-Prussianize Petrograd, and to put the nagaikas of the
+Cossacks and the riding-whips with which Junker officers slash German
+privates, and the forty tolerated homosexual brothels of Berlin, and all
+the other psychopathic symptoms of overfeeding and inculcated insolence
+and sham virility in their proper place, which I take to be the dustbin.
+
+
+*Driving Capital Out of the Country*.
+
+But I must here warn everyone concerned that the most formidable
+opposition to the break-up of these unnatural alliances between east and
+west, between Democracy and Autocracy, between the twentieth century and
+the Dark Ages, will not come from the Balancers of Power. They are not
+really Balance of Power alliances: in fact, they are tending to an
+enormous overbalance of power in favor of the east as against the west
+and in favor of Militarist Autocracy as against Democracy. They are at
+root absolutely unpatriotic, even absolutely conscienceless products of
+commercial finance; and the Balance of Power theories are only the
+attempts of our diplomats to put a public spirited face on the
+operations of private cupidity. This is not the first time nor the
+second that I have had to urge that the greatest danger to us in the
+sphere of foreign politics is the tendency of capital to run away from
+civilization: the one running downhill to hell as naturally as the other
+struggles uphill to the Celestial City. The Englishman is allowed to
+produce the subsistence of himself and his family only on condition that
+he produces the subsistence of the capitalist and his retainers as well;
+and lo! he finds more and more that these retainers are not Englishmen,
+but Russians, South Americans, Kaffirs, Persians, or yellow or black
+barbarians armed for his destruction (not to mention Prussians and
+Austrians), and that the treaties made by our diplomatists have less and
+less to do with the security of the nation or the balance of power or
+any other public business, and more and more with capitalist
+opportunities of making big dividends out of slavish labour. For
+instance, the Anglo-Russian agreement is not a national treaty: it is
+the memorandum of a commercial agreement settling what parts of Persia
+are to be exploited by the Russian and English capitalists respectively;
+the capitalists, always against State interference for the benefit of
+the people, being very strongly in favor of it for coercing strikers at
+home and keeping foreign rivals off their grass abroad. And the absurd
+part of it is that when the State has thus arranged for our capitalists
+to exploit certain parts of Persia, and for their sakes to protect the
+parliamentary liberties of the part left to Russia, they discovered
+that, after all, the most profitable game was to lend Russia the money
+to exploit with, and to facilitate the operation by allowing her to
+destroy the Persian parliament in the face of our own exhortation to it
+to keep the flag flying, which we accordingly did without a blush. The
+French capitalists had dragged France into an alliance with Russia long
+before this; but the French Republic had the excuse of the German peril
+and the need for an anti-German ally. Her natural ally for that purpose
+was England; but as there was no market in England for her money, her
+plutocrats drove her into the alliance with Russia as well; and it is
+that alliance and not the alliance with England that has terrified
+Germany into flying at her throat and plunging Europe into a frightful
+war. The natural alliance with England twice averted war: in the
+Moroccan crises of Algeciras and Agadir, when Sir Edward Grey said
+boldly that we should defend France, and took the first steps towards a
+joint military and naval control of the French and English forces. Why
+he shrank from that firm position last July and thereby led Germany to
+count so fatally on our neutrality I do not pretend to know; it suffices
+for my argument that we were able to hold the balance between France and
+Germany, but failed to hold it between Germany and Russia, and that it
+was the placing of Russian loans in France and England that brought
+Russia into our western affairs. It would have paid us ten times over to
+have made Russia a present of all we and France have lent her
+(indemnifying, of course, the holders of the stock through an addition
+to the income tax) rather than pay the price of a European war. But what
+is the use of crying for spilt milk? I am merely explaining why, when
+French money went to Russia, the French papers discovered that the
+Russians were a most interesting people and their Government--properly
+understood--a surprisingly Liberal Government; and why, when English
+money went to Russia, the English press suddenly developed leanings
+towards the Greek Church, and deplored the unofficial execution of
+Stolypin as deeply as it had rejoiced in the like fate of Bobrikoff. The
+upshot of it all is that western civilization is at present busy
+committing suicide by machinery, and importing hordes of Asiatics and
+Africans to help in the throat cutting, not for the benefit of the silly
+capitalists, who are being ruined wholesale, but to break up the
+Austrian Empire for the benefit of Russia and the Slavs of eastern
+Europe, which may be a very desirable thing, but which could and should
+be done by the eastern Powers among themselves, without tearing Belgium
+and Germany and France and England to pieces in the process.
+
+
+*The Red Flag and the Black.*
+
+Will you now at last believe, O stupid British, German, and French
+patriots, what the Socialists have been telling you for so many years:
+that your Union Jacks and tricolours and Imperial Eagles ("where the
+carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered") are only toys to keep
+you amused, and that there are only two real flags in the world
+henceforth: the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of
+Capitalism, the flag of God and the flag of Mammon? What earthly or
+heavenly good is done when Tom Fool shoots Hans Narr? The plain fact is
+that if we leave our capital to be dealt with according to the
+selfishness of the private man he will send it where wages are low and
+workers enslaved and docile: that is, as many thousand miles as possible
+from the Trade Unions and Trade Union rates and parliamentary Labour
+Parties of civilization; and Germany, at his sordid behest, will plunge
+the world into war for the sake of disgracing herself with a few rubber
+plantations, poetically described by her orators and journalists as "a
+place in the sun." When you do what the Socialists tell you by keeping
+your capital jealously under national control and reserving your
+shrapnel for the wasters who not only shirk their share of the
+industrial service of their country, but intend that their children and
+children's children shall be idle wasters like themselves, you will find
+that not a farthing of our capital will go abroad as long as there is a
+British slum to be cleared and rebuilt, or a hungry, ragged, and
+ignorant British child to be fed, clothed, and educated.
+
+
+*A League of Peace*.
+
+But in the west I see no insuperable obstacle to a Treaty of Peace in
+the largest sense. This war has smoothed the way to it, if I may use the
+word smoothing to describe a process conduced with so little courtesy
+and so much shrapnel. Germany has now learned--and the lesson was
+apparently needed, obvious as it would have been to a sanely governed
+nation--that when it comes to shoving and shooting, Germany instantly
+loses all the advantages of her high civilization, because France and
+England, cultured or uncultured, can shove and shoot as well or beter
+than she, whilst as to slashing and stabbing, their half barbarous Turco
+and Ghoorka slaves can cut the Prussian Guard to bits, in spite of the
+unquestionable superiority of Wagner's music to theirs. Then take
+France. She does not dream that she could fight Germany and England
+single-handed. And England could not fight France and Germany without a
+sacrifice as ruinous as it would be senseless. We therefore have the
+necessary primary conditions for a League of Peace between the three
+countries; for if one of them break it, the other two can make her
+sorry, under which circumstances she will probably not break it. The
+present war, if it end in the reconquest of Alsace and Lorraine by the
+French, will make such a League much more stable; not that France can
+acquire by mere conquest any right to hold either province against its
+will (which could be ascertained by plebiscite), but because the honors
+of war as between France and Germany would then be easy, France having
+regained her laurels and taught Germany to respect her, without
+obliterating the record of Germany's triumph in 1870. And if the war
+should further result in the political reconstruction of the German
+Empire as a democratic Commonwealth, and the conquest by the English
+people of democratic control of English foreign policy, the combination
+would be immensely eased and strengthened, besides being brought into
+harmony with American public feeling, which is important to the security
+and prestige of the League.
+
+
+*The Case of the Smaller States.*
+
+Already the war has greatly added to the value of one of the factors
+upon which the League of Peace will depend. The smaller States: Holland,
+Belgium, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian Powers, would have joined it
+any time these 40 years, had it existed, for the sake of its protection,
+and thereby made the Protestant north of Mr. Houston Chamberlain's dream
+as much a reality as any such dream is ever likely to be. But after the
+fight put up by Belgium the other day, the small States will be able to
+come in with the certainty of being treated with considerable respect as
+military factors; for Belgium can now claim to have saved Europe
+single-handed. Germany has been very unpleasantly reminded of the fact
+that though a big man may be able to beat a little one, yet if the
+little one fights for all he is worth he may leave the victor very sorry
+he broke the peace. Even as between the big Powers, victory has not, as
+far as the fighting has yet gone, been always with the biggest
+battalions. With a couple of millions less men, the Kaiser might have
+taken more care of them and made a better job of it.
+
+At the same time I hold no brief for small States as such, and most
+vehemently deny that we are in any way bound to knight errantry on their
+behalf as against big ones. They are mostly either incorrigibly
+bellicose themselves, like Montenegro, or standing temptations to the
+big Powers, like Bosnia and Herzegovina. They multiply frontiers, which
+are nuisances, and languages, which have made confusion since the
+building of Babel. The striking contrast between the United States of
+North America and the disunited States of South America in this respect
+is, from the Pacifist point of view, very much in favor of the northern
+unity. The only objection to large political units is that they make
+extremely dangerous autocracies. But as groups of federated democracies
+they are the best neighbours in the world. A federal democratic Russia
+would be as safe a colleague as America: a federal democratic Germany
+would be as pleasant company as Switzerland. Let us, I beg, hear no more
+of little States as British Dulcineas.
+
+
+*The Claims of Belgium.*
+
+As to the special case of Belgium, its claims in the settlement are
+simple and indeed single. If we conclude a peace without clearing the
+Germans completely out of Belgium, we shall be either beaten or
+dishonoured. And such indemnity as a money payment can effect for
+Belgium is due not only by Germany, but by Britain, France, and Russia
+as well. Belgium has been crushed between the Alliance and the Entente:
+it was these two menaces to the peace of Europe that produced
+Armageddon; and as Belgium's heroic resistance served the Entente
+against the Alliance, the obligation to make good the remediable damage
+is even more binding on the Entente.
+
+But there is another and more pressing matter arising out of the
+conquest of Belgium.
+
+
+*The Belgian Refugees and the Problem of Unemployment.*
+
+As I write these lines the descent on our shores of an army of refugees
+from captured Antwerp and threatened Ostend has forced the President of
+the Local Government Board to make a desperate appeal to all and sundry
+to form representative committees to deal with the prevention and relief
+of distress: in other words to save the refugees from starving to death.
+Now the Board of Trade has already drawn attention to a memorandum of
+the Local Government Board as to the propriety of providing employment
+for refugees. And instantly and inevitably the condition had to be laid
+down that if the Committees find employment for anyone, they shall refer
+the case to the local Labour Exchange in order that "any steps taken to
+assist refugees to find employment shall not be such as to endanger the
+employment of British workpeople." In other words, the starving Belgians
+have fled from the Germans only to compete for crust with starving
+Englishmen. As long as there is an unemployed Englishman in the
+country--and there are a good many, especially in the cotton
+industry--how is it possible to give a job to a Belgian without
+depriving an Englishman of it? Why, instead of making impossible
+conditions, and helplessly asking private citizens to do something for
+pity's sake, will not the Government face the fact that the refugee
+question is simply an intensification of the normal unemployed question,
+the only difference being that we are accustomed to leave our own people
+to starve when they are common persons with whom the governing classes
+do not associate, whereas the Belgians have rendered us such a
+tremendous service in the war, and our statesmen have so loudly
+protested that the integrity of Belgium is dearer to England than her
+own heart's blood, that we cannot with any decency treat the destitute
+Belgians as if they were mere British riffraff. Yet when we attempt to
+provide for the Belgians by finding work for them the Board of Trade has
+to point out that by doing so we are taking the bread out of the mouths
+of our own people. Hence we arrive at the remarkable situation of
+starving Britons and Belgians looking hungrily through barbed wire
+fences at flourishing communities of jolly and well fed German prisoners
+of war (whose friendly hat wavings to me and my fellow passengers as I
+rush through Newbury Racecourse Station in the Great Western Express I
+hereby acknowledge publicly with all possible good feeling). I therefore
+for the present strongly recommend all Belgians who have made up their
+minds to flee to England, to pick up German uniforms on the battle
+fields and surrender to the British in the character of Uhlans. Their
+subsistence will then be secure until the war is over, as we dare not
+illtreat our prisoners lest the Germans should retaliate upon the
+British soldiers in their hands, even if we were all spiteful enough to
+desire to do it, as some of our baser sort have not been ashamed to
+propose.
+
+But the women and children, and the too young and the too old, cannot
+resort to this expedient. And though theoretically our own unemployed
+could be dressed in British uniforms and sent abroad with instructions
+to take refuge in neutral territory and be "interned" or to surrender to
+the first Uhlan patrol they met, yet it would be difficult to reduce
+this theory to practice, though the possibility is worth mentioning as a
+reduction to absurdity of the situation. As a matter of common sense "we
+should at once place all destitute Belgian refugees on the footing of
+prisoners of war, except that we need not post sentries to shoot them if
+they try to escape, nor surround them with barbed wire. Indeed these
+precautions are necessary in the case of the Germans rather to save
+their sense of honour whilst remaining here than to defeat any very
+strong longing on their part to return to the trenches.
+
+In a reasonable state of society there would be another difference. The
+Belgians would offer to work so as not to be a burden to us; whilst the
+German prisoner would say--as he actually does, by the way--"No: I am
+not here by my own will: if you open the door I shall go home and take
+myself off your hands; so I am in no way bound to work for you." As it
+is, our Trade Unions are up in arms at the slightest hint of either
+Belgian or German labour being employed when there is no shortage of
+English labour!"
+
+
+*The Minority Report*.
+
+All this exasperating anomaly and deadlock and breakdown would disappear
+if we had a proper system of provision for our own unemployed civilians
+(there are no unemployed soldiers: we do not discharge them between the
+battles). The Belgians would have found an organization of unemployment
+ready for them, and would have been provided for with our own
+unemployed, not as refugees, but simply as unemployed. How to do that
+need not be explained here. The problem was worked out by one of the
+hardest bits of thinking yet done in the Socialist movement, and set
+forth in the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws
+and the Relief of Distress, 1909. Our helplessness in the present
+emergency shews how very unwise we were to shelve that report.
+Unluckily, what with the wounded vanity of the majority of the
+Commission, who had been played off the stage by Mrs. Sidney Webb; the
+folly of the younger journalists of the advanced guard, who had just
+then rediscovered Herbert Spencer's mare's nest of "the servile State,"
+and revolted with all the petulant anarchism of the literary profession
+against the ideal Interfering Female as typified in their heated
+imaginations by poor Mrs. Sidney Webb, who became the Aunt Sally of our
+young artists in stale anti-bureaucratic invective; and, above all, the
+mulishly silent refusal of our governing classes to see why the
+unemployed should not be simply left to starve, as they had always been
+(the Poor Law being worse than useless for so large a purpose), nothing
+was done; and there is consequently no machinery ready for dealing with
+the refugees. That is why we must treat them for the moment simply as
+unguarded prisoners of war.
+
+
+*The General Strike Against War.*
+
+But if the problem of unemployment among our own people becomes acute,
+we shall have to fall back on the Minority Report proposals or else run
+the risk of a revolt against the war. We have already counted on the
+chances of that revolt hampering Germany, just as Germany counted on the
+chances of its hampering Russia, The notion that the working classes can
+stop a war by a general international strike is never mentioned during
+the first rally to the national flag at the outbreak of a war; but it is
+there all the time, ready to break out again if the supplies of food and
+glory run short. Its gravity lies in its impracticability. If it were
+practicable, every sane man would advocate it. As it is, it might easily
+mean that British troops would be coercing British strikers at home when
+they should be fighting Potsdam abroad, thus producing a disastrous and
+detestable division of popular feeling in the face of the enemy.
+
+
+*The Disarmament Delusion.*
+
+Objections to the Western Pacifist settlement will come from several
+quarters, including the Pacifist quarters. Some of the best disposed
+parties will stumble over the old delusion of disarmament. They think it
+is the gun that matters. They are wrong: the gun matters very much when
+war breaks out; but what makes both war and the gun is the man behind
+them. And if that man really means the peace of the world to be kept, he
+will take care to have a gun to keep it with. The League of Peace must
+have a first-rate armament, or the League of War will very soon make
+mincemeat of it. The notion that the men of evil intent are to have all
+the weapons will not work. Theoretically, all our armaments should be
+pooled. But as we, the British Empire, will most certainly not pool our
+defenses with anyone, and as we have not the very smallest intention of
+disarming, and will go on building gun for gun and ship for ship in step
+with even our dearest friends if we see the least risk of our being left
+in a position of inferiority, we cannot with any countenance demand that
+other Powers shall do what we will not do ourselves. Our business is not
+to disable ourselves or anyone else, but to organize a balance of
+military power against war, whether made by ourselves or any other
+Power; and this can be done only by a combination of armed and fanatical
+Pacifists of all nations, not by a crowd of non-combatants wielding
+deprecations, remonstrances, and Christmas cards.
+
+
+*America's Example: War at a Year's Notice.*
+
+How far it will be possible to take these national armaments out of
+national control remains to be seen. Already America, who is as deeply
+demoralized by Capitalism as we are, though much less tainted with
+Militarism now that Colonel Roosevelt has lost his front seat, has
+pledged herself to several European States not to go to war with them
+until the matter under dispute has been in the hands of an international
+tribunal for a year. Now there is no military force on earth, nor likely
+to be, strong enough to prevent America from treating these agreements
+as Germany has just treated the 1839 Treaty guaranteeing the neutrality
+of Belgium. Therefore the Militarists declare that the agreements are
+not worth the scraps of paper they are written on. They always will
+footle in this way. They might as well say that because there are crimes
+which men can commit with legal impunity in spite of our haphazard
+criminal codes, men always do commit them. No doubt nations will do what
+it is to their interest to do. But because there is in every nation a
+set of noisy moral imbeciles who cannot see that nations have an
+overwhelming interest in creating and maintaining a tradition of
+international good faith, and honouring their promissory notes as
+scrupulously as the moral imbeciles pay their silly gambling debts and
+fight their foolish duels, we are not, I presume, going to discard every
+international guarantee except the howitzer. Why, the very Prussian
+Militarists themselves are reviling us for doing what their own
+Militarist preachers assumed as a matter of course that we should do:
+that is, attack Prussia without regard to the interests of European
+civilization when we caught her at a disadvantage between France and
+Russia. But we should have been ashamed to do that if she had not, by
+assuming that there was no such thing as shame (_alias_ conscience),
+terrified herself into attacking France and Belgium, when, of course, we
+were immediately ashamed not to defend them. This idiotic ignoring of
+the highest energies of the human soul, without the strenuous pressure
+of which the fabric of civilization--German civilization perhaps most of
+all--could not hold together for a single day, should really be treated
+in the asylums of Europe, not on battlefields.
+
+I conclude that we might all very well make a beginning by pledging
+ourselves as America has done to The Hague tribunal not to take up arms
+in any cause that has been less than a year under arbitration, and to
+treat any western Power refusing this pledge as an unpopular and
+suspicious member of the European club. To break such a pledge would be
+an act of brigandage; and the need for suppressing brigandage cannot be
+regarded as an open question.
+
+
+*The Security Will o' the Wisp.*
+
+It will be observed that I propose no guarantee of absolute security.
+Not being a sufferer from _delirium tremens_ I can live without it.
+Security is no doubt the Militarists' most seductive bait to catch the
+coward's vote. But their method makes security impossible, They
+undertook to secure the English in Egypt from an imaginary Islam rising
+by the Denshawai Horror, as a result of which nobody has ventured to
+suggest that we should trust the Egyptian army in this conflict, though
+India, having learnt from Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald that
+there are really anti-Militarists in England who regard Indians as
+fellow creatures, is actually rallying to us against the Prussian
+Junkers, who are, in Indian eyes, indistinguishable from the
+Anglo-Indians who call Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald
+traitors, and whose panicstricken denial of even a decent pretence of
+justice in the sedition trials is particularly unfortunate just now. We
+must always take risks; and we should never trade on the terror of
+death, nor forget that this wretchedest of all the trades is none the
+less craven because it can so easily be gilt with romance and heroism
+and solemn national duty and patriotism and the like by persons whose
+superficial literary and oratorical talent covers an abyss of
+Godforsaken folly.
+
+
+*The Only Real World Danger.*
+
+The one danger before us that nothing can avert but a general raising of
+human character through the deliberate cultivation and endowment of
+democratic virtue without consideration of property and class, is the
+danger created by inventing weapons capable of destroying civilization
+faster than we produce men who can be trusted to use them wisely. At
+present we are handling them like children. Now children are very
+pretty, very lovable, very affectionate creatures (sometimes); and a
+child can make nitroglycerine or chloride of nitrogen as well as a man
+if it is taught to do so. We have sense enough not to teach it; but we
+do teach the grown-up children. We actually accompany that dangerous
+technical training with solemn moral lessons in which the most
+destructive use of these forces at the command of kings and capitalists
+is inculcated as heroism, patriotism, glory and all the rest of it. It
+is all very well to fire cannons at the Kaiser for doing this; but we do
+it ourselves. It is therefore undeniably possible that a diabolical
+rhythm may be set up in which civilization will rise periodically to the
+point at which explosives powerful enough to destroy it are discovered,
+and will then be shattered and thrown back to a fresh start with a few
+starving and ruined survivors. H.G. Wells and Anatole France have
+pre-figured that result in fiction; and I cannot deny the strength of
+its probability; for if England and Germany can find no better way of
+celebrating their arrival at the highest point of civilization yet
+attained than setting out to blow one another to fragments with
+fulminates, it would seem that the peace of the neutral States is the
+result, not of their being more civilized, but less heavily armed. And
+when we see that the effect of the enterprise is not to redouble civil
+vigilance and stimulate the most alert and jealous political criticism,
+but on the contrary to produce an assumption that every constitutional
+safeguard must be suspended until the war is over, and that every silly
+tyrannical expedient such as censorship of the press, martial law, and
+the like, will begin to work good instead of evil the moment men take to
+murdering one another, it must be admitted that the prospect is not too
+hopeful. Our only consolation is that civilization has survived very
+destructive wars before, mostly because they have produced effects not
+only unintended but violently objected to by the people who made them.
+In 1870, for instance, Napoleon III. can hardly have intended his own
+overthrow and return to exile in England; nor did Bismarck aim at the
+restoration of French Republicanism and the formation of an
+Anglo-Franco-Russian alliance against Prussia. Several good things may
+come out of the present war if it leaves anybody alive to enjoy them.
+
+
+*The Church and the War.*
+
+And now, where in our society is the organ whose function it should be
+to keep us constantly in mind that, as Lassalle said, "the sword is
+never right," and to shudder with him at the fact that "the Lie is a
+European Power"? In no previous war have we struck that top note of keen
+irony, the closing of the Stock Exchange and not of the Church. The
+pagans were more logical: they closed the Temple of Peace when they drew
+the sword. We turn our Temples of Peace promptly into temples of war,
+and exhibit our parsons as the most pugnacious characters in the
+community. I venture to affirm that the sense of scandal given by this
+is far deeper and more general than the Church thinks, especially among
+the working classes, who are apt either to take religion seriously or
+else to repudiate it and criticize it closely. When a bishop at the
+first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock around
+the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically, necessarily,
+manfully, rightly; but that does not justify him in pretending that
+there has been no change, and that Christ is, in effect, Mars. The
+straightforward course, and the one that would serve the Church best in
+the long run, would be to close our professedly Christian Churches the
+moment war is declared by us, and reopen them only on the signing of the
+treaty of peace. No doubt to many of us the privation thus imposed would
+be far worse than the privation of small change, of horses and motor
+cars, of express trains, and all the other prosaic inconveniences of
+war. But would it be worse than the privation of faith, and the horror
+of the soul, wrought by the spectacle of nations praying to their common
+Father to assist them in sabring and bayonetting and blowing one another
+to pieces with explosives that are also corrosives, and of the Church
+organizing this monstrous paradox instead of protesting against it?
+Would it make less atheists or more? Atheism is not a simple homogeneous
+phenomenon. There is the youthful atheism with which every able modern
+mind begins: an atheism that clears the soul of superstitions and
+terrors and servilities and base compliances and hypocrisies, and lets
+in the light of heaven. And there is the atheism of despair and
+pessimism: the sullen cry with which so many of us at this moment,
+looking on blinded deafened maimed wrecks that were once able-bodied
+admirable lovable men, and on priests blessing war, and newspapers and
+statesmen and exempt old men hounding young men on to it, are saying "I
+know now there is no God." What has the Church in its present attitude
+to set against this crushed acceptance of darkness except the quaint but
+awful fact that there are cruder people on whom horrifying calamities
+have just the opposite effect, because they seem the work of some power
+so overwhelming in its malignity that it must be worshipped because it
+is mighty? Let the Church beware how it plays to that gallery. If all
+the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased rolling
+they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war
+is a famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.
+
+But as I know quite well that the Churches are not going to do anything
+of the kind, I must not close on a note which might to some readers
+imply that I hope, as some highly respected friends of mine do, to build
+a pacific civilization on the ruins of the vast ecclesiastical
+organizations which have never yet been able to utter the truth, because
+they have had to speak to the poor according to their ignorance and
+credulity, and to the rich according to their power. When I read that
+the icon of the Russian peasant is a religious force that will prevail
+over the materialism of Helmholtz and Haeckel, I have to contain myself
+as best I can in the face of an assumption by a modern educated European
+which implies that the Irish peasants who tied scraps of rag to the
+trees over their holy wells and paid for masses to shorten the stay of
+their dead relatives in purgatory, were more enlightened than their
+countryman Tyndall, the Lucretian materialist, and to ask whether the
+Russian peasant may not find his religious opinions somewhat neutralized
+by his alliance with the countries of Paul Bert and Combes, of Darwin
+and Almroth Wright. If we are to keep up any decent show of talking
+sense on this point we must begin by recognizing that the lines of
+battle in this war cut right across all the political and sectarian
+lines in Europe, except the line between our Socialist future and our
+Commercialist past. Materialist France, metaphysical Germany,
+muddle-headed English, Byzantine Russia may form what military
+combinations they please: the one thing they cannot form is a Crusade;
+and all attempts to represent this war as anything higher or more
+significant philosophically or politically or religiously for our
+Junkers and our Tommies than a quite simple primitive contest of the
+pugnacity that bullies and the pugnacity that will not be bullied are
+foredoomed to the derision of history. However far-reaching the
+consequences of the war may be, we in England are fighting to shew the
+Prussians that they shall not trample on us nor on our neighbors if we
+can help it, and that if they are fools enough to make their fighting
+efficiency the test of civilization, we can play that game as
+destructively as they. That is simple, and the truth, and by far the
+jolliest and most inspiring ground to recruit on. It stirs the blood and
+stiffens the back as effectively and quickly as hypocrisy and cant and
+humbug sour and trouble and discourage. But it will not carry us farther
+than the end of the fight. We cannot go on fighting forever, or even for
+very long, whatever Lord Kitchener may think; and win, lose, or tie, the
+parties, when the fight is over, must fall back on their civil wisdom
+and political foresight for a settlement of the terms on which we are to
+live happily together ever after. The practicable conditions of a stable
+comity of nations cannot be established by the bayonet, which settles
+nothing but the hash of those who rely on it. They are to found, as I
+have already explained, in the substitution for our present Militarist
+kingdoms of a system of democratic units delimited by community of
+language, religion, and habit; grouped in federations of united States
+when their extent makes them politically unwieldy; and held against war
+by the bond of international Socialism, the only ground upon which the
+identity of interest between all workers never becomes obscured.
+
+
+*The Death of Jaures.*
+
+By far the greatest calamity wrought by the war has been the death of
+Jaurès, who was worth more to France and to Europe than ten army corps
+and a hundred Archdukes. I once proposed a press law that might have
+saved him. It was that every article printed in a newspaper should bear
+not only the name and address of the writer, but the sum paid him for
+the contribution. If the wretched dupe who assassinated Jaurès had known
+that the trashy articles on the Three Years Law he had been reading were
+not the voice of France in peril, but the ignorant scribbling of some
+poor devil at his wits' end to earn three francs, he would hardly have
+thrown away his own life to take that of the greatest statesman his
+country has produced since Mirabeau. It is hardly too much to say that
+this ghastly murder and the appalling war that almost eclipsed its
+horror, is the revenge of the sweated journalist on a society so silly
+that though it will not allow a man to stuff its teeth without
+ascertained qualifications for the task, it allows anyone, no matter how
+poor, how ignorant, how untrained, how imbecile, to stuff its brains
+without even taking the trouble to ask his name. When we interfere with
+him and his sweaters at all, we interfere by way of appointing a
+censorship to prevent him from telling, not lies, however mischievous
+and dangerous to our own people abroad, but the truth. To be a liar and
+a brewer of bad blood is to be a privileged person under our censorship,
+which, so far, has proceeded by no discoverable rule except that of
+concealing from us everything that the Germans must know lest the
+Germans should find it out.
+
+
+*Socialism Alone Keeps Its Head.*
+
+Socialism has lost its leader on the Continent; but it is solid and
+representative on the main point; it loathes war; and it sees clearly
+that war is always waged by working men who have no quarrel, but on the
+contrary a supreme common interest. It steadily resists the dangerous
+export of capital by pressing the need for uncommercial employment of
+capital at home: the only practicable alternative. It knows that war, on
+its romantic side, is "the sport of kings": and it concludes that we had
+better get rid of kings unless they can kill their tedium with more
+democratic amusements. It notes the fact that though the newspapers
+shout at us that these battles on fronts a hundred miles long, where the
+slain outnumber the total forces engaged in older campaigns, are the
+greatest battles known to history, such machine-carnages bore us so
+horribly that we are ashamed of our ingratitude to our soldiers in not
+being able to feel about them as about comparatively trumpery scraps
+like Waterloo or even Inkerman and Balaclava. It never forgets that as
+long as higher education, culture, foreign travel, knowledge of the
+world: in short, the qualification for comprehension of foreign affairs
+and intelligent voting, is confined to one small class, leaving the
+masses in poverty, narrowness, and ignorance, and being itself
+artificially cut off at their expense from the salutary pressure of the
+common burden which alone keeps men unspoilt and sane, so long will that
+small class be forced to obtain the support of the masses for its wars
+by flattering proclamations of the national virtues and indignant
+denunciations of the villanies of the enemy, with, if necessary, a
+stiffening of deliberate falsehood and a strenuous persecution of any
+attempt at inconvenient truthtelling. Here there is no question of the
+Junker being a monster. You must rule ignoramuses according to their
+ignorance. The priest must work bogus miracles for them; the man of
+science must offer them magical cures and prophylactics; the barrister
+must win their verdict by sophistries, false pathos, and appeals to
+their prejudices; the army and navy must dazzle them with pageants and
+bands and thundering salvos and romantic tales; the king must cut
+himself off from humanity and become an idol. There is no escape whilst
+such classes exist. Mahomet, the boldest prophet that ever threw down
+the gage of the singleness and supremacy of God to a fierce tribe of
+warriors who worshipped stones as devotedly as we worship dukes and
+millionaires, could not govern them by religious truth, and was forced
+to fall back on revolting descriptions of hell and the day of judgment,
+invented by him for the purpose. What else could he do if his people
+were not to be abandoned to their own destruction? If it is an axiom of
+diplomacy that the people must not be told the truth, that is not in the
+least because, for example, Sir Edward Grey has a personal taste for
+mendacity; it is a necessity imposed by the fact that the people are
+incapable of the truth. In the end, lying becomes a reflex action with
+diplomatists; and we cannot even issue a penny bluebook without
+beginning it with the quite unprovoked statement that "no crime has ever
+aroused deeper or more general horror throughout Europe" than the
+assassination of the Archduke. The real tragedy was that the violent
+death of a fellow creature should have aroused so little.
+
+
+*Divided Against Ourselves*.
+
+This state of things would be bad enough if the governing classes really
+sought the welfare of the governed, and were deceiving them for their
+own good. But they are doing nothing of the sort. They are using their
+power secondarily, no doubt, to uphold the country in which they have so
+powerful and comfortable a position; but primarily their object is to
+maintain that position by the organized legal robbery of the poor; and
+to that end they would join hands with the German Junkers as against the
+working class in Germany and England as readily as Bismarck joined hands
+with Thiers to suppress the Commune of Paris. And even if this were not
+so, nothing would persuade the working classes that those who sweat them
+ruthlessly in commercial enterprise are any more considerate in public
+affairs, especially when there is any question of war, by which much
+money can be made for rich people who deal in the things most wanted and
+most highly paid for in war time: to wit, armaments and money. The
+direct interest of our military caste in war accounts for a good deal;
+but at least it involves personal risk and hardship and bereavement to
+the members of that caste. But the capitalist who has shares in
+explosives and cannons and soldiers' boots runs no risk and suffers no
+hardship; whilst as to the investor pure and simple, all that happens to
+him is that he finds the unearned income obtainable on Government
+security larger than ever. Victory to the capitalists of Europe means
+that they can not only impose on the enemy a huge indemnity, but lend
+him the money to pay it with whilst the working classes produce and pay
+both principal and interest.
+
+As long as we have that state of things, we shall have wars and secret
+and mendacious diplomacy. And this is one of many overwhelming reasons
+for building the State on equality of income, because without it
+equality of status and general culture is impossible. Democracy without
+equality is a delusion more dangerous than frank oligarchy and
+autocracy. And without Democracy there is no hope of peace, no chance of
+persuading ourselves that the sacredness of civilization will protect it
+any more than the sacredness of the cathedral of Rheims has protected
+it, not against Huns and Vandals, but against educated German gentlemen.
+
+
+*Rheims.*
+
+Commercial wage-slaves can never reproduce that wonderful company of
+sculptured figures that made Rheims unlike any other place in the world;
+and if they are now destroyed, or shortly about to be, it does not
+console me that we still have--perhaps for a few days longer only--the
+magical stained glass of Chartres and the choir of Beauvais. We tell
+ourselves that the poor French people must feel as we should feel if we
+had lost Westminster Abbey. Rheims was worth ten Westminster Abbeys; and
+where it has gone the others may just as easily go too. Let us not sneer
+at the German pretension to culture: let us face the fact that the
+Germans are just as cultured as we are (to say the least) and that war
+has nevertheless driven them to do these things as irresistibly as it
+will drive us to do similar things tomorrow if we find ourselves
+attacking a town in which the highest point from which our positions can
+be spotted by an observer with a field glass in one hand and a telephone
+in the other is the towering roof of the cathedral. Also let us be
+careful how we boast of our love of medieval art to people who well
+know, from the protests of Ruskin and Morris, that in times of peace we
+have done things no less mischievous and irreparable for no better
+reason than that the Mayor's brother or the Dean's uncle-in-law was a
+builder in search of a "restoration" job. If Rheims cathedral were taken
+from the Church to-morrow and given to an English or French joint stock
+company, everything transportable in it would presently be sold to
+American collectors, and the site cleared and let out in building sites.
+That is the way to make it "pay" commercially.
+
+
+*The Fate of The Glory Drunkard.*
+
+But our problem is how to make Commercialism itself bankrupt. We must
+beat Germany, not because the Militarist hallucination and our
+irresolution forced Germany to make this war, so desperate for her, at a
+moment so unfavourable to herself, but because she has made herself the
+exponent and champion in the modern world of the doctrine that military
+force is the basis and foundation of national greatness, and military
+conquest the method by which the nation of the highest culture can
+impose that culture on its neighbors. Now the reason I have permitted
+myself to call General Von Bernhardi a madman is that he lays down quite
+accurately the conditions of this military supremacy without perceiving
+that what he is achieving is a _reductio ad absurdum_. For he declares
+as a theorist what Napoleon found in practice, that you can maintain the
+Militarist hold over the imaginations of the people only by feeding them
+with continual glory. You must go from success to success; the moment
+you fail you are lost; for you have staked everything on your power to
+conquer, for the sake of which the people have submitted to your tyranny
+and endured the sufferings and paid the cost your military operations
+entailed. Napoleon conquered and conquered and conquered; and yet, when
+he had won more battles than the maddest Prussian can ever hope for, he
+had to go on fighting just as if he had never won anything at all. After
+exhausting the possible he had to attempt the impossible and go to
+Moscow. He failed; and from that moment he had better have been a
+Philadelphia Quaker than a victor of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena and
+Wagrarn. Within a short breathing time after that morning when he stood
+outside Leipsic, whistling _Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre_ whilst his
+flying army gasped its last in the river or fled under a hail of bullets
+from enemies commanded by generals without a tenth of his ability or
+prestige, we find him disguised as a postillion, cowering abjectly
+behind the door of a carriage whilst the French people whom he had
+crammed with glory for a quarter of a century were seeking to tear him
+limb from limb. His success had made him the enemy of every country
+except France: his failure made him the enemy of the human race. And
+that was why Europe rose up finally and smashed him, although the
+English Government which profited by that operation oppressed the
+English people for thirty years afterwards more sordidly than Napoleon
+would have oppressed them, and its Allies replaced him on the throne of
+France by an effete tyrant not worthy to unlace his shoe latchet.
+Nothing can finally redeem Militarism. When even genius itself takes
+that path its end is still destruction. When mere uppishness takes it
+the end is not changed, though it may be reached more precipitately and
+disastrously.
+
+
+*The Kaiser.*
+
+Prussia has talked of that path for many years as the one down which its
+destiny leads it. Its ruler, with the kid gloves he called mailed fists
+and the high class tailoring he called shining armour, did much of the
+talking, though he is in practice a most peaceful teetotaller, as many
+men with their imaginations full of the romance of war are. He had a
+hereditary craze for playing at soldiers; and he was and is a naïve
+suburban snob, as the son of The Englishwoman would naturally be,
+talking about "the Hohenzollerns" exactly as my father's people in
+Dublin used to talk about "the Shaws." His stage walk, familiar through
+the cinematograph, is the delight of romantic boys, and betrays his own
+boyish love of the _Paradeschritt_. It is frightful to think of the
+powers which Europe, in its own snobbery, left in the hands of this
+Peter Pan; and appalling as the results of that criminal levity have
+been, yet, being by no means free from his romantic follies myself, I do
+not feel harshly toward Peter, who, after all, kept the peace for over
+twenty-six years. In the end his talk and his games of soldiers in
+preparation for a toy conquest of the world frightened his neighbours
+into a league against him; and that league has now caught him in just
+such a trap as his strategists were laying for his neighbours. We please
+ourselves by pretending that he did not try to extricate himself, and
+forced the war on us; but that is not true. When he realized his peril
+he tried hard enough; but when he saw that it was no use he accepted the
+situation and dashed at his enemies with an infatuate courage not
+unworthy of the Hohenzollern tradition. Blinded as he was by the false
+ideals of his class, it was the best he could do; for there is always a
+chance for a brave and resolute warrior, even when his back is not to
+the wall but to the Russians.
+
+That means that we have to conquer him and not to revile him and strike
+moral attitudes. His victory over British and French Democracy would be
+a victory of Militarism over civilization; it would literally shut the
+gates of mercy on mankind. Leave it to our official fools and
+governesses to lecture the Kaiser, and to let loose Turcos and Ghoorkas
+on him: a dangerous precedent. Let Thomas Atkins, Patrick Murphy, Sandy
+McAlister, and Pitou Dupont fight him under what leadership they can
+get, until honour is satisfied, simply because if St. George does not
+slay the dragon the world will be, as a friend of mine said of Europe
+the other day, "no place for a gentleman."
+
+
+*Recapitulation.*
+
+1. The war should be pushed vigorously, not with a view to a final
+crushing of the German army between the Anglo-French combination and the
+Russian millions, but to the establishment of a decisive military
+superiority by the Anglo-French combination alone. A victory
+unattainable without Russian aid would be a defeat for Western European
+Liberalism; Germany would be beaten not by us, but by a Militarist
+autocracy worse than her own. By sacrificing Prussian Poland and the
+Slav portions of the Austrian Empire Germany and Austria could satisfy
+Russia, and merge Austria and Germany into a single German State, which
+would then dominate France and England, having ascertained that they
+could not conquer her without Russia's aid. We may fairly allow Russia
+to conquer Austria if she can; that is her natural part of the job. But
+if we two cannot without Russian help beat Potsdam, or at least hold her
+up in such a stalemate as will make it clear that it is impossible for
+her to subjugate us, then we shall simply have to "give Germany best"
+and depend on an alliance with America for our place in the sun.
+
+2. We cannot smash or disable Germany, however completely we may defeat
+her, because we can do that only by killing her women; and it is
+trifling to pretend that we are capable of any such villainy. Even to
+embarrass her financially by looting her would recoil on ourselves, as
+she is one of our commercial customers and one of our most frequently
+visited neighbors. We must, if we can, drive her from Belgium without
+compromise. France may drive her from Alsace and Lorraine. Russia may
+drive her from Poland. She knew when she opened fire that these were the
+stakes in the game; and we are bound to support France and Russia until
+they are won or lost, unless a stalemate reduces the whole method of
+warfare to absurdity. Austria, too, knew that the Slav part of her
+empire was at stake. By winning these stakes the Allies will wake the
+Kaiser from his dream of a Holy Teuton Empire with Prussia as the Head
+of its Church, and teach him to respect us; but that once done, we must
+not allow our camp followers to undo it all again by spiteful
+humiliations and exactions which could not seriously cripple Germany,
+and would make bad blood between us for a whole generation, to our own
+great inconvenience, unhappiness, disgrace, and loss. We and France have
+to live with Germany after the war; and the sooner we make up our mind
+to do it generously, the better. The word after the fight must be _sans
+rancune_; for without peace between France, Germany, and England, there
+can be no peace in the world.
+
+3. War, as a school of character and a nurse of virtue, must be formally
+shut up and discharged by all the belligerents when this war is over. It
+is quite true that ill-bred and swinish nations can be roused to a
+serious consideration of their position and their destiny only by
+earthquakes, pestilences, famines, comets' tails, Titanic shipwrecks,
+and devastating wars, just as it is true that African chiefs cannot make
+themselves respected unless they bury virgins alive beneath the
+doorposts of their hut-palaces, and Tartar Khans find that the
+exhibition of a pyramid of chopped-off heads is a short way to impress
+their subjects with a convenient conception of their divine right to
+rule. Ivan the Terrible did undoubtedly make his subjects feel very
+serious indeed; and stupid people are apt to believe that this sort of
+terror-stiffened seriousness is virtue. It is not. Any person who should
+set-to deliberately to contrive artificial earthquakes, scuttle liners,
+and start epidemics with a view to the moral elevation of his
+countrymen, would very soon find himself in the dock. Those who plan
+wars with the same object should be removed with equal firmness to
+Hanwell or Bethlehem Hospital. A nation so degraded as to be capable of
+responding to no higher stimulus than that of horror had better be
+exterminated, by Prussian war lords or anyone else foolish enough to
+waste powder on them instead of leaving them to perish of their own
+worthlessness.
+
+4. Neither England nor Germany must claim any moral superiority in the
+negotiations. Both were engaged for years in a race for armaments. Both
+indulged and still indulge in literary and oratorical provocation. Both
+claimed to be "an Imperial race" ruling other races by divine right.
+Both shewed high social and political consideration to parties and
+individuals who openly said that the war had to come. Both formed
+alliances to reinforce them for that war. The case against Germany for
+violating the neutrality of Belgium is of no moral value to England
+because (_a_) England has allowed the violation of the Treaty of Paris
+by Russia (violation of the neutrality of the Black Sea and closing of
+the free port of Batoum), and the high-handed and scandalous violation
+of the Treaty of Berlin by Austria (seizure of Bosnia and Herzegovina),
+without resorting to arms or remedying the aggression in any other way;
+(_b_) because we have fully admitted that we should have gone to war in
+defence of France in any case, whether the Germans came through Belgium
+or not, and refused to give the German Ambassador any assurance that we
+should remain neutral if the Germans sacrificed the military advantage
+of attacking through Belgium for the sake of avoiding a war with us;
+(_c_) that the apparent moral superiority of the pledge given by France
+and England to respect Belgian neutrality is illusory in face of the
+facts that France and England stood to gain enormously, and the Germans
+to lose correspondingly, by confining the attack on France to the
+heavily fortified Franco-German frontier, and that as France and England
+knew they would be invited by the Belgians to enter Belgium if the
+Germans invaded it, the neutrality of Belgium had, as far as they were
+concerned, no real existence; (_d_) that as all treaties are valid only
+_rebus sic stantibus_, and the state of things which existed at the date
+of the Treaty of London (1839) had changed so much since then (Belgium
+is no longer menaced by France, at whom the treaty was aimed, and has
+acquired important colonies, for instance) that in 1870 Gladstone could
+not depend on it, and resorted to a special temporary treaty not now in
+force, the technical validity of the 1839 treaty is extremely doubtful;
+(_e_) that even if it be valid its breach is not a _casus belli_ unless
+the parties for reasons of their own choose to make it so; and (_f_)
+that the German national peril pleaded by the Imperial Chancellor in his
+Peer Gynt speech (the _durchhauen_ one), when he rashly but frankly
+threw away the strong technical case just stated and admitted a breach
+of international law, was so great according to received Militarist
+ideas in view of the Russian mobilization, that it is impossible for us
+or any other Militarist-ridden Power to feel sure ourselves, much less
+to convince others, that we should have been any more scrupulous in the
+like extremity. It must be added that nothing can extenuate the enormity
+of the broad fact that an innocent country has been horribly devastated
+because her guilty neighbors formed two huge explosive combinations
+against one another instead of establishing the peace of Europe, but
+that is an offence against a higher law than any recorded on diplomatic
+scraps of paper, and when it comes to judgment the outraged conscience
+of humanity will not have much patience with the naughty child's plea of
+"he began it."
+
+5. Militarism must not be treated as a disease peculiar to Prussia. It
+is rampant in England; and in France it has led to the assassination of
+her greatest statesman. If the upshot of the war is to be regarded and
+acted upon simply as a defeat of German Militarism by Anglo-French
+Militarism, then the war will not only have wrought its own immediate
+evils of destruction and demoralization, but will extinguish the last
+hope that we have risen above the "dragons of the prime that tare each
+other in their slime." We have all been equally guilty in the past. It
+has been steadily assumed for years that the Militarist party is the
+gentlemanly party. Its opponents have been ridiculed and prosecuted in
+England; hanged, flogged or exiled in Russia; and imprisoned in France:
+they have been called traitors, cads, cranks, and so forth: they have
+been imprisoned for "bad taste" and for sedition whilst the most
+virulent sedition against Democracy and the most mutinous military
+escapades in the commissioned ranks have been tolerated obsequiously,
+until finally the practical shelving of Liberal Constitutionalism has
+provoked both in France and England a popular agitation of serious
+volume for the supersession of parliament by some sort of direct action
+by the people, called Syndicalism. In short Militarism, which is nothing
+but State Anarchism, has been carried to such a pitch that it has been
+imitated and countered by a movement of popular Anarchism, and has
+exploded in a European war because the Commercialist Governments of
+Europe had no faith in the effective guidance of any modern State by
+higher considerations than Lord Roberts's "will to conquer," the weight
+of the Kaiser's mailed fist, and the interest of the Bourses and Stock
+Exchanges. Unless we are all prepared to fight Militarism at home as
+well as abroad, the cessation of hostilities will last only until the
+belligerents have recovered from their exhaustion.
+
+6. It had better be admitted on our side that as to the conduct of the
+war there is no trustworthy evidence that the Germans have committed any
+worse or other atrocities than those which are admitted to be inevitable
+in war or accepted as part of military usage by the Allies. By "making
+examples" of towns, and seizing irresponsible citizens as hostages and
+shooting them for the acts of armed civilians over whom they could exert
+no possible control, the Germans have certainly pushed these usages to a
+point of Terrorism which is hardly distinguishable from the deliberate
+murder of non-combatants; but as the Allies have not renounced such
+usages, nor ceased to employ them ruthlessly in their dealings with the
+hill tribes and fellaheen and Arabs with whom they themselves have to
+deal (to say nothing of the notorious domestic Terrorism of the Russian
+Government), they cannot claim superior humanity. It is therefore waste
+of time for the pot to call the kettle black. Our outcry against the
+Germans for sowing the North Sea with mines was followed too closely by
+the laying of a mine field there by ourselves to be revived without
+flagrant Pharisaism. The case of Rheims cathedral also fell to the
+ground as completely as a good deal of the building itself when it was
+stated that the French had placed a post of observation on the roof.
+Whether they did or not, all military experts were aware that an officer
+neglecting to avail himself of the cathedral roof in this way, or an
+opposing officer hestitating to fire on the cathedral so used, would
+have been court-martialed in any of the armies engaged. The injury to
+the cathedral must therefore be suffered as a strong hint from
+Providence that though we can have glorious wars or glorious cathedrals
+we cannot have both.
+
+7. To sum up, we must remember that if this war does not make an end of
+war in the west, our allies of to-day may be our enemies of to-morrow,
+as they are of yesterday, and our enemies of to-day our allies of
+to-morrow as they are of yesterday; so that if we aim merely at a fresh
+balance of military power, we are as likely as not to negotiate our own
+destruction. We must use the war to give the _coup de grace_ to medieval
+diplomacy, medieval autocracy, and anarchic export of capital, and make
+its conclusion convince the world that Democracy is invincible, and
+Militarism a rusty sword that breaks in the hand. We must free our
+soldiers, and give them homes worth fighting for. And we must, as the
+old phrase goes, discard the filthy rags of our righteousness, and fight
+like men with everything, even a good name, to win, inspiring and
+encouraging ourselves with definite noble purposes (abstract nobility
+butters no parsnips) to face whatever may be the price of proving that
+war cannot conquer us, and that he who dares not appeal to our
+conscience has nothing to hope from our terrors.
+
+
+
+
+*"Shaw's Nonsense About Belgium"*
+
+By Arnold Bennett.
+
+Written for THE NEW YORK TIMES.
+
+
+Mr. Bernard Shaw's "Common Sense About the War" is the talk of the town,
+and it deserves to be. One of its greatest values is its courage, for in
+it Shaw says many things no one else would have dared to say. It
+therefore, by breaking the unearthly silence on certain aspects of the
+situation, perhaps inaugurates a new and healthier period of discussion
+and criticism on such subjects as recruiting, treatment of soldiers and
+sailors' dependents, secret diplomacy, militarism, Junkerism, churches,
+Russia, peace terms, and disarmament. It contains the most magnificent,
+brilliant, and convincing common sense that could possibly be uttered.
+No citizen, I think, could rise from the perusal of this tract with a
+mind unilluminated or opinions unmodified. Hence everybody ought to read
+it, though everybody will not be capable of appreciating the profoundest
+parts of it.
+
+Mixed up with the tremendous common sense, however, is a considerable
+and unusual percentage of that perverseness, waywardness, and
+arlequinading which are apparently an essential element of Mr. Shaw's
+best work. This is a disastrous pity, having regard to the immense
+influence and vogue of Shaw, not only in Germany, but in America, and
+the pity is more tragic as Shaw has been most absurd about the very
+matter which most Englishmen regard as most important, namely, Great
+Britain's actual justification for going to war.
+
+
+*Shaw's Admitted Prejudice.*
+
+Mr. Shaw begins by conceiving the possibility of his being blinded by
+prejudice or perversity, and admits his capacity for criticising England
+with a certain slight malicious taste for taking the conceit out of her.
+Seemingly he belongs to that numerous class who think that to admit a
+fault is to excuse it. As a highwayman might say before taking your
+purse, "Now, I admit, I have a certain slight taste for thieving," and
+expect you to smile forgiveness of his depredation, Shaw's bias is
+evident wherever he discusses the action and qualities of Great Britain.
+Thus he contrasts Bernhardi's brilliant with our own very dull
+militarists' facts, the result being that the intense mediocrity of
+Bernhardi leaps to the eye on every page, and that events have
+thoroughly discredited all his political and many of his military ideas,
+whereas we possess militarists of first-class quality.
+
+Naturally, Shaw calls England muddle-headed. Yet of late nothing has
+been less apparent than muddle-headednes. Of British policy, Shaw says
+that since the Continent generally regards us as hypocritical, we must
+be hypocritical. He omits to say that the Continent generally, and
+Germany in particular, regards our policy and our diplomacy as extremely
+able and clear-sighted. The unscrupulous cleverness of Britain is one of
+Germany's main themes.
+
+These are minor samples of Mr. Shaw's caprices. In discussing the origin
+of the war Mr. Shaw's aim is to prove that all the great powers are
+equally to blame. He goes far back and accuses Great Britain of
+producing the first page of Bernhardian literature in the anonymous
+pamphlet "The Battle of Dorking." He admits in another passage that the
+note of this pamphlet was mainly defensive. He is constantly thus making
+intrenchments for himself in case of forced retirement, and there is in
+his article almost nothing unjust against Great Britain that is not
+ingeniously contradicted or mitigated elsewhere.
+
+
+*Great Britain's War Literature.*
+
+Beginning with "The Battle of Dorking" and ending with H.G. Well's "War
+in the Air," one of the most disturbing and effective warnings against
+militarism ever written, he sees simply that Great Britain has produced
+threatening and provocative militarist literature comparable to
+Germany's. No grounds exist for such a contention. There are militarists
+in all countries, but there are infinitely more in Germany than in any
+other country. The fact is notorious. The fact is also notorious that
+the most powerful, not the most numerous, party in Germany wanted the
+war. It would be as futile to try to prove that Ireland did not want
+home rule as that Germany did not want war. As for a war literature,
+bibliographical statistics show, I believe, that in the last ten years
+Germany has published seven thousand books or pamphlets about war. No
+one but a German or a Shaw, in a particularly mischievous mood, would
+seek to show that Great Britain is responsible for the war fever. It
+simply is not so.
+
+Mr. Shaw urges that we all armed together. Of course we did. When one
+nation publicly turns bellicose the rest must copy her preparations. If
+Great Britain could live this century over again she would do over again
+what she actually did, because common sense would not permit her to do
+otherwise. The admitted fact that some Britons are militarists does not
+in the slightest degree impair the rightness or sagacity of our policy.
+If one member of a family happens to go to the bad and turn burglar,
+therein is no reason why the family mansion should not be insured
+against burglary.
+
+Mr. Shaw proceeds to what he calls the diplomatic history of the war.
+His notion of historical veracity may be judged from his description of
+the Austrian ultimatum to Servia as an escapade of a dotard. He puts the
+whole blame of it on Franz Josef, and yet he must know quite well that
+Germany has admitted even to her own subjects that Austria asked
+Germany's opinion about her policy and obtained Germany's approval
+before delivering the ultimatum. [Official German pamphlet "Reasons for
+the War with Russia," August, 1914.] There is no word in Mr. Shaw's
+diplomatic history of the repeated efforts toward peace made by Great
+Britain and scotched by Germany. On the contrary, with astounding
+audacity and disingenuousness, he tries to make it appear that
+suggestions for peace were offered by Germany and rejected by Great
+Britain. Once more it simply was not so.
+
+
+*Defense of Sir Edward Grey.*
+
+Mr. Shaw's paraphrase of Document 17 in the British diplomatic
+dispatches is a staggering travesty. So far as I can see it bears no
+relation to the original. Further, he not only deplores that a liberal
+government should have an imperialist Foreign Secretary, but he accuses
+Sir Edward Grey of sacrificing his country's welfare to the interests of
+his party and committing a political crime in order not to incur the
+wrath of The Daily News and The Manchester Guardian. This is totally
+inexcusable. Let me not be misunderstood. I am not a liberal. I am an
+out-and-out radical. I foresee a cleavage in the Liberal Party, and when
+that cleavage comes I shall be on the extreme left wing. I entirely
+agree with Mr. Shaw's denunciation of secret diplomacy and undemocratic
+control of foreign policy. By every social tradition I should be in
+opposition to Sir Edward Grey, but I think Grey was the best Foreign
+Secretary that the Liberal Party could have chosen and that he worked
+well on the only possible plane, the plane of practicality. I am quite
+sure he is an honest man, and I strongly resent, as Englishmen of all
+opinions will resent, any imputation to the contrary.
+
+As for the undemocratic control of foreign policy, a strong point about
+our policy on the eve of the war is that it was dictated by public
+opinion. [See Grey's dispatch to the British Ambassador at Berlin, No.
+123.] Germany could have preserved peace by a single gesture addressed
+to Franz Josef. She did not want peace. Mr. Shaw said Sir Edward Grey
+ought to have shouted out at the start that if Germany fought we should
+fight. Sir Edward Grey had no authority to do so, and it would have been
+foolish to do so. Mr. Shaw also says Germany ought to have turned her
+whole army against Russia and left the western frontier to the care of
+the world's public opinion in spite of the military alliance by which
+France was bound to Russia. We have here an example of his aptitude for
+practical politics.
+
+
+*Was Belgium a Mere Excuse?*
+
+Let us now come to Belgium. Mr. Shaw protests needlessly that he holds
+no brief for small States as such, and he most vehemently denies that we
+are bound to knight errantry on their behalf. His objection to small
+States is that they are either incorrigibly bellicose or standing
+temptations to big powers. Outside the Balkans no small State is
+bellicose. All are eminently pacific. That they are a standing
+temptation to thieves is surely no reason for their destruction. If it
+is a reason Mr. Shaw ought to throw his watch down the drain.
+
+Mr. Shaw states that Belgium was a mere excuse for our going to war.
+That there was a vast deal more in the pre-war diplomacy than appears in
+the printed dispatches, or in any dispatches, I am as convinced as Mr.
+Shaw is, but I am equally convinced that so far as we are concerned
+there was nothing in diplomacy, however secret, to contradict our public
+attitude. The chief item not superficially apparent is that the
+diplomats knew all along that Germany wanted war and was doing all she
+could to obtain war on terms most favorable to herself. That our own
+interest coincided with our duty to Belgium did not by any means render
+our duty a mere excuse for action. If a burglar is making his way upward
+in the house where Mr. Shaw lives and Mr. Shaw comes down and collars
+him in the flat of a defenseless invalid below and hands him over to the
+police Mr. Shaw would not expect the police to say, "You are a
+hypocrite; you only seized the burglar because you feared he would come
+to you next." I stick to the burglar simile, because a burglar is just
+what Germany is.
+
+
+*The "Infamous Proposal" Phrase.*
+
+Mr. Shaw characterizes Mr. Asquith's phrase, "Germany's infamous
+proposal," as the "obvious barrister's claptrap." Once more this is
+totally inexcusable. I do not always see eye to eye with Mr. Asquith, I
+agree with Mr. Shaw that he has more than once sinned against democratic
+principles, but what has that to do with the point? My general
+impression of Mr. Asquith and general impression of this country is that
+Mr. Asquith, in addition to being a pretty good Liberal, is an honest
+man. His memorable speech containing the "infamous proposal" phrase was
+most positively a genuine emotional expression of his conviction and of
+the conviction of the whole country, and Mr. Shaw, a finished master of
+barrister's claptrap when he likes, has been merely scurrilous about it.
+Germany's proposal was infamous. Supposing that we had taken the Belgium
+point at Mr. Shaw's valuation of it, the "nonsense about Belgium," as he
+calls it, and refrained from war, what would have been the result? The
+result would have been that today we could not have looked one another
+in the face as we passed down the street.
+
+But Mr. Shaw is not content with arguing that the Belgium point was a
+mere excuse for us. He goes further and continually implies that there
+was no Belgium point. Every time he mentions the original treaty that
+established Belgian neutrality he puts after it in brackets, [date
+1839,] an obvious barrister's device, sarcastically to discredit the
+treaty because of its age. He omits to say that the chief clause in the
+treaty contains the word "perpetually." What is worse, he infers that by
+the mere process of years, as Belgium gradually made herself, civilized
+herself, enriched herself, and increased her stake in the world, her
+moral right to independence and freedom instead of being strengthened
+was somehow mysteriously weakened. The theory is monstrous, but if he
+does not mean that he means nothing.
+
+Further, he says that in 1870 Gladstone could not depend on the treaty
+of 1839 and resorted to a special temporary treaty not now in force, and
+that, therefore, technically the validity of the 1839 treaty is
+extremely doubtful. This twisting of facts throws a really sinister
+light upon the later developments of Mr. Shaw as a controversialist. The
+treaty of 1870 was, indeed, temporary, except in so far as it confirmed
+the treaty of 1839. Article 3 of the treaty of 1870 says it shall be
+binding on the contracting parties during the continuance of the war and
+for twelve months after, and then proceeds "and on the expiration of
+that time the independence and neutrality of Belgium will, so far as the
+high contracting parties are respectively concerned, continue to rest as
+heretofore on the quintuple treaty of 1839," (textual.)
+
+Mr. Shaw's manifesto is lengthy and it will no doubt be reprinted in
+book form. I repeat what I said in my first paragraph as to the major
+part of it, but I assert that the objectionable part of the manifesto is
+so objectionable in its flippancy, in its perversity, in its injustice,
+and in its downright inexactitude as to amount to a scandal. Mr. Shaw
+has failed to realize either his own importance or the importance and
+very grave solemnity of the occasion. The present is no hour for that
+disingenuous, dialectical bravura which might excusably relieve a
+domestic altercation. Before reprinting Mr. Shaw should, I suggest;
+seriously reconsider his position and rewrite.
+
+
+
+
+*"Bennett States the German Case"*
+
+By George Bernard Shaw.
+
+Letter to The Daily News of London.
+
+
+_To The Daily News, Sir:_
+
+In justice to the enemy I am bound to admit that Mr. Bennett's case,
+which is the German case, is a very strong one and that his ironic
+comment on the case against Germany, "We have here an example of Mr.
+Shaw's aptitude for practical politics," is a comment that the Kaiser
+will probably make and that the average "practical man" will make, too.
+
+Mr. Bennett, in saying that I am a simpleton to doubt that, if Germany
+had not attacked France, France would have attacked her, shows a much
+greater courage than he credits me with. That is Germany's contention,
+and if valid is her justification for dashing at any enemy who, as Mr.
+Bennett believes, was lying in wait to spring on her back when Russia
+had her by the throat. If Mr. Bennett is right, and I am a simpleton,
+there is nothing more to be said. The Imperial Chancellor's plea of "a
+state of necessity" is proved up to the hilt.
+
+I did not omit to say that Germany regards our policy and our diplomacy
+as extremely able and clear-sighted. I expressly and elaborately pointed
+that out. Mr. Bennett, being an Englishman, is so flattered by the
+apparent compliment from those clever Germans that he insists it is
+deserved. I, being an Irishman and, therefore, untouched by flattery,
+see clearly that what the Germans mean by able and clear-sighted is
+crafty, ruthless, unscrupulous, and directed to the deliberate and
+intentional destruction of Germany by a masterly diplomatic combination
+of Russia, France and Great Britain against her, and I defend the
+English and Sir Edward Grey in particular on the ground, first, that the
+British nation at large was wholly innocent of the combination, and,
+second, that even among diplomatists, guilty as most of them
+unquestionably were and openly as our Junkers--like the German
+ones--clamored for war with Germany, there was more muddle than
+Machiavelli about them, and that Sir Edward never completely grasped the
+situation or found out what he really was doing and even had a
+democratic horror of war.
+
+
+*Shaw's Excuses Scorned.*
+
+But Mr. Bennett will not have any of my excuses for his unhappy country.
+He will have it that the Germans are right in admiring Sir Edward as a
+modern Caesar Bogia, and that our militarist writers are "of first class
+quality," as contrasted with the "intense mediocrity" of poor Gen.
+Bernhardi.
+
+If Mr. Bennett had stopped there the Kaiser would send him the Iron
+Cross, but of course, like a true born Englishman, he goes on to deny
+indignantly that England has produced a militarist literature comparable
+to Germany and to affirm hotly that Mr. Asquith is an honest man whose
+bad arguments are "a genuine emotional expression of his convictions and
+that of the whole country," and that Sir Edward Grey is an honest man,
+and that he (Mr. Bennett) "strongly resents as Englishmen of all
+opinions will resent any imputation to the contrary"--just what I said
+he would say and that he entirely agrees with my denunciation of secret
+diplomacy and undemocratic control of foreign policy and that I am a
+perverse and wayward harlequin, mischievous, unveracious, scurrilous,
+monstrous, disingenuous, flippant, unjust, inexact, scandalous, and
+objectionable, and that on all points to which he takes exception and a
+good many more I am so magnificent, brilliant, and convincing that no
+citizen could rise from perusing me without being illuminated.
+
+That is just a little what I meant by saying that Englishmen are
+muddle-headed, because they never have been forced by political
+adversity to mistrust their tempers and depend on a carefully stated
+case as Irishmen have been.
+
+
+*Showed Germany the Way.*
+
+I did with great pains what nobody else had done. I showed what Germany
+should have done, knowing that I had no right to reproach her for doing
+what she did until I was prepared to show that a better way had been
+open to her.
+
+Bennett says, in effect, that nobody but a fool could suppose that my
+way was practicable and proceeds to call Germany a burglar. That does
+not get us much further. In fact, to me it seems a step backward. At all
+events it is now up to Mr. Bennett to show us what practical alternative
+Germany had except the one I described. If he cannot do that, can he
+not, at least, fight for his side? We, who are mouthpieces of many
+inarticulate citizens, who are fighting at home against the general
+tumult of scare and rancor and silly cinematograph heroics for a sane
+facing of facts and a stable settlement, are very few. We have to bring
+the whole continent of war-struck lunatics to reason if we can.
+
+What chance is there of our succeeding if we begin by attacking one
+another because we do not like one another's style or confine ourselves
+to one another's pet points? I invite Mr. Bennett to pay me some more
+nice compliments and to reserve his fine old Staffordshire loathing for
+my intellectual nimbleness until the war is over.--G. BERNARD SHAW.
+
+[Illustration: G.K. CHESTERTON. _See Page 108_]
+
+[Illustration: SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE. (_Photo by Arnold Genthe_) _See
+Page 132_]
+
+
+
+
+*Flaws in Shaw's Logic*
+
+By Cunninghame Graham.
+
+Letter to The Daily News of London.
+
+
+_To the Editor of The Daily News:_
+
+The controversy between men of peace as to the merits, demerits, causes,
+and possible results of the great war is becoming almost as dangerous
+and little less noisy than the real conflict now being waged in and
+around Ypres. The only difference between the two conflicts is that the
+combatants in Flanders only strive to kill the body. Those who fire
+paper bullets aim at the annihilation of the soul.
+
+Literature is a nice thing in its way. It both passes and gives us many
+weary hours. It has its place. But I submit that at present it is mere
+dancing on a tight rope. Whether the war could have been avoided or not
+is without interest today. In fact, there is no controversy possible
+after Maximilian Harden's pronouncement. In it he throws away the
+scabbard and says boldly that Germany from the first was set on war.
+Hence it becomes a work of supererogation to find excuses for her, and
+hence, my old friend, Bernard Shaw, penned his long indictment of his
+hereditary enemy, England, all in vain.
+
+We are a dull-witted race. Although the Continent has dubbed us
+"Perfidious Albion," it is hard for us to take in general ideas, and no
+man clearly sees the possibilities of the development of the original
+sin that lies dormant in him. Thus it becomes hard for us to understand
+the reason why, if Germany tore up a treaty three months ago we are
+certain to tear up another in three years' time.
+
+All crystal gazing appeals but little to the average man on this side of
+the St. George's channel. It may be that we shall tear up many treaties,
+but the broad fact remains that hitherto we have torn up none.
+
+The particular treaty that Germany tore up was signed by five powers in
+1839, ratified again in 1870 by a special clause respected by King
+Frederick William in his war against the French, was often referred to
+in Parliament by Gladstone and by other Ministers, and was considered
+binding on its signatories. Germany tore it up for her own ends, thus
+showing that she was a stupid though learned people, for she at once at
+the same time prejudiced her case to the whole world and made a military
+mistake.
+
+No human motives are without alloy, but at the same time honesty in our
+case has proved the better policy. Germany, no doubt, would have granted
+us almost anything for our assent to her march through Belgium. We
+refused her offers, no doubt from mixed motives, for every Englishman is
+not an orphan archangel, stupid, or dull or muddle-headed, or what not.
+The balance of the world is with us, not, perhaps, because they love us
+greatly, but because they see that we, perhaps by accident, have been
+forced into the right course and that all smaller nationalities such as
+Montenegro, Ireland, Poland, and the rest would disappear on our defeat.
+
+CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+*Editorial Comment on Shaw*
+
+From THE NEW YORK TIMES, Nov. 5, 1914.
+
+
+Mr. G. Bernard Shaw thinks that "the time has now come to pluck up
+courage and begin to talk and write soberly about the war." Our readers
+will find in THE TIMES Sunday Magazine this morning some of the fruits
+of this auto-suggestion. They are very remarkable. While Mr. Shaw can
+hardly be called a representative of any considerable class, the fact
+that one prominent writer, always much read, can assume Mr. Shaw's
+attitude and make public Mr. Shaw's comments throws a strong light on
+the spirit of British society. It is true that he intimates that he ran
+the risk of "prompt lynching" at one time, but that was probably the
+suggestion of a certain timidity and vanity to which he pleads guilty.
+His safe and prosperous existence is really a striking evidence, on the
+one hand, of British good nature, and, on the other, of the indifferent
+estimate the British put on his influence.
+
+Like Iago, Mr. Shaw is nothing if not critical, and in this crisis his
+criticism is for the most part bitter, extreme, and in purpose
+destructive. He particularly dislikes Sir Edward Grey and the Government
+of which he is a leading spirit, and the class which the Government
+represents. He singles out Sir Edward as the chief "Junker" and among
+the chief "militarists" who brought about this war. Mr. Shaw's attacks
+on the Foreign Secretary are savage, and, as often happens with savage
+attacks--they are far from consistent. For example, Mr. Shaw paraphrases
+at some length the interview between Sir Edward and the German
+Ambassador, in which the latter made four different propositions to
+secure the neutrality of Great Britain if Germany waged war on France,
+all of which Sir Edward refused. Mr. Shaw sees in this only evidence of
+determination to take arms against Germany in any case, carrying out a
+long-cherished plan formed by the Government of which Sir Edward Grey
+was, for this matter, the responsible member. He does not see--- though
+it is so plain that a wayfaring man though a professional satirist
+should not err therein--that what the Secretary intended to do--what, in
+fact, he did do--was to refuse to put a price on British perfidy, to
+accept any "bargain" offered to that end.
+
+On the other hand, Mr. Shaw paraphrases at still greater length the
+report of the interview in which the Russian Foreign Minister and the
+French Ambassador at St. Petersburg tried to induce the British
+Government to commit itself in advance to war against Germany. Mr. Shaw
+thinks that thus the German "bluff" would have been called and war would
+have been prevented, and he is confident that Mr. Winston Churchill
+would have taken the Bismarck tone and dictated the result. He cannot
+see--what is really the essential fact in both cases--that Sir Edward
+Grey was striving in every honorable way to preserve peace, that his
+Government refused to stand idle and see France crushed in the same
+spirit that it refused to menace Germany until a definite and undeniable
+cause of war arose.
+
+That cause came with Germany's violation of its pledge to observe the
+neutrality of Belgium, and England's response excites Mr. Shaw's most
+furious contempt. He adopts with zest the judgment of the German
+Chancellor. The pledge for all who signed it was but a scrap of paper,
+of no more binding force than others that had gone their way to dusty
+death in the diplomatic waste baskets. To observe the obligation it
+imposed was hypocrisy. To fight in order to compel Germany to observe it
+was crass militarism. Plainly, Mr. Shaw is a little difficult. The
+Government under which he lives is either too bellicose or not bellicose
+enough; too ready to help France if France is attacked or not ready
+enough to bully Germany, and especially it is all wrong about Belgium
+and its treaty, since treaties have several times been broken, and so on
+through a bewildering circle of contradictory statements and notions.
+
+Mr. Shaw finds little to choose between the groups of combatants. He
+distinctly prides himself on his impartiality, not to say indifference.
+On account of his Irish birth he claims something of the detachment of a
+foreigner, but admits a touch of Irish malice in taking the conceit out
+of the English. Add to this his professed many-sidedness as a dramatist
+and playwright and we get as good an explanation as can be given of this
+noted writer's attitude toward the tremendous struggle now waging. But
+Mr. Shaw's assumption of even-handed scorn for every one concerned, of
+"six of one and a half dozen of the other," does not hold out. He feels
+profoundly that such fighting as Germany does, for such a purpose as
+inspires Germany, must be met by force, and that England could not in
+the long run, no matter by whom guided or governed, have shirked the
+task laid upon her. That being the case, one wonders a little why it was
+worth while to cover every one with ridicule and to present a picture of
+Great Britain so essentially grotesque and distorted.
+
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+*Bernard Shaw on the End of the War.*
+
+_From The New York Sun, Nov_. 15, 1914.
+
+
+In the midst of a good deal of untimely gibing, George Bernard Shaw, as
+reported in a London dispatch to The Sun of yesterday, says one or two
+very wise and appropriate things about the end of the war and the times
+to come after it. His warnings are a useful check to the current loose
+talk of the fire-eaters and preachers of the gospel of vengeance.
+
+"We and France have to live with Germany after the war," Mr. Shaw points
+out. Even to embarrass her financially would be a blow to England
+herself, Germany being one of England's best customers and one of her
+most frequently visited neighbors. The truth of this is unanswerable.
+The great object must be to effect a peace with as little rancor as
+possible.
+
+Mr. Shaw does not say it, but there are going to be overwhelming
+political reasons why the pride of Germany and Austria and still more
+why their military power shall not be too much impaired in case of their
+defeat.
+
+Perhaps in the final settlement the Western Allies may be found to have
+more in common with Berlin than with St. Petersburg. Germany has pointed
+this out with much force.
+
+Mr. Shaw's position is not admirable when he chooses their days of
+tribulation for sticking pins into his own people, even though some of
+the things he says may be unpleasantly true. But it cannot be denied
+that he has some sane views on the situation. The pity is that he must
+always impair the force of the useful things he has to say by
+flippancies, impertinences, and out-of-place girdings at those whose
+courage he should help to maintain. He reminds one of a man who insists
+on wrangling over the mistaken construction of a chimney while the house
+is burning down.
+
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+*Bernard Shaw as a Patriot.*
+
+_From The New York World, Nov. 17, 1914._
+
+
+Bernard Shaw has written for our neighbor THE TIMES an elaborate
+three-page thesis to maintain:
+
+1. That Great Britain was abundantly justified in making war with
+Germany.
+
+2. That the explanation given by the British Government for making war
+against Germany was stupid, hypocritical, mendacious, and disgraceful.
+
+3. That he alone is capable of interpreting the moral purpose of the
+British people in undertaking this necessary work of civilization.
+
+4. That the reason the British Government's justification of the war is
+so inadequate is because no British Government is ever so clever as
+Bernard Shaw.
+
+5. That even in the midst of the most horrible calamity known to human
+history it pays to advertise.
+
+Various patriots have various ways of serving their country. Some go to
+the firing line to be shot and others stay at home to be a source of
+innocent merriment to the survivors.
+
+
+
+
+*"Shaw Empty of Good Sense"*
+
+
+By Christabel Pankhurst.
+
+Written for THE NEW YORK TIMES.
+
+
+His reputation for perversity and contrariety is fully maintained by
+George Bernard Shaw in the ineptly-named article, "Common Sense About
+the War." At home in Britain we all know that it is Mr. Shaw's habit to
+oppose where he might be expected to support, and vice versa. For
+example, should he speak at a prohibition meeting he would most likely
+extol strong drink, or if asked to defend the sale of liquor declare
+dramatically for prohibition.
+
+He sees himself as the critic of everything and everybody--the one and
+only man who knows what to do and how to do it.
+
+Mr. Shaw charges his compatriots with intellectual laziness, but they
+are not so lazy as to leave him to do their thinking for them. That he
+sometimes--and oftener in the past than now--says illuminating things is
+true, but firm reliance cannot be placed upon his freakish mental
+processes, exemplified in his writings about the war. He has played with
+effect the part of jester to the British public, but when, as now, his
+jests are empty of the kernel of good sense, the matter gets beyond a
+joke.
+
+The truth is that in face of this great and tragic reality of war the
+men of mere words, the literary theorists, are in danger of missing
+their way. Certainly women of deeds are more likely to see things aright
+than are men of words, and it is as a woman of deeds that I, a
+suffragette, make answer to my irresponsible compatriot, Mr. Bernard
+Shaw. And yet not a compatriot, for Mr. Shaw disclaims those feelings of
+loyalty and enthusiasm for the national cause that fill the mass of us
+who live under the British flag!
+
+"Until Home Rule emerges from its present suspended animation," says Mr.
+Shaw, "I shall retain my Irish capacity for criticising England with
+something of the detachment of a foreigner." Now, these words are not a
+little surprising, because Mr. Shaw's interest in the Home Rule cause
+has hitherto been of a most restrained and well-nigh secret character,
+and any one who imagines that Mr. Shaw is a strenuous campaigner for
+Home Rule is greatly mistaken. If in the years preceding the war the
+Horne Rule cause had depended upon Mr. Shaw's activities, it would have
+been in a bad way. It is now, when a foreign enemy menaces our nation as
+a whole, that Mr. Shaw manifests this enhanced interest in Home Rule.
+
+The suffragettes, who have fought and suffered for their cause as no
+living man reformer in the British Isles has fought and suffered for
+his, have during the present crisis subordinated their claim to the
+urgent claims of national honor and safety. So Mr. Shaw, whose
+campaigning is done generally in the armchair, and never in any place
+more dangerous than the rostrum, ought surely to refrain from his
+frivolous, inconsistent, destructive, and unprofitable criticism of our
+country.
+
+As for the question of lynching, Mr. Shaw is, the American public may be
+assured, in no danger whatever of being lynched. He is in far more
+danger of having the Iron Cross conferred upon him by the Kaiser in
+recognition of his attempt to supplement the activities of the official
+German Press Bureau. But if he were a German subject, writing on certain
+points of German policy as he does upon certain points of British
+policy, his fate can well be imagined. The only retribution that will
+come upon this man, who exploits the freedom of speech and pen that
+England gives him, is that his words lose now and henceforth the weight
+they used to have. Oh, the conceit of the man, who in this dark hour,
+when the English are dying on the battlefield, writes of "taking the
+conceit out of England" by a stroke of his inconsequent pen!
+
+
+*Admits England's Cause Is Just.*
+
+But with all his will to "take the conceit" out of this England, so
+fiercely menaced, her sons killed, her daughters widowed--yet needing,
+so he thinks, his castigation into the bargain--the critic is
+constrained to admit that our country is playing the part of "the
+responsible policeman of the West" and that "for England to have
+refrained from hurling herself into the fray, horse, foot, and
+artillery, was impossible from every point of view." Then why preface
+these statements by a series of attacks upon the country which is
+admitted to be justly fighting in a just cause?
+
+The sole importance of Mr. Shaw's criticism comes from this. He
+unwarrantably indorses statements made by Germany in her attempt to put
+the Allies in the wrong. Because he is known to the German people by his
+dramatic work, extracts from his article will be circulated among them
+as an expression of the views of a representative British citizen. And
+how are the Germans to know that this is false, deprived as they are of
+news of what is happening in the outside world and ignorant as they must
+be of Mr. Shaw's real lack of influence at this serious time?
+
+That their traffic in mere words disables some literary men from
+comprehending facts is shown by Mr. Shaw's play upon the word
+"Junkerism." He points to the dictionary definition of the word instead
+of to the fact it represents, and by this verbal juggling tries to
+convince his readers that the military autocracy that dominates and
+misdirects Germany has its counterpart and equal in Great Britain.
+Whereas, the conditions in the two countries are wholly different, and
+it is this very difference that Germany has regarded as one of the signs
+of British inferiority.
+
+Mr. Shaw's suggestion that the British are posing as "Injured Innocence"
+and as "Mild Gazelles" is neither funny nor true. We are simply a people
+defending ourselves, resisting conquest and military despotism, and
+fighting for the ideal of freedom and self-government. When our country
+is no longer in danger we suffragettes, if it be still necessary, are
+prepared to fight on and wage our civil war that we may win freedom and
+self-government for women as well as men. But, in the meantime, we
+support the men--yes, and even the Government do we in a sense
+support--in fighting the common enemy who menaces the freedom of men and
+women alike. Although the Government in the past have erred gravely in
+their dealing with the woman question, they are for the purpose of this
+war the instrument of the nation.
+
+
+*Facts Belie Him.*
+
+Mr. Shaw would seem to hold Britain responsible for German militarism,
+but the facts he cites are against him there. "I am old enough," says
+he, "to remember the beginnings of the anti-German phase of military
+propaganda in England. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 left England
+very much taken aback. Up to that date nobody was much afraid that
+Prussia--suddenly Prussia beat France right down in the dust."
+Precisely! It was this war on France, deliberately engineered by
+Bismarck, and it was the defeat and despoilment of France that fed
+Germany's militarism and encouraged Germany to make those plans of
+military aggression which, after long and deliberate preparation, are
+being carried into effect in the present war. Germany's plans of
+military aggression have compelled other countries to prepare, however
+inadequately, to defend themselves.
+
+Mr. Shaw gives support to the Germans' contention that they are not the
+aggressors but are menaced by Russia. Yet he does not explain why, if
+that is so, Germany took French gold and territory in 1870 and has since
+continued to alienate France; nor why Germany has chosen Britain as her
+enemy of enemies to be supplanted and surpassed in power.
+
+If Germany is simply on the defensive against Russia and has no desire
+to attack and cripple France and Britain, then why has she antagonized
+these countries and driven one after the other into a Russian alliance?
+
+When he affects to criticise Germany for not having "entrusted the
+security of her western frontier to the public opinion of Western Europe
+and to America and fought Russia, if attacked, with her rear not
+otherwise defended," Mr. Shaw burkes the fact that Germany's object is
+to seize Belgium and to make it part of the German Empire, also to seize
+at least the northern coast of France and to make this seizure the means
+of dominating Britain.
+
+Indeed, the point at which German ambition for conquest ceases would be
+hard to fix. And yet Mr. Shaw pictures for us an injured-innocent,
+mild-gazelle Germany on the defensive! Quite in this picture is his
+assertion that "the ultimatum to Servia was the escapade of a dotard,"
+whereas, everybody knows that the ultimatum was dictated at Berlin. It
+is plain as a pikestaff that in order to bring on the Great War of
+conquest for which her rulers thought The Day had arrived. Germany
+dictated the issue and terms of the ultimatum to Servia and then urged
+Austria to refuse any compromise and arbitration which might have
+averted war.
+
+Mr. Shaw has assumed the impossible task of trying to blind the American
+public to these and other facts that prove Germany to be the aggressor
+in this war, but he will fail in his attempt at white-washing German
+policy because it is one of the characteristics of the American people
+that they have a strong feeling for reality and that no twisting and
+combining of words can prevent them from getting at the facts beneath.
+
+Bernhardi's writings are generally believed to be an inspiration, and in
+part a statement of German policy. But Mr. Shaw differs. In trying to
+prove that Bernhardism has nothing to do with the case, he maintains
+that Germany has neglected the Bernhardi programme, and says:
+
+"He warned Germany to make an alliance with Italy, Austria, Turkey, and
+America before undertaking the subjugation of France, then of England."
+
+Mr. Shaw then asserts that Germany disregarded this advice and allowed
+herself to be caught between Russia and a Franco-British combination
+with no ally save Austria. But here again facts are against him. For
+Germany has followed with marvelous precision the line drawn by
+Bernhardi.
+
+She is actually fighting in partnership with Austria. She allied herself
+with Italy--though Italy has refused to fight with her in this present
+war of aggression. Germany has also bent Turkey to her purpose, and has
+dragged the Turks into the war. An alliance with America! Well, to have
+gained the help of America in crushing France and crippling England, and
+ravaging and conquering Belgium was quite beyond the power of German
+diplomacy and intrigue! Still Germany's attempts to win at least
+America's moral support in this war are vigorous, if unsuccessful.
+
+And with what quotable matter Mr. Shaw provides the German rulers for
+the further deluding of their subjects when he writes of the German
+people being "stirred to their depths by the apparent treachery and
+duplicity of the attack made upon them in their extrernest peril from
+France and Russia," when he writes of the Kaiser doing "all a Kaiser
+could do without unbearable ignominy to induce the British not to fight
+him and give him fair play with Russia," and when he writes of "taking
+the Kaiser at a disadvantage." As though we ought meekly to have agreed
+to the Kaiser's plan of defeating France and using her defeat as a
+bridge to England and a means of conquering England! Uncommon nonsense
+about the war--so we must rename Mr. Shaw's production!
+
+And what is all this that flows from the pen of Mr. Shaw about Belgium
+and "obsolete treaties," "rights of way," "necessities that know no
+international law," "circumstances that alter treaties"? Made in Germany
+such statements are, and yet even the Imperial German Chancellor is not
+so contemptuous as Bernard Shaw is of Belgium's charter of existence,
+the treaty now violated by Germany.
+
+That is a treaty that cannot become obsolete until the powers who made
+it release Belgium from the restrictions and obligations which the
+treaty imposes. Germany pleads guilty in this matter of the violation of
+Belgian neutrality, though Mr. Shaw attempts to show her innocent, for
+the German Chancellor has said: "This is an infraction of international
+law--we are compelled to overrule the legitimate protests of the
+Luxemburg and Belgian Governments. We shall repair the wrong we are
+doing as soon as our military aims have been achieved." And again the
+Chancellor said the invasion of Belgium "is contrary to the law of
+nature." To Mr. Bernard Shaw's peculiar sense of international morality
+such dealing is not, however, repugnant.
+
+
+*No "Right of Way" in Belgium.*
+
+In his letter to President Wilson Mr. Shaw, either willfully or
+ignorantly, seeks to confuse the neutrality of a neutralized State such
+as Belgium and the neutrality of an ordinary State such as Italy, and he
+pretends that violation of the first sort of neutrality creates a
+situation in no way different from that created by the violation of the
+second and normal sort of neutrality. I would refer Mr. Shaw to "The
+Case for Belgium" issued by the Belgian delegates to the United States
+wherein they point out that "the peculiarity about Belgian neutrality is
+that it has been imposed upon her by the powers as the one condition
+upon which they recognized her national existence."
+
+The consequence of this is that whereas Italy and the United States and
+other powers having a similar status can, subject to the risk of attack
+from an affronted belligerent, please themselves whether or not they
+condone a violation of their neutrality, Belgium and the other
+neutralized States cannot condone such violation, but must either resist
+all breaches of their neutrality or surrender their right to existence.
+And further a neutralized State, putting faith in the treaty that
+guarantees its existence and its neutrality, refrains naturally from
+that preparation for war which would be deemed necessary in the absence
+of such a treaty.
+
+There is no such thing as the "right of way" through neutralized Belgium
+which Mr. Shaw claims on behalf of belligerent Germany. Far from
+exercising a right of way Germany has violently committed a trespass,
+offering a German promise, a mere "scrap of paper," as reparation. "A
+right of way," argues Bernard Shaw, "is not a right of conquest"; but
+the truth is that in passing through Belgium Germany assumed dominion
+over Belgium, which dominion she has since formally asserted and is
+seeking forcibly to maintain.
+
+
+*A New Shavian Theory.*
+
+No comprehension does Mr. Shaw display of the hurt to the Belgians'
+sense of honor involved in Germany's use of their territory for purposes
+hostile to their friendly neighbor, France. To be forced into injuring a
+friend is an outrage, indeed, and Mr. Shaw surely knows too much of
+matters military to be unaware that to permit a right of way to one
+combatant amounts to making an attack upon the other, and that Germany,
+by the very fact of crossing Belgium soil, was forcing Belgium to be the
+enemy of France. Only by their great heroism were the Belgians able to
+escape this infamy that had been planned for them.
+
+To be conquered does not really matter! There we have another Shavian
+theory. How grateful would the would-be world-ruling Kaiser feel to Mr.
+Shaw were he to succeed in inoculating the peoples of Europe and of
+America with that theory! So would the task of putting the peoples under
+the German yoke (otherwise known as German culture) be made easier--and
+cheaper. But the spirit of national freedom, which is as precious to
+humanity as is the spirit of individual freedom, cannot be driven out by
+words any more than it can be driven out by blows. The most unlettered
+Belgian soldier, fighting for a truth that is at the very heart and
+depth of all things true, puts the mere wordmonger to shame.
+
+That Great Britain does not fight only for Belgium is certainly a fact,
+though Belgium's plight alone would have been enough to bring us into
+the conflict. We fight also for France, because she is wrongfully
+attacked, and because she is by her civilization and culture one of the
+world's treasures. We fight for the all-sufficient reason of
+self-defense.
+
+There is the case for Britain, and despite his special pleading for
+Germany, Mr. Shaw can show no flaw in it. He does say, however, that the
+British Government, instead of first seeking a mild way of preserving
+peace, ought to have said point blank to Germany: "If you attack France
+we shall attack you." I also think that such a declaration would have
+been the right one. To me and to many others the thought that our
+country might stand by and watch inactively an attack upon France was
+intolerable. Great was our relief when this apprehension was removed by
+the British Government's declaration of war. Why did not the British
+Government say to Germany before the war cloud burst that Britain would
+fight to defend France, and why did the Government delay so long in
+declaring war? Mr. Shaw does not give the reason, but I will give it.
+
+It was that the Government feared opposition to our entering into the
+war would come from a Radico-Socialist literary clique in London, from a
+section of the Liberal press, and from certain Liberal and Labor
+politicians who had been deceived by German professors and other
+missionaries of the Kaiser into thinking the German peril did not exist.
+When Belgium was invaded most of these misguided ones were unable to
+cling any longer to their "keep out of it" policy, and then the
+Government felt free to act. Yet the Government need not have waited,
+because with the facts before them the people as a whole would perfectly
+have understood the necessity of fighting even had Belgium not been
+invaded.
+
+Henceforward the general public must be kept informed of what is
+happening in the international world. Foreign politics must be conducted
+with greater publicity. There, at least, Bernard Shaw is right, but this
+is a reform which he and his fellow-men have failed to effect, whereas
+women, had they been voters, would have demanded and secured it long
+ago.
+
+Now, although undue diplomatic secrecy, always wrong, will be especially
+wrong when the terms of peace come to be made, sentimentality will
+certainly be more mischievous still. It is difficult to resist the
+conclusion that Bernard Shaw's writings on the war are intended as an
+appeal to sentimentality--an appeal that Germany at the close of the war
+shall have treatment which, by being more than just to her, would be
+less than just to the countries whom she has attacked, and would mean a
+recurrence of this appalling war in after years.
+
+Before the war specious words were used to cloak the German policy of
+aggression which has plunged the world in horror and is martyrizing
+peoples. In view of the coming victory of the Allies, the same tactics
+will be adopted by the German militarists, and it behooves Bernard Shaw
+to beware lest even without intent he serve as their tool. Men such as
+he who believe that while they can never be in the wrong, their country
+can never be in the right, are just the men who are in danger of
+stumbling at this time.
+
+[Illustration: CHRISTABEL PANKHURST.
+
+_Photo (C) by Underwood & Underwood._
+
+_See Page 68_]
+
+[Illustration: JAMES M. BARRIE. _See Page 100_]
+
+
+
+
+*Comment by Readers of Shaw*
+
+ *Shaw Has Made Minister von Jagow's Remark on a "Scrap of Paper"
+ Understandable.*
+
+
+_To the Editor of The New York Times_:
+
+Most hearty thanks for that masterly "common-sense" article of Bernard
+Shaw. How clearly he expresses the much that many of us have felt way
+down inside and have not been able to formulate even to ourselves!
+
+He has made at least one woman--and one of German parentage at
+that--understand what reams of public and private communications from
+all over the Fatherland could not make clear: just why the blunt,
+impetuous, shocked, and astounded Kaiser dared give utterance to that
+disgraceful "scrap of paper" remark--inexcusable but also very
+understandable in the light of his knowledge of and confidence in a more
+astute miscreant; why France and Germany have always considered England
+more or less of a Tartuffe and a "Scheinheilige" (one who seems holy);
+and why every German--man, woman and child--so execrates Sir Edward Grey
+and colleagues.
+
+Nothing in all the sickening present conditions, the future long-lasting
+woe and misery, the barbarous neutrality violations has so made me blush
+for my mother's country as the "scrap of paper" incident; and it has
+been most bitter to listen to the extravagant, fantastic eulogies on
+England, with which we've been so favored without feeling honestly able
+to make any excuses whatever for Germany.
+
+But now--thanks to that article--I can understand what I may not
+condone, and, though abhorring the Kaiser and my mother's compatriots
+for their share in that horror going on abroad, I can also pity the
+hot-headed, imperfect mere man going to war under a carefully incited
+and fostered misapprehension, and need no longer glorify the
+cool-headed, sapient policy which so cleverly duped ruler and people.
+
+Not since the war began have I felt so undepressed, so free to
+sympathize where I so love, so free from having to commend those for
+whom I feel no love whatever. For all of which accept the warmest thanks
+of
+
+KATE HUDSON.
+
+New York, Nov. 17.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+*Shaw Article Work of "Farceur."*
+
+_To the Editor of The New York Times_:
+
+"Common sense and Shaw!" Shaw begins his article by saying, "I am giving
+my views for what they are worth, with a malicious bias." Later on he
+says: "I am writing history." Toward the end, after having obscured with
+words many things which had hitherto been clear to most people, he says:
+"Now that we begin to see where we really are, &c." How Shavian!
+
+There are at least two sides to all questions, and so long as they are
+reasonably presented one is glad to hear them even if they fail to
+convince, but when a farceur is allowed to occupy three whole pages
+usually filled by serious and interesting writers it seems time to
+protest. The subject itself is not one for easy paradox or false and
+flippant epigram.
+
+Mr. Shaw says he does not hold his tongue easily. He certainly does not,
+and when it wags it wags foolishly, and, as he admits, maliciously,
+albeit sometimes amusingly, and with superficial brilliance. He says the
+Irish do not consider England their country yet. Of course they do not.
+Why should the Irish consider themselves English? Neither do the Scots,
+nor the Welsh, nor the Canadians, nor will they ever so think. But they
+are all British, and so, despite all Mr. Shaw says to the contrary,
+Kitchener was right.
+
+Mr. Shaw falls into a common and regrettable error when he continually
+writes England when he really means the British Empire. It is the
+British Empire that is at war, for which, though a citizen, Mr. Shaw has
+no authority to speak or to be considered a representative, for, as he
+unnecessarily admits, he is not a "British patriot"; neither is he a
+"Junker," for I have looked through all his definitions of the word, and
+none applies to him.
+
+In what way is the "Battle of Dorking" like Bernhardi? The one he says
+had as a moral: "To arms! or the Germans will besiege London!" The other
+said: "To arms! so that the Germans may besiege London, or any other
+country that does not want compulsory culture!" The one was defensive,
+the other offensive.
+
+He says of the war: "We" began it. Since he says he is not English, and
+that it is an English war, whom does he mean by "We"? If he means the
+British, then, should a policeman see a small boy being ill-treated by a
+large man and go to the help of that boy, he, the policeman, must be
+said to have begun the fight which would probably ensue between him and
+said man, notwithstanding that the policeman is only fulfilling what he
+has sworn to do.
+
+Monaco, he says, "seems to be, on the whole, the most prosperous and
+comfortable State in Europe." If this is buffoonery it is singularly out
+of place. But even Monaco has an "army," has had recently a small
+revolution, and the Monegasques do not consider themselves ideally
+comfortable, and they have many "injustices." Does he hold the
+principality up as a model administration and the source of its
+prosperity as above reproach?
+
+Mr. Shaw represents no one but himself, and, like all small men, he
+reviles others greater than he, such as Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith,
+but it does not become him, looking at his own life's history, to cast
+cheap sneers at anonymous journalists in cheap newspapers, who, though
+they may lack his literary style, possess, at least, one virtue which he
+boasts that he has not--patriotism! Yours very truly,
+
+LAWRENCE GRANT.
+
+New York, Nov. 18.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+*Antidote to "Long Infliction of Dreary Stuff."*
+
+_To the Editor of The New York Times_:
+
+Hail to Bernard Shaw! Could anything be more refreshing? After the long
+infliction upon us of the flood of dreary stuff from London and Paris,
+and all the talk of German militarism, and what is to become of it at
+the hands of such immaculately unmilitary apostles of peace and
+international righteousness and treaty observances as Russia, France,
+and England, and all the maudlin denunciations of the German Nietzsche
+and Bernhardi, and the terrible Kaiser, could anything be more
+refreshing than Shaw's advent in the field of current war history?
+
+Though an Anglo-Saxon of American birth and long descent, and no
+believer in militarism of any sort of itself, yet I see in that no
+reason to distort ancient history by an attempt to make it appear that
+German militarism is at all the chief sinner, or, for that matter, not a
+very necessary and desirable thing in order that Germany may have her
+rightful place in the world, or any place at all.
+
+V.A.W. Warwick, N.Y., Nov. 16.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+*False Assumptions Basis of Shaw's Attack.*
+
+_To the Editor of The New York Times_:
+
+The article on the European war by Mr. G.B. Shaw in THE TIMES of Sunday
+appeals to me as a noteworthy specimen of what an artful literary genius
+can do in the way of argumentative cantankerousness. His chief grievance
+is British diplomacy as represented by Sir Edward Grey, upon whose
+devoted head he empties the vials of his splenetic humor.
+
+Underlying his argument are two glaringly false assumptions, and on
+these the whole fabric rests. The first is that a certain undefined but
+presumably multitudinous body, which he designates as "Socialist,"
+"Democratic," and "Social Democratic," is better qualified to determine
+the policy and conduct the correspondence of the Foreign Office than
+trained and experienced statesmen.
+
+The second is that Sir Edward Grey should have followed the suggestion
+of Sazonof and threatened Germany with war at a certain stage of the
+correspondence. This can now be only a matter of opinion, but it may be
+confidently affirmed that of all nations the Germany of this day would
+be the last to back down in face of a threat. It may be also said
+generally that an open threat is about the surest way to bring on a war.
+Austria threatened Servia and war ensued. Germany threatened Russia and
+war ensued. Germany threatened Belgium--in the form of a notification
+that she intended to invade her territory--and war ensued.
+
+Mr. Shaw's contentions are grotesque.
+
+Flushing, Nov. 16. SAM TEST.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+*"Junkers" Controlled Old World Ages Before Shaw.*
+
+_To the Editor of The New York Times:_
+
+With regard to the article by Mr. Bernard Shaw, the gist of the matter
+can be compressed in fewer words. The ideas expressed are not the
+exclusive property of Mr. Shaw. The Old World for indefinite ages has
+been controlled and directed by what he calls the "Junker" class, the
+rich and idle aristocrats who want for nothing, and, being born to rule,
+do not find it worth while to exert themselves mentally, and for whom
+there is no suitable profession but the army and diplomacy.
+
+The mass of the people are to them the great unwashed, and those a
+little higher in the scale "cads and bounders," or the German
+equivalent, in fact the canaille of the French who at the time of the
+Revolution took things into their own hands to the great surprise of
+everybody. This substratum is not considered in the scheme of the
+"Junker's" existence, though the lower orders alone are the workers and
+producers and make ease and luxury possible.
+
+Mr. Shaw. I believe, intends to intimate that there might be a use for
+the intellectual class, the thinkers and writers with the imagination
+that can put them mentally in the place of the individuals who make up
+the masses, think the thoughts and live the lives vicariously of the
+people who are the nation, and if the "Junker" class of England and
+Germany and kindred nations who govern and dictate its policies were
+leavened with the brains and broad-mindedness of the thinkers there
+might be found a better use for men than killing each other and a
+brighter outlook for the world which is now filled with widows and
+orphans.
+
+Mrs. F.B. WILLIAMSON.
+
+Elizabeth, N.J., Nov, 16.
+
+
+
+
+*Open Letter to President Wilson*[A]
+
+*By George Bernard Shaw.*
+
+
+Sir: I petition you to invite the neutral powers to confer with the
+United States of America for the purpose of requesting Britain, France,
+and Germany to withdraw from the soil of Belgium and fight out their
+quarrel on their own territories. However the sympathies of the neutral
+States may be divided, and whatever points now at issue between the
+belligerent powers may be doubtful, there is one point on which there
+can be neither division nor doubt, and that is that the belligerent
+armies have no right to be in Belgium, much less to fight in Belgium,
+and involve the innocent inhabitants of that country in their reciprocal
+slaughter. You will not question my right to address this petition to
+you. You are the official head of the nation that is beyond all question
+or comparison the chief of the neutral powers, marked out from all the
+rest by commanding magnitude, by modern democratic constitution, and by
+freedom from the complication of monarchy and its traditions, which have
+led Europe into the quaint absurdity of a war waged formally between the
+German Kaiser, the German Czar, the German King of the Belgians, the
+German King of England, the German Emperor of Austria, and a gentleman
+who shares with you the distinction of not being related to any of them,
+and is therefore describable monarchically as one Poincaré, a Frenchman.
+
+I make this petition on its merits, without claiming any representative
+character except such as attaches to me as a human being. Nobody here
+has asked me to do it. Except among the large class of constitutional
+beggars, the normal English feeling is that it is no use asking for a
+thing if you feel certain that it will be refused, and are not in a
+position to enforce compliance. Also, that the party whose request is
+refused and not enforced looks ridiculous. Many Englishmen will say that
+a request to the belligerents to evacuate Belgium forthwith would be
+refused; could not be enforced; and would make the asker ridiculous. We
+are, in short, not a prayerful nation. But to you it will be clear that
+even the strongest power, or even allied group of powers, can have its
+position completely changed by an expression of the public opinion of
+the rest of the world. In your clear western atmosphere and in your
+peculiarly responsible position as the head centre of western democracy,
+you, when the European situation became threatening three months ago,
+must have been acutely aware of the fact to which Europe was so fatally
+blinded--namely, that the simple solution of the difficulty in which the
+menace of the Franco-Russo-British Entente placed Germany was for the
+German Emperor to leave his western frontier under the safeguard of the
+neighborliness and good faith of American, British, and French
+democracy, and then await quite calmly any action that Russia might take
+against his country on the east. Had he done so, we could not have
+attacked him from behind; and had France made such an attack--and it is
+in the extremest degree improbable that French public opinion would have
+permitted such a hazardous and unjustifiable adventure--he would at
+worst have confronted it with the fullest sympathy of Britain and the
+United States, and at best with their active assistance. Unhappily,
+German Kings do not allow democracy to interfere in their foreign
+policy; do not believe in neighborliness; and do believe in cannon and
+cannon fodder. The Kaiser never dreamed of confiding his frontier to you
+and to the humanity of his neighbors. And the diplomatists of Europe
+never thought of that easy and right policy, and could not suggest any
+substitute for it, with the hideous result which is before you.
+
+
+*The State of Belgium.*
+
+Now that this mischief has been done, and the two European thunderclouds
+have met and are discharging their lightnings, it is not for me to
+meddle with the question whether the United States should take a side in
+their warfare as far as it concerns themselves alone. But I may plead
+for a perfectly innocent neutral State, the State of Belgium, which is
+being ravaged in a horrible manner by the belligerents. Her surviving
+population is flying into all the neighboring countries to escape from
+the incessant hail of shrapnel and howitzer shells from British cannon,
+French cannon, German cannon, and, most tragic of all, Belgian cannon;
+for the Belgian Army is being forced to devastate its own country in its
+own defense.
+
+For this there can be no excuse; and at such a horror the rest of the
+world cannot look on in silence without incurring the guilt of the
+bystander who witnesses a crime without even giving the alarm. I grant
+that Belgium, in her extreme peril, made one mistake. She called to her
+aid the powers of the Entente alone instead of calling on the whole
+world of kindly men. She should have called on America, too; and it is
+hard to see how you could in honor have disregarded that call. But if
+Belgium says nothing, but only turns her eyes dumbly toward you while
+you look at the red ruin in which her villages, her heaps of slain, her
+monuments and treasures are being hurled by her friends and enemies
+alike, are you any the less bound to speak out than if Belgium had asked
+you to send her a million soldiers?
+
+Not for a moment do I suggest that your intervention should be an
+intervention on behalf of either the Allies or the Entente. If you
+consider both sides equally guilty, we know that you can find reasons
+for that verdict. But Belgium is innocent; and it is on behalf of
+Belgium that so much of the world as is still at peace is waiting for a
+lead from you. No other question need be prejudged. If Germany maintains
+her claim to a right of way through Belgium on a matter which she
+believed (however erroneously) to be one of life and death to her as a
+nation, nobody, not even China, now pretends that such rights of way
+have not their place among those common human rights which are superior
+to the more artificial rights of nationality. I think, for example, that
+if Russia made a descent on your continent under circumstances which
+made it essential to the maintenance of your national freedom that you
+should move an army through Canada, you would ask our leave to do so,
+and take it by force if we did not grant it. You may reasonably suspect,
+even if all our statesmen raise a shriek of denial, that we should take
+a similar liberty under similar circumstances in the teeth of all the
+scraps of paper in our Foreign Office dustbin. You see, I am frank with
+you, and fair, I hope, to Germany. But a right of way is not a right of
+conquest; and even the right of way was not, as the Imperial Chancellor
+imagined, a matter of life and death at all, but a militarist
+hallucination, and one that has turned out, so far, a military mistake.
+In short, there was no such case of overwhelming necessity as would have
+made the denial of a right of way to the German Army equivalent to a
+refusal to save German independence from destruction, and therefore to
+an act of war against her, justifying a German conquest of Belgium. You
+can therefore leave the abstract question of international rights of way
+quite unprejudiced by your action. You can leave every question between
+the belligerents fully open, and yet, in the common interest of the
+world, ask Germany to clear out of Belgium, into France or across the
+Channel, if she can, back home if she can force no other passage, but at
+all events out of Belgium. A like request would, of course, be addressed
+to Britain and to France at the same time. The technical correctness of
+our diplomatic position as to Belgium may be unimpeachable; but as the
+effect of our shells on Belgium is precisely the same as that of the
+German shells, and as by fighting on Belgian soil we are doing her
+exactly the same injury that we should have done her if the violation of
+her neutrality had been initiated by us instead of by Germany, we could
+not decently refuse to fall in with a general evacuation.
+
+
+*A Certain Result of Intervention.*
+
+At all events, your intervention could not fail to produce at least the
+result that even if the belligerents refused to comply, your request
+would leave them in an entirely new and very unpleasant relation to
+public opinion. No matter how powerful a State is, it is not above
+feeling the vast difference between doing something that nobody condemns
+and something that everybody condemns except the interested parties.
+
+That difference alone would be well worth your pains. But it is by no
+means a foregone conclusion that a blank refusal would be persisted in.
+Germany must be aware that the honor of England is now so bound up with
+the complete redemption of Belgium from the German occupation that to
+keep Antwerp and Brussels she must take Portsmouth and London. France is
+no less deeply engaged. You can judge better than I what chance Germany
+now has, or can persuade herself she has, of exhausting or overwhelming
+her western enemies without ruining herself in the attempt. Whatever
+else the war and its horrors may have done or not done, you will agree
+with me that it has made an end of the dreams of military and naval
+steam-rollering in which the whole wretched business began. At a cost
+which the conquest of a whole continent would hardly justify, these
+terrible armaments and the heroic hosts which wield them push one
+another a few miles back and forward in a month, and take and retake
+some miserable village three times over in less than a week. Can you
+doubt that though we have lost all fear of being beaten, (our darkened
+towns, and the panics of our papers, with their endless scares and silly
+inventions, are mere metropolitan hysteria,) we are getting very tired
+of a war in which, having now re-established our old military
+reputation, and taught the Germans that there is no future for their
+empire without our friendship and that of France, we have nothing more
+to gain? In London and Paris and Berlin nobody at present dares say
+"Sirs, ye are brethren; why do ye wrong one to another?"; for the
+slightest disposition toward a Christian view of things is regarded as a
+shooting matter in these capitals; but Washington is still privileged to
+talk common humanity to the nations.
+
+
+*An Advantage of Aloofness.*
+
+Finally, I may remind you of another advantage which your aloofness from
+the conflict gives you. Here, in England and in France, men are going to
+the front every day; their women and children are all within earshot;
+and no man is hard-hearted enough to say the worst that might be said of
+what is going on in Belgium now. We talk to you of Louvain and Rheims in
+the hope of enlisting you on our side or prejudicing you against the
+Germans, forgetting how sorely you must be tempted to say as you look on
+at what we are doing, "Well, if European literature, as represented by
+the library of Louvain, and European religion, as represented by the
+Cathedral of Rheims, have not got us beyond this, in God's name let them
+perish." I am thinking of other things--of the honest Belgians, whom I
+have seen nursing their wounds, and whom I recognize at a glance as
+plain men, innocent of all warlike intentions, trusting to the wisdom
+and honesty of the rulers and diplomatists who have betrayed them, taken
+from their farms and their businesses to destroy and be destroyed for no
+good purpose that might not have been achieved better and sooner by
+neighborly means. I am thinking of the authentic news that no papers
+dare publish, not of the lies that they all publish to divert attention
+from the truth. In America these things can be said without driving
+American mothers and wives mad; here, we have to set our teeth and go
+forward. We cannot be just; we cannot see beyond the range of our guns.
+The roar of the shrapnel deafens us; the black smoke of the howitzer
+blinds us; and what these do to our bodily senses our passions do to our
+imaginations. For justice, we must do as the mediaeval cities did--call
+in a stranger. You are not altogether that to us; but you can look at
+all of us impartially. And you are the spokesman of Western democracy.
+That is why I appeal to you.
+
+G. BERNARD SHAW.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[A] The English newspaper, The Nation, in which Mr. Shaw's letter to the
+President of the United States appeared on Nov. 7, made the following
+comment thereon:
+
+We are glad to publish Mr. Shaw's brilliant appeal to the President of
+the United States, because we believe that when the time for settlement
+arrives, the influence of America will be a powerful, perhaps a
+decisive, factor in obtaining it. We agree, too, with him that while she
+is not likely to respond to an appeal to intervene on the side of the
+Entente or the Alliance, the case of Belgium, the innocent victim of the
+war, is bound to find her in a very different mood. The States are
+already Belgium's almoner; it is only a step further for them to come in
+as her savior. But on a vital point we disagree with Mr. Shaw. His Irish
+mind puts the case with an indifference to which we cannot pretend. We
+have got to save Western Europe from a victory of Prussian militarism,
+as well as to avenge Belgium and set her on her feet again. We regard
+the temper and policy revealed in Germany's violation of Belgium soil
+and her brutalization of the Belgian people as essential to our judgment
+of this war and its end. And we dare not concede an inch to Mr. Shaw's
+"right of way" theory. His distinction between "right of way" and a
+"right of conquest" has no practical effect other than to extinguish the
+rights of small nationalities as against great ones, who alone have the
+power to take a "right of way" when it is refused, and afterward to turn
+it into a right of conquest. Germany's action was not only a breach of
+her own treaty (only revealed within a few hours of its execution), but
+of Article I. of The Hague Convention on the rights of neutral powers:
+
+ "THE TERRITORY OF NEUTRAL POWERS IS INVIOLABLE."
+
+It is not therefore a small thing that Germany has ripped clean through
+the whole fabric of The Hague Conventions of 1907. Could the American
+Government, aware of that fact, address herself to intervention on the
+Belgian question without regard to the breaches of international law
+which were perpetrated, first, through the orignal German invasion of
+Belgium, and then in the conduct of the campaign in that country?
+
+
+
+
+*A German Letter to G. Bernard Shaw*
+
+By Herbert Eulenberg.
+
+ _The following letter from the noted German playwright Eulenberg,
+ whose plays of a decided modern tendency have been presented
+ extensively in Germany and in Vienna, was made public by the German
+ Press Bureau of New York in October_, 1914.
+
+Bernard Shaw: You have addressed us Germans several times of late
+without receiving a reply from us. The reason for this was probably the
+momentary bitterness against your country of our people's intellectual
+representatives. Indeed, our best scholars and artists, Ernst Haeckel at
+81 years, leading the rest, stripped themselves during these past weeks
+of all the honors which England had apportioned them. Permit me as one
+who had the opportunity to do much for the propagation of your dramatic
+works, especially of your finest drama, "Candida," in Western Germany
+and in Holland, to present as quiet and as moderate a retort as is
+possible.
+
+Your appeal to intellectual Germany we reciprocate with a question to
+intellectual England. It is as follows: How is it possible for you to
+witness your country's present unheard of policy (so opposed to culture)
+without rising as one man against it? Do you believe that we thinking
+Germans would ever, without saying or doing anything, observe an
+alliance of our Government, whose goal was the strengthening of
+imperialism and the subjugation and destruction of a cultured power,
+such as France or England? Never! Among your people only a very small
+number of brave scholars protested against this criminal alliance of
+your Government at the beginning of the war. You others, you poets,
+painters, and musicians of present-day England were silent and permitted
+Sir Edward Grey to continue to sin against a people related to you by
+blood and intellect. You raised your voice a little, Bernard Shaw! But
+what did you propose to us: "Refrain from your militarism, my dear
+Germans, and become again the congenial, complacent poets and thinkers,
+the people of Goethe and Beethoven, whom no one hated! Then we will
+surely help you against the bad Russians!"
+
+Is not this proposal a bit too naïve for you, Bernard Shaw? We are
+situated in the midst of Russians and Frenchmen, who have formed an open
+alliance against us for more than twenty years. Our neighbors in the
+East denounce nothing more than us, and our neighbors in the West
+denounce us and plan against us, who have for nearly half a century
+evinced nothing but friendliness toward them. When such enemies surround
+us, does not your friendly counsel, Bernard Shaw, seem as if you said to
+us: "Just let yourself be massacred, Germans! Afterward your British
+cousins will vouchsafe you their protection."
+
+
+*Germany Not Isolated.*
+
+Do you think that we would carry on our militarism and our expensive
+drilling if we lived on an island as you do? We would not think of it.
+We would speedily dispatch a blood-thirsty butcher, like your Lord
+Kitchener, from our island to our most unhealthy colony. We could not
+even reconcile our worthy Dr. Karl Peters, who had dealt a little
+unscrupulously with a few negro women, with our conceptions of culture,
+and had to pass him over to you! But the thought shall not come to me or
+to us, as it does to your Prime Ministers, to pose as angels of light, a
+fact about which you have yourself told your compatriots the bitter
+truth to our great joy. We admit having injured Belgium's neutrality,
+but we have only done it because of dire necessity, because we could not
+otherwise reach France and take up the fight against two sides forced
+upon us. Belgium's independence and freedom, which is suddenly of the
+utmost importance to your King and your Ministers, we have not touched.
+Even after the expeditious capture of Liége we asked Belgium for the
+second time: "Let us pass quickly through your country. We will make
+good every damage, and will not take away a square foot of your country!
+Do destroyers of liberty and Huns and vandals, or whatever other
+defamatory names your English papers now heap upon us, who at the time
+of Beethoven and Schopenhauer formed the Areopagus of culture, conduct
+themselves in such a way? Does not one of your living spirits in England
+cry aloud at the reprehensible alliance which your Government has made
+over your heads with Russia and Japan? On the most shameful day in
+English history, on the day when Mongolian Japan gave the German people
+her ultimatum at the instigation of your politicians, on this, I repeat
+it, most shameful day in the entire English history, I believed that the
+great dead in Westminster Abbey would rise from their graves horrified
+at the shameful deed which their grandsons and great-grandsons imposed
+upon old England.
+
+
+*The Land of Shakespeare.*
+
+We Germans venerated the old England almost as a fatherland. We have
+recognized, understood, and studied Shakespeare, whom you, Bernard Shaw,
+so dislike, more than any other people, even more than the English
+nation itself. Lord Byron received more benefits from Goethe alone than
+from all of England put together. Newton, Darwin, and Adam Smith found
+in Germany their best supporters and interpreters. The dramatic writers
+of latter-day England, most worthy of mention, from Oscar Wilde to you,
+Galsworthy and Knoblauch, are recognized by us and their plays performed
+numberless times. We have always endeavored to understand the English
+character. "Nowhere did we feel so much at home as in Germany," all your
+compatriots will tell you who have been guests here.
+
+In "gratitude" for this our merchants were persecuted for years by your
+merchants, because of a wild hatred for Germans, which, by the way, had
+a most disagreeable effect upon the races of other colors. In
+"gratitude," with but few exceptions which we will not forget, we are
+now abused and belittled by your press before all of Europe and America
+as if we were assassins, vagabonds, enemies of culture and murderers,
+far worse than the Russians. As thanks for that you have entered upon a
+war against us, for which even Sir Edward Grey could not at first give a
+good reason until the injury of Belgium neutrality luckily came to his
+assistance.
+
+Our people are, therefore, now rightly embittered against England
+because through your groundless participation you have made more
+difficult the war against Russia and France, for which one alone, the
+Czar of Russia, bears the blame. But despite this great bitterness they
+would never approve the demolition of your country and your nation,
+because of their respect for your great past and your share in the
+development of culture in Europe. You, however, joined an alliance as a
+third great power, whose only purpose is our dissolution and
+destruction. Merely for reasons of justice and of moral courage a Pitt,
+a Burke, a Disraeli would have withdrawn their participation in such an
+alliance, which--Oh, heroic deed--falls upon the Germans by threes, no,
+by fours or fives. Your present-day statesmen, wholly unworthy of
+representing a people with your past and your inheritance, incite the
+Mongolians and blacks against us, your brother nation. They steal and
+permit our small and insufficiently protected colonies to be stolen and
+no not care a jot for all considerations of Europeans' culture and
+morals.
+
+
+*An Unnatural Russian Alliance.*
+
+England, once the home and the refuge for all free spirits from the days
+of the Inquisition, from Rousseau until Freiligrath and Karl Marx,
+England has allied herself with Russia--the prison and the horror of all
+friends of liberty! Hear ye, hear ye illustrious dead, who lived and
+struggled for the freedom and the greatest possible joy of mankind, and
+shake in your tombs with disgust and with horror! But you living ones,
+and you, Bernard Shaw, the foremost of all English artists, do
+everything in your power to break this terrible alliance and make it
+powerless for England. Much more lies in the balance for her than is
+understood by your present nearsighted politicians, who have in mind
+only the momentary advantages. The destruction of the German power is
+not the only thing in question here; no, it concerns a great part of
+civilized Europe in regard to the suspension of their hard-won political
+liberty; and England, the people of the Magna Charta, the first free
+Constitution, can never be a party to that. That is why we call to you,
+Bernard Shaw, in the name of Europe, and ask you for your voice in the
+struggle.
+
+It is a splendid thing that this serious time has also aroused the
+poets, the thinkers and artists as political and diplomatic advisers,
+and we should not let ourselves be crowded out of this profession, for
+which, thanks to our minds, we are not less fitted than the high-brow
+Lords and Counts. Men of our guild from Thucydides and Herodotus to
+Petrarch and Rubens, and our Humboldt and your Beaconsfield have ever
+shown themselves to be good intermediaries and peace advocates. And
+that, believe me, Bernard Shaw, is of more importance to our people, as
+well as to our Kaiser, who for over twenty-five years has avoided war
+like a poison, than all other bloody laurels. Here's to a decent,
+honorable and "eternal" peace.
+
+HERBERT EULENBERG.
+
+
+
+
+*British Authors Defend England's War*
+
+
+ _One of the most interesting documents brought forth about the war
+ was issued Sept. 17 in London. It was signed by fifty-three of the
+ leading British writers. Herewith are presented the text of their
+ defense of England and their autograph signatures in facsimile._
+
+The undersigned writers, comprising among them men of the most divergent
+political and social views, some of them having been for years ardent
+champions of good-will toward Germany, and many of them extreme
+advocates of peace, are nevertheless agreed that Great Britain could not
+without dishonor have refused to take part in the present war. No one
+can read the full diplomatic correspondence published in the "White
+Paper" without seeing that the British representatives were throughout
+laboring whole-heartedly to preserve the peace of Europe, and that their
+conciliatory efforts were cordially received by both France and Russia.
+
+When these efforts failed Great Britain had still no direct quarrel with
+any power. She was eventually compelled to take up arms because,
+together with France, Germany, and Austria, she had solemnly pledged
+herself to maintain the neutrality of Belgium. As soon as danger to that
+neutrality arose she questioned both France and Germany as to their
+intentions. France immediately renewed her pledge not to violate Belgian
+neutrality; Germany refused to answer, and soon made all answer needless
+by her actions. Without even the pretense of a grievance against Belgium
+she made war on the weak and unoffending country she had undertaken to
+protect, and has since carried out her invasion with a calculated and
+ingenious ferocity which has raised questions other and no less grave
+than that of the willful disregard of treaties.
+
+When Belgium in her dire need appealed to Great Britain to carry out her
+pledge, that country's course was clear. She had either to break faith,
+letting the sanctity of treaties and the rights of small nations count
+for nothing before the threat of naked force, or she had to fight. She
+did not hesitate, and we trust she will not lay down arms till Belgium's
+integrity is restored and her wrongs redressed.
+
+The treaty with Belgium made our duty clear, but many of us feel that,
+even if Belgium had not been involved, it would have been impossible for
+Great Britain to stand aside while France was dragged into war and
+destroyed. To permit the ruin of France would be a crime against liberty
+and civilization. Even those of us who question the wisdom of a policy
+of Continental ententes or alliances refuse to see France struck down by
+a foul blow dealt in violation of a treaty.
+
+We observe that various German apologists, official and semi-official,
+admit that their country had been false to its pledged word, and dwell
+almost with pride on the "frightfulness" of the examples by which it has
+sought to spread terror in Belgium, but they excuse all these
+proceedings by a strange and novel plea. German culture and civilization
+are so superior to those of other nations that all steps taken to assert
+them are more than justified, and the destiny of Germany to be the
+dominating force in Europe and the world is so manifest that ordinary
+rules of morality do not hold in her case, but actions are good or bad
+simply as they help or hinder the accomplishment of that destiny.
+
+These views, inculcated upon the present generation of Germans by many
+celebrated historians and teachers, seem to us both dangerous and
+insane. Many of us have dear friends in Germany, many of us regard
+German culture with the highest respect and gratitude; but we cannot
+admit that any nation has the right by brute force to impose its culture
+upon other nations, nor that the iron military bureaucracy of Prussia
+represents a higher form of human society than the free Constitutions of
+Western Europe.
+
+Whatever the world destiny of Germany may be, we in Great Britain are
+ourselves conscious of a destiny and a duty. That destiny and duty,
+alike for us and for all the English-speaking race, call upon us to
+uphold the rule of common justice between civilized peoples, to defend
+the rights of small nations, and to maintain the free and law-abiding
+ideals of Western Europe against the rule of "Blood and Iron" and the
+domination of the whole Continent by a military caste.
+
+For these reasons and others the undersigned feel bound to support the
+cause of the Allies with all their strength, with a full conviction of
+its righteousness, and with a deep sense of its vital import to the
+future of the world.
+
+[Illustration: Signatures]
+
+[Illustration: Signatures]
+
+
+
+
+*WHO'S WHO AMONG THE SIGNERS.*
+
+WILLIAM ARCHER, dramatic critic and editor of Ibsen's works, author of
+"Life of Macready," "Real Conversations," "The Great Analysis," and
+(with Granville Barker) "A National Theatre."
+
+H. GRANVILLE BARKER, actor, dramatist, and manager, shares with his wife
+management of the Kingsway Theatre, London; author of "The Voysey
+Inheritance," and (with Laurence Housman) "Prunella."
+
+SIR JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE, creator of "Sentimental Tommy" and "Peter
+Pan," famous for his sympathetic studies of Scotch life and his
+fantastic comedies.
+
+HILAIRE BELLOC, best known as a writer on history, politics, and
+economics; a recognized authority on the French Revolution.
+
+ARNOLD BENNETT, author of many popular realistic studies of English
+provincial life, including "Clayhanger" and "Hilda Lessways."
+
+ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON, chiefly known for "From a College Window,"
+"Beside Still Waters," and other volumes of essays.
+
+EDWARD FREDERIC BENSON, brother of the preceding, author of many novels
+of modern life, including "Dodo."
+
+VERY REV. MONSIGNOR ROBERT HUGH BENSON, the youngest of the three famous
+Benson brothers. Besides numerous devotional and theological works,
+Monsignor Benson has written several widely appreciated historical
+novels.
+
+LAWRENCE BINYON, author of many lyrics and poetic dramas, Assistant
+Keeper in the British Museum, in charge of Oriental Prints and Drawings.
+
+ANDREW CECIL BRADLEY, critic, sometime Professor of Poetry at Oxford
+University, author of a standard work on Shakespeare.
+
+ROBERT BRIDGES, Poet-Laureate. Prominent as a physician before his
+poetry brought him the high honor he now enjoys.
+
+HALL CAINE, one of the most popular of contemporary novelists.
+
+R.C. CARTON, dramatist, author of "Lord and Lady Algy" and "A White
+Elephant."
+
+CHARLES HADDON CHAMBERS, dramatist, author of "John a Dreams," part
+author of "The Fatal Card."
+
+GILBERT K. CHESTERTON, essayist, novelist, poet; defender of orthodox
+thought by unorthodox methods.
+
+HUBERT HENRY DAVIES, dramatist, author of "The Mollusc" and "A Single
+Man."
+
+SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, creator of "Sherlock Holmes."
+
+HERBERT ALBERT LAURENS FISHER, Vice Chancellor of Sheffield University,
+author of "The Mediaeval Empire," "Napoleon Bonaparte," and other
+historical works.
+
+JOHN GALSWORTHY, a novelist and dramatist who has come into great
+prominence during the last five years, his plays, "Strife" and
+"Justice," and his novel, "The Dark Flower," being widely known.
+
+ANSTEY GUTHRIE, (F. ANSTEY,) author of "The Brass Bottle," "The Talking
+Horse," and other fantastic and humorous tales.
+
+SIR HENRY RIDER HAGGARD, author of many widely read romances, among them
+being "She."
+
+THOMAS HARDY, generally considered to be the greatest living English
+novelist.
+
+JANE ELLEN HARRISON, sometime Fellow and Lecturer at Newnham College,
+Cambridge University; writer of many standard works on classical
+religion, literature, and life.
+
+ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS, (ANTHONY HOPE,) author of popular historical
+romance and sketches of modern society, including "The Prisoner of
+Zenda."
+
+MAURICE HEWLETT, poet and romantic novelist, author of "Earthworks Out
+of Tuscany" and other mediaeval tales.
+
+ROBERT HICHENS, novelist, author of "The Garden of Allah," "Bella
+Donna," and other stories.
+
+JEROME K. JEROME, humorist, famous for "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow"
+and the "Three Men" series, and for his play "The Passing of the Third
+Floor Back."
+
+HENRY ARTHUR JONES, dramatist, author of "The Silver King," "The
+Hypocrites," and other plays.
+
+RUDYARD KIPLING needs no introduction to people who read the English
+language.
+
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE, author of "The Morals of Marcus," "Septimus," and "The
+Beloved Vagabond," which have been made into successful plays.
+
+EDWARD VERRAL LUCAS, associate editor of Punch and editor of several
+popular anthologies, author of "A Wanderer in Holland."
+
+JOHN WILLIAM MACKAIL, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, author
+and editor of many volumes dealing with ancient Greek and Roman
+literature.
+
+JOHN MASEFIELD, known chiefly for his long poems of life among the
+British poor.
+
+ALFRED EDWARD WOODLEY MASON, writer of romantic novels, of which "The
+Four Feathers" and "The Turnstile" are perhaps the best known, and of
+several popular dramas.
+
+GILBERT MURRAY, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University since
+1908, editor and translator of Greek classics, perhaps the greatest
+Greek scholar now living.
+
+HENRY NEWBOLT, "laureate of the British Navy," author of "Drake's Drum"
+and many other songs.
+
+BARRY PAIN, author of "Eliza" and other novels and short stories of
+adventure, of many well-known parodies and poems.
+
+SIR GILBERT PARKER, of Canadian birth, poet and author of romantic
+novels, including "The Judgment House," and "The Right of Way."
+
+EDEN PHILLPOTTS, realistic novelist, noted for his exact portraits of
+the English rustic, author of "Down Dartmoor Way."
+
+SIR ARTHUR WING PINERO, one of the most popular of living dramatists.
+His plays include "Sweet Lavender" and "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray."
+
+SIR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH, Professor of English Literature at Cambridge
+University, poet, novelist, and writer of short stories.
+
+SIR OWEN SEAMAN, since 1906 editor of Punch, writer of parodies and
+light verse.
+
+GEORGE R. SIMS, journalist, poet, and author of many popular dramas,
+including "The Lights of London," "Two Little Vagabonds," and "Harbour
+Lights."
+
+MAY SINCLAIR, writer of novels dealing with modern moral problems, "The
+Divine Fire" and "The Combined Maze" being best known.
+
+FLORA ANNIE STEEL, author of "Tales from the Punjab," "On the Face of
+the Waters," "A Prince of Dreamers," and other novels and short stories,
+most of which deal with life in India.
+
+ALFRED SUTRO, dramatist, author of "The Walls of Jericho," "The
+Barrier," and other plays of modern society."
+
+GEORGE MACAULAY TREVELYAN, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge;
+author of "England Under the Stuarts," and other historical and
+biographical works.
+
+RT. HON. GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN, historian, biographer of Macaulay, and
+author of a four-volume work on the American Revolution.
+
+HUMPHRY WARD, journalist and author, sometime Fellow of Brasenose
+College, editor of several biographical and historical works.
+
+MARY A. WARD, (Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD,) best known of contemporary women
+novelists; her first success was "Robert Elsmere."
+
+H.G. WELLS, novelist, author of "Tono Bungay" and "Ann Veronica."
+
+MARGARET L. WOODS, poet; her "Wild Justice" and "The Invader" have
+placed her in the front rank.
+
+ISRAEL ZANGWILL, novelist, poet, dramatist, interpreter of the modern
+Jewish spirit.
+
+
+
+
+*The Fourth of August--Europe at War*
+
+*By H.G. Wells.*
+
+_Copyright_, 1914, _by The New York Times Company_.
+
+
+Europe is at war!
+
+The monstrous vanity that was begotten by the easy victories of '70 and
+'71 has challenged the world, and Germany prepares to reap the harvest
+Bismarck sowed. That trampling, drilling foolery in the heart of Europe,
+that has arrested civilization and darkened the hopes of mankind for
+forty years. German imperialism, German militarism, has struck its
+inevitable blow. The victory of Germany will mean the permanent
+enthronement of the War God over all human affairs. The defeat of
+Germany may open the way to disarmament and peace throughout the earth.
+
+To those who love peace there can be no other hope in the present
+conflict than the defeat, the utter discrediting of the German legend,
+the ending for good and all of the blood and iron superstition, of
+Krupp, flag-wagging Teutonic Kiplingism, and all that criminal, sham
+efficiency that centres in Berlin. Never was war so righteous as war
+against Germany now. Never has any State in the world so clamored for
+punishment.
+
+But be it remembered that Europe's quarrel is with the German State, not
+with the German people; with a system, and not with a race. The older
+tradition of Germany is a pacific and civilizing tradition. The
+temperament of the mass of German people is kindly, sane, and amiable.
+Disaster to the German Army, if it is unaccompanied by any such
+memorable wrong as dismemberment or intolerable indignity, will mean the
+restoration of the greatest people in Europe to the fellowship of
+Western nations. The role of England in this huge struggle is plain as
+daylight. We have to fight. If only on account of the Luxemburg outrage,
+we have to fight. If we do not fight, England will cease to be a country
+to be proud of; it will be a dirt-bath to escape from. But it is
+inconceivable that we should not fight. And having fought, then in the
+hour of victory it will be for us to save the liberated Germans from
+vindictive treatment, to secure for this great people their right, as
+one united German-speaking State, to a place in the sun.
+
+First we have to save ourselves and Europe, and then we have to stand
+between German on the one hand and the Cossack and revenge on the other.
+
+For my own part, I do not doubt that Germany and Austria are doomed to
+defeat in this war. It may not be catastrophic defeat, though even that
+is possible, but it is defeat. There is no destiny in the stars and
+every sign is false if this is not so.
+
+They have provoked an overwhelming combination of enemies. They have
+underrated France. They are hampered by a bad social and military
+tradition. The German is not naturally a good soldier; he is orderly and
+obedient, but he is not nimble nor quick-witted; since his sole
+considerable military achievement, his not very lengthy march to Paris
+in '70 and '71, the conditions of modern warfare have been almost
+completely revolutionized and in a direction that subordinates the
+massed fighting of unintelligent men to the rapid initiative of
+individualized soldiers. And, on the other hand, since those years of
+disaster, the Frenchman has learned the lesson of humility; he is
+prepared now sombrely for a sombre struggle; his is the gravity that
+precedes astonishing victories. In the air, in the open field, with guns
+and machines, it is doubtful if any one fully realizes the superiority
+of his quality to the German. This sudden attack may take him aback for
+a week or so, though I doubt even that, but in the end I think he will
+hold his own; even without us he will hold his own, and with us then I
+venture to prophesy that within three months from now his tricolor will
+be over the Rhine. And even suppose his line gets broken by the first
+rush. Even then I do not see how the Germans are to get to Paris or
+anywhere near Paris. I do not see how against the strength of the modern
+defensive and the stinging power of an intelligent enemy in retreat, of
+which we had a little foretaste in South Africa, the exploit of Sedan
+can be repeated. A retiring German army, on the other hand, will be far
+less formidable than a retiring French army, because it has less "devil"
+in it, because it is made up of men taught to obey in masses, because
+its intelligence is concentrated in its aristocratic officers, because
+it is dismayed when it breaks ranks. The German Army is everything the
+conscriptionists dreamed of making our people; it is, in fact, an army
+about twenty years behind the requirements of contemporary conditions.
+
+On the eastern frontier the issue is more doubtful because of the
+uncertainty of Russian things. The peculiar military strength of Russia,
+a strength it was not able to display in Manchuria, lies in its vast
+resources of mounted men. A set invasion of Prussia may be a matter of
+many weeks, but the raiding possibilities in Eastern Germany are
+enormous. It is difficult to guess how far the Russian attack will be
+guided by intelligence, and how far Russia will blunder, but Russia will
+have to blunder very disastrously indeed before she can be put upon the
+defensive. A Russian raid is far more likely to threaten Berlin than a
+German to reach Paris.
+
+Meanwhile there is the struggle on the sea. In that I am prepared for
+some rude shocks. The Germans have devoted an amount of energy to the
+creation of an aggressive navy that would have been spent more wisely in
+consolidating their European position. It is probably a thoroughly good
+navy and ship for ship the equal of our own. But the same lack of
+invention, the same relative uncreativeness that has kept the German
+behind the Frenchman in things aerial has made him, regardless of his
+shallow seas, follow our lead in naval matters, and if we have erred,
+and I believe we have erred, in overrating the importance of the big
+battleship, the German has at least very obligingly fallen in with our
+error. The safest, most effective place for the German fleet at the
+present time is the Baltic Sea. On this side of the Kiel Canal, unless I
+overrate the powers of the waterplane, there is no safe harbor for it.
+If it goes into port anywhere that port can be ruined, and the
+bottled-up ships can be destroyed at leisure by aerial bombs. So that if
+they are on this side of the Kiel Canal they must keep the sea and
+fight, if we let them, before their coal runs short. Battle in the open
+sea in this case is their only chance. They will fight against odds, and
+with every prospect of a smashing, albeit we shall certainly have to pay
+for that victory in ships and men. In the Baltic we shall not be able to
+get at them without the participation of Denmark, and they may have a
+considerable use against Russia. But in the end even there mine and
+aeroplane and destroyer should do their work.
+
+So I reckon that Germany will be held east and west, and that she will
+get her fleet practically destroyed. We ought also to be able to sweep
+her shipping off the seas, and lower her flag forever in Africa and Asia
+and the Pacific. All the probabilities, it seems to me, point to that.
+There is no reason why Italy should not stick to her present neutrality,
+and there is considerable inducement close at hand for both Denmark and
+Japan to join in, directly they are convinced of the failure of the
+first big rush on the part of Germany. All these issues will be more or
+less definitely decided within the next two or three months. By that
+time I believe German imperialism will be shattered, and it may be
+possible to anticipate the end of the armaments phase of European
+history. France, Italy, England, and all the smaller powers of Europe
+are now pacific countries; Russia, after this huge war, will be too
+exhausted for further adventure; a shattered Germany will be a
+revolutionary Germany, as sick of uniforms and the imperialist idea as
+France was in 1871, as disillusioned about predominance as Bulgaria is
+today. The way will be open at last for all these western powers to
+organize peace. That is why I, with my declared horror of war, have not
+signed any of these "stop-the-war" appeals and declarations that have
+appeared in the last few days. Every sword that is drawn against Germany
+now is a sword drawn for peace.
+
+
+
+
+*If the Germans Raid England*
+
+*By H.G. Wells.*
+
+*From The Times of London, Oct. 31, 1914.*
+
+
+_To the Editor of The [London] Times_:
+
+Sir: At the outset of the war I made a suggestion in your columns for
+the enrollment of all that surplus of manhood and patriotic feeling
+which remains after every man available for systematic military
+operations has been taken. My idea was that comparatively undrilled boys
+and older men, not sound enough for campaigning, armed with rifles, able
+to shoot straight with them, and using local means of transport,
+bicycles, cars, and so forth, would be a quite effective check upon an
+enemy's scouting, a danger to his supplies, and even a force capable of
+holding up a raiding advance--more particularly if that advance was poor
+in horses and artillery, as an overseas raid was likely to be. I
+suggested, too, that the mere enrollment and arming of the population
+would have a powerful educational effect in steadying and unifying the
+spirit of our people. My proposals were received with what seemed even a
+forced amusement by the "experts." I was told that I knew nothing about
+warfare, and that the Germans would not permit us to do anything of the
+sort. The Germans, it seems, are the authorities in these matters, a
+point I had overlooked. They would refuse to recognize men with only
+improvised uniforms, they would shoot their prisoners--not that I had
+proposed that my irregulars should become prisoners--and burn the
+adjacent villages. This seemed to be an entirely adequate reply from the
+point of view of the expert mind, and I gathered that the proper rôle
+for such an able-bodied civilian as myself was to keep indoors while the
+invader was about and supply him as haughtily as possible with light
+refreshments and anything else he chose to requisition. I was also
+reminded that if only men like myself had obeyed their expert advice and
+worked in the past for national service and the general submission of
+everything to expert military direction, these troubles would not have
+arisen. There would have been no surplus of manhood and everything would
+have gone as smoothly and as well for England as--the Press Censorship.
+
+
+*An Improbable Invasion.*
+
+For a time I was silenced. Under war conditions it is always a difficult
+question to determine how far it is better to obey poor, or even bad,
+directions or to criticise them in the hope of getting better. But the
+course of the war since that correspondence and the revival of the idea
+of a raid by your military correspondent provoke me to return to this
+discussion. Frankly, I do not believe in that raid, and I think we play
+the German game in letting our minds dwell upon it. I am supposed to be
+a person of feverish imagination, but even by lashing my imagination to
+its ruddiest I cannot, in these days of wireless telegraphy, see a
+properly equipped German force, not even so trivial a handful as 20,000
+of them, getting itself with guns, motors, ammunition, and provisions
+upon British soil. I cannot even see a mere landing of infantrymen. I
+believe in that raid even less than I do in the suggested raid of
+navigables that has darkened London. I admit the risk of a few aeroplane
+bombs in London, but I do not see why people should be subjected to
+danger, darkness, and inconvenience on account of that one-in-a-million
+risk. Still, as the trained mind does insist upon treating all
+unenlisted civilians as panicstricken imbeciles and upon frightening old
+ladies and influential people with these remote possibilities, and as it
+is likely that these alarms may even lead to the retention of troops in
+England when their point of maximum effectiveness is manifestly in
+France, it becomes necessary to insist upon the ability of our civilian
+population, if only the authorities will permit the small amount of
+organization and preparation needed, to deal quite successfully with any
+raid that in an extremity of German "boldness" may be attempted.
+
+And, in the first place, let the expert have no illusions as to what we
+ordinary people are going to do if we find German soldiers in England
+one morning. We are going to fight. If we cannot fight with rifles, we
+shall fight with shotguns, and if we cannot fight according to rules of
+war apparently made by Germans for the restraint of British military
+experts, we will fight according to our inner light. Many men, and not a
+few women, will turn out to shoot Germans. There will be no preventing
+them after the Belgian stories. If the experts attempt any pedantic
+interference, we will shoot the experts. I know that in this matter I
+speak for so sufficient a number of people that it will be quite useless
+and hopelessly dangerous and foolish for any expert-instructed minority
+to remain "tame." They will get shot, and their houses will be burned
+according to the established German rules and methods on our account, so
+they may just as well turn out in the first place, and get some shooting
+as a consolation in advance for their inevitable troubles. And if the
+raiders, cut off by the sea from their supports, ill-equipped as they
+will certainly be, and against odds, are so badly advised as to try
+terror-striking reprisals on the Belgian pattern, we irregulars will, of
+course, massacre every German straggler we can put a gun to. Naturally.
+Such a procedure may be sanguinary, but it is just the common sense of
+the situation. We shall hang the officers and shoot the men. A German
+raid to England will in fact not be fought--it will be lynched. War is
+war, and reprisals and striking terror are games that two can play at.
+This is the latent temper of the British countryside, and the sooner the
+authorities take it in hand and regularize it the better will be the
+outlook in the remote event of that hypothetical raid getting home to
+us. Levity is a national characteristic, but submissiveness is not.
+Under sufficient provocation the English are capable of very dangerous
+bad temper, and the expert is dreaming who thinks of a German expedition
+moving through an apathetic Essex, for example, resisted only by the
+official forces trained and in training.
+
+And whatever one may think of the possibility of raids, I venture to
+suggest that the time has come when the present exclusive specialization
+of our combatant energy upon the production of regulation armies should
+cease. The gathering of these will go on anyhow; there are unlimited men
+ready for intelligent direction. Now that the shortage of supplies and
+accommodation has been remedied the enlistment sluices need only be
+opened again. The rank and file of this country is its strength; there
+is no need, and there never has been any need, for press hysterics about
+recruiting. But there is wanted a far more vigorous stimulation of the
+manufacture of material--if only experts and rich people would turn
+their minds to that. It is the trading and manufacturing class that
+needs goading at the present time. It is very satisfactory to send
+troops to France, but in France there are still great numbers of
+able-bodied, trained Frenchmen not fully equipped. It is our national
+duty and privilege to be the storehouse and arsenal of the Allies. Our
+factories for clothing and material of all sorts should be working day
+and night. There is the point to which enthusiasm should be turned. It
+is just as heroic and just as useful to the country to kill yourself
+making belts and boots as it is to die in a trench. But our organization
+for the enrollment and utilization of people not in the firing line is
+still amazingly unsatisfactory. The one convenient alternative to
+enlistment as a combatant at present is hospital work. But it is really
+far more urgent to direct enthusiasm and energy now to the production of
+war material. If this war does not end, as all the civilized world hopes
+it will end, in the complete victory of the Allies, our failure will not
+be through any shortage of men, but through a shortage of gear and
+organizing ability. It will not be through a default of the people, but
+through the slackness of the governing class.
+
+
+*Arms and Equipment Needed.*
+
+Now so far as the enrollment of us goes, of the surplus people who are
+willing to be armed and to be used for quasi-military work at home, but
+who are not of an age or not of a physique or who are already in shop or
+office serving some quite useful purpose at home, we want certain very
+simple things from the authorities. We want the military status that is
+conferred by a specific enrollment and some sort of uniform. We want
+accessible arms. They need not be modern service weapons; the rifles of
+ten years ago are quite good enough for the possible need we shall have
+for them. And we want to be sure that in the possible event of an
+invasion the Government will have the decision to give every man in the
+country a military status by at once resorting to the levée en masse.
+Given a recognized local organization and some advice--it would not take
+a week of Gen. Baden-Powell's time, for example, to produce a special
+training book for us--we could set to work upon our own local drill,
+rifle practice, and exercises, in such hours and ways as best suited our
+locality. We could also organize the local transport, list local
+supplies, and arrange for their removal or destruction if threatened.
+Finally, we could set to work to convert a number of ordinary cars into
+fighting cars by reconstructing and armoring them and exercising crews.
+And having developed a discipline and self-respect as a fighting force,
+we should be available not only for fighting work at home, in the
+extremely improbable event of a raid, but also for all kinds of
+supplementary purposes, as a reserve of motor drivers, as a supply of
+physically exercised and half-trained recruits in the events of an
+extended standard, and as a guarantee of national discipline under any
+unexpected stress. Above all, we should be relieving the real fighting
+forces of the country for the decisive area, which is in France and
+Belgium now and will, I hope, be in Westphalia before the Spring.
+
+At present we non-army people are doing only a fraction of what we would
+like to do for our country. We are not being used. We are made to feel
+out of it, and we watch the not always very able proceedings of the
+military authorities and the international mischief-making of the
+Censorship with a bitter resentment that is restrained only by the
+supreme gravity of the crisis. For my own part I entertain three
+Belgians and make a young officer possible by supplementing his
+expenses, and my wife knits things. A neighbor, an able-bodied man of 42
+and an excellent shot, is occasionally permitted to carry a recruit to
+Chelmsford. If I try to use my pen on behalf of my country abroad, where
+I have a few friends and readers, what I write is exposed to the clumsy
+editing and delays of anonymous and apparently irresponsible officials.
+So practically I am doing nothing, and a great number of people are
+doing very little more. The authorities are concentrated upon the
+creation of an army numerically vast, and for the rest they seem to
+think that the chief function of government is inhibition. Their
+available energy and ability is taxed to the utmost in maintaining the
+fighting line, and it is sheer greed for direction that has led to their
+systematic thwarting of civilian co-operation. Let me warn them of the
+boredom and irritation they are causing. This is a people's war, a war
+against militarism; it is not a war for the greater glory of British
+diplomatists, officials, and people in uniforms. It is our war, not
+their war, and the last thing we intend to result from it is a
+permanently increased importance for the military caste.
+
+Yours very sincerely,
+
+H.G. WELLS.
+
+
+
+
+*Sir Oliver Lodge's Comment*
+
+
+_To the Editor of The [London] Times_:
+
+Sir: In a strikingly vigorous letter Mr. H.G. Wells claims that a nation
+of which every individual prefers death to submission is unconquerable
+and cannot be successfully invaded. Ways of hampering an army are too
+numerous, if people are willing to run every risk, not only for
+themselves but for those dependent on them.
+
+This may be admitted. And we may also agree that the British race would
+be likely to risk everything if the consequences of carefully engendered
+hate were loosed upon us. But here comes a point worthy of
+consideration. An invasion of England is, to say the least, unlikely; an
+invasion of Germany may soon have to be undertaken. May it not add to
+the difficulties of our troops if a policy of "arming every woman,
+child, and cat and dog" is favorably regarded by us? Is not such a
+policy a sort of left-handed outcome of the Prussian contention that
+even their own unarmed civilian populace is contemptible and may be
+slaughtered without mercy if military procedure is resisted, or even if
+supplies are not forthcoming?
+
+It will be difficult, and I hope impossible, for the Allies to act in
+accordance with this latter view; though the German peasantry may have
+been so fed with lies that it will be unable to believe that our
+soldiers can be trusted to behave like civilized beings when the time
+has come for a forward march. It is clear that riotous license is
+subversive of discipline, and conduces to defeat--as it probably has in
+recent Continental experience. For, although ancient warriors used to
+ravage a country, and although women have occasionally intervened in
+order to stop a battle, surely never before in the history of the world
+have women and children been forced forward in defense of a fighting
+line! Yet undoubtedly war can be so conducted that foes mutually respect
+each other; indeed, save for the cowardly abomination of floating mines,
+this present war has been so conducted at sea. I suggest that the fair
+procedure in case of invasion is for each civilian to choose whether to
+be a combatant or not, and to incur the danger of an affirmative choice
+in a sufficiently conspicuous and permanent manner. I am, Sir,
+faithfully yours,
+
+*OLIVER LODGE,* The University, Birmingham, Oct. 31.
+
+
+
+
+*What the German Conscript Thinks*
+
+*By Arnold Bennett.*
+
+_Copyright_, 1914, _by The New York Times Company_.
+
+
+Some hold that this is a war of Prussian militarism, and not a war of
+the German people. This view has the merits of kindliness and
+convenience. Others warn us not to be misled by such sentimentalists,
+and assert that the heart of the German people is in the war. The point
+is of importance to us, because the work of the conscript in the field
+must be influenced by his private feelings. Notwithstanding all drill
+and sergeantry, the German Army remains a collection of human
+beings--and human beings more learned, if not better educated, than our
+own race! It is not a mere fighting machine, despite the efforts of its
+leaders to make it into one.
+
+Among those who assert that the heart of the German people is in the war
+are impartial and experienced observers who have carefully studied
+Germany for many years. For myself, I give little value to their
+evidence. To come at the truth by observation about a foreign country is
+immensely, overpoweringly difficult. I am a professional observer: I
+have lived in Paris and in the French provinces for nine years; I am
+fairly familiar with French literature and very familiar with the French
+language--and I honestly would not trust myself to write even a shilling
+handbook about French character and life. Nearly all newspapers are
+conservative; nearly all foreign correspondents adopt the official or
+conventional point of view; and the pictures of foreign life which get
+into the press are, as a rule--shall I say incomplete?
+
+Even when the honest observer says, "These things I saw with my own eyes
+and will vouch for," I am not convinced that he saw enough. An
+intelligent foreigner with first-class introductions might go through
+England and see with his own eyes that England was longing for
+protection, the death of home rule, and the repeal of the Insurance act.
+The unfortunate Prince Lichnowsky, after an exhaustive inquiry and
+access to the most secret sources of exclusive information telegraphed
+to the Kaiser less than a month ago that civil war was an immediate
+certainty throughout Ireland. Astounding fatuity? Not at all. English
+observers of England have made, and constantly do make, mistakes equally
+prodigious. See Hansard every month. So that when I read demonstrations
+of the thesis that the heart of the German people is in the war, I am
+not greatly affected by them.
+
+
+*German Heart Is In the War.*
+
+Still, I do myself believe that the heart of the German people is in the
+war, and that that heart is governed by two motives--the motive of
+self-defense against Russia and the motive of overbearing
+self-aggrandizement. I do not base my opinion on phenomena which I have
+observed. Beyond an automobile journey through Schleswig-Holstein, which
+was formidably tedious, and a yacht journey through the Kiel Canal and
+Kiel Bay, which was somewhat impressive, I have never traveled in
+Germany at all. I base my opinion on general principles. In a highly
+educated and civilized country such as Germany (the word "civilized"
+must soon take on a new significance!) it is impossible that an
+autocracy, even a military autocracy, could exist unrooted in the
+people. "Prussian militarism" may annoy many Germans, but it pleases
+more than it annoys, and there can be few Germans who are not flattered
+by it. That the lower classes have an even more tremendous grievance
+against the upper classes in Germany than in England or France is a
+certitude. But the existence and power of the army are their reward,
+their sole reward, for all that they have suffered in hardship and
+humiliation at the hands of the autocracy. It is the autocracy's bribe
+and sweetmeat to them.
+
+The Germans are a great nation; they have admirable qualities, but they
+have also defects, and among their defects is a clumsy arrogance, which
+may be noticed in any international hotel frequented by Germans. It is a
+racial defect, and to try to limit it to the military autocracy is
+absurd. An educated and civilized nation has roughly the Government that
+it wants and deserves. And it has in the end ways of imposing itself on
+its apparent rulers that are more effective than the ballot box or the
+barricade, and just as sure. No election was needed to prove to the
+Italian Government that Italy did not want to fight for the Triple
+Alliance, and would not fight for it. The fact was known; it was
+immanent in the air, beyond all arguments and persuasions. Italy
+breathed a negative, and war was not. So in Germany the mass of Germans
+have for years breathed war, and war is. The war may be autocratic,
+dynastic, what you will; but it is also national, and it symbolizes the
+national defect.
+
+
+*How About the Leaders?*
+
+Does the German conscript believe in the efficacy of his leaders? I mean
+when he is lying awake and fatigued at night, not when he is shouting
+"Hoch!" or watching the demeanor of women in front of him. Does no doubt
+ever lancinate him? Again I would answer the question from general
+principles and not from observation. The German conscript must know what
+everybody knows--that in almost every bully there is a coward. And he
+must know that he is led by bullies. He learned that in the barrack
+yard. An enormous number of conscripts must also know that there is
+something seriously wrong with a system that for the sake of its own
+existence has killed freedom of the press. And the million little things
+that are wrong in the system he also knows out of his own daily life as
+a conscript. Further, he must be aware that there is a dearth of really
+great men in his system. In the past there were in Germany men great
+enough to mesmerize Europe--Bismarck and von Moltke. There is none today
+that appeals to the popular imagination as Kitchener does in England or
+Joffre in France. Alone, in Germany, the Kaiser has been able to achieve
+a Continental renown. The Kaiser has good qualities. But twenty-four
+years ago he committed an act of folly and (one may say) "bad form"
+which nothing but results could justify, and which results have not
+justified. Whatever his good qualities may be it is an absolute
+certainty that common sense, foresight, and mental balance are not among
+them. The conscript feels that, if he does not state it clearly to
+himself. And as for the military organization of which the Kaiser is the
+figurehead, it has shown for many years past precisely those signs which
+history teaches us are signs of decay. It has not withstood the fearful
+ordeal of success. Just lately, if not earlier, the conscript must have
+felt that, too.
+
+What is the conclusion? Take the average conscript, the member of the
+lower middle class. He is accustomed to think politically, because at
+least fifty out of every hundred of him are professed Socialists with a
+definite and bitter political programme against certain manifestations
+of the autocracy. (It is calculated that two-fifths of the entire army
+is Socialist.) He may not argue very closely while in the act of war;
+indeed, he could not. But enormous experience is accumulated in his
+subconsciousness--experience of bullying and cowardice, of humiliation,
+of injustice, of lying, and of his own most secret shortcomings--for he,
+too, is somewhat of the bully, out for self-aggrandisement as well as
+for self-defense, and his conscience privately tells him so. The
+organization is still colossal, magnificent, terrific. In the general
+fever of activity he persuades himself that nothing can withstand the
+organization; but at the height of some hand-to-hand crisis, when
+one-hundredth of a dogged grain of obstinacy will turn the scale, he may
+remember an insult from an incompetent officer, or the protectionism at
+home which puts meat beyond his purse in order to enrich the landowner,
+or even the quite penal legislation of the autocracy against the
+co-operative societies of the poor, and the memory (in spite of him) may
+decide a battle. Men think of odd matters in a battle, and it is a
+scientific certainty that, at the supreme pinch, the subconscious must
+react.
+
+
+
+
+*Felix Adler's Comment*
+
+*From The Standard, Oct. 14, 1914.*
+
+
+Apropos of a recent article by Mr. Arnold Bennett, wherein he speaks of
+the resentment which the German soldiers--two-fifths of them
+Socialists--must feel against the bullying discipline to which they have
+been subjected, the following reflections are jotted down. The reader
+who is interested in pursuing the subject further may profitably consult
+a book entitled "Imperial Germany," by Prince von Bülow, which contains
+some penetrating observations on the workings of the German mind, as
+well as the chapter on Germany in Alfred Fouillée's notable work,
+"Esquisse Psychologique des Peuples Européens."
+
+The precision which characterizes the operations of the German military
+machine is due to the German notion of discipline. Discipline in Germany
+is based on the peculiar place assigned to the expert. Military experts
+exercise in their branch an authority different in degree but not in
+kind from that belonging to experts in other departments--strategy,
+tactics, improvements of armament, methods of mobilization. The inexpert
+soldier submits to the military expert as a person about to undergo a
+necessary operation would submit to a surgeon. It is a mistake to
+suppose that the Germans, a highly intelligent and educated people, are
+being cowed into submission by brutal non-commissioned officers.
+Brutality, when it occurs, is looked upon as exceptional and incidental
+to a system on the whole approved. The Germans would never tolerate the
+severe discipline to which they are subjected did they not willingly
+submit to it. They regard a highly efficient army as necessary to the
+safety of the Fatherland, and they are willing to leave the
+responsibility for the means of securing efficiency to the experts.
+During the Franco-German war, when a student in the University of
+Berlin, I talked with some of the brightest of the younger men about
+their military obligations, and I found that they took precisely the
+view just stated. The Pomeranian peasant may submit to military
+dictation in a dull, half-instinctive fashion. The flower and élite of
+German intelligence submit to it no less--from conviction.
+
+How shall we account for the unique predominance of the expert in German
+life? The explanation would seem to lie in the phrase invented by a
+brilliant writer of the last century, "Deutschland ist Hamlet" (Germany
+is Hamlet). The Germans are a resolute people--not at all, as has been
+erroneously supposed, a nation of dreamers--just as Hamlet, according to
+recent criticism, was essentially of a resolute character. In the days
+of the Hansa and of the Hohenstaufen the Germans cut a great figure in
+oversea commerce and in war. They were great doers of deeds. The Germans
+are intensely volitional, but also intensely intellectual. Hence the
+native hue of resolution has sometimes been sicklied o'er by too much
+thinking. The intellect of the German refuses to sanction action until
+the successive steps to be taken have been worked out with logical
+accuracy, and a scientific groove, so to speak, has been hollowed out
+along which action can proceed. As soon as this is accomplished, the
+flood of volitional impulse enters gladly into the channel prepared for
+it and moves on in it with irresistible force. Bismarck represents the
+active side, as the eminent philosophers of the German people represent
+the side of logical construction. The two sides must be taken together
+to understand German history and the tendencies prevailing in Germany
+today.
+
+Underneath it all, of course, is German sentiment, but of this we need
+take no account in discussing German discipline, except in so far as
+love for the Fatherland enters in to sustain the patience of the people
+under the burden of their military establishment.
+
+Discipline, or the subordination of the inexpert to the expert, likewise
+accounts for certain peculiarities of the German political parties.
+Prince von Bülow mentions three examples of supremely efficient
+organization--the Prussian Army, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the
+German Social Democracy. There are some 4,200 Socialist associations,
+subject to the orders of forty-two district associations, these in turn
+being ruled by the Central Committee. The working of the Social
+Democratic machine is almost flawless. The discipline, it is said, is
+iron.
+
+Again, the conception of Government in Germany, unlike that which
+prevails in England, France, or America, is determined by the idea of
+expertness. The Government is the political expert par excellence. Its
+business is to study the interests of the State as a whole. In all
+matters of economic theory, of finance, of administration, of social
+reform, it invokes the advice of specialists. But it is itself the
+supreme political specialist. It stands high above all the political
+parties. It does not depend for its existence on majorities in
+Parliament. It seeks the co-operation of Parliament, but reserves to
+itself the right of initiative and leadership.
+
+The object of the above remarks is to explain, not to justify, and in
+the face of much uninstructed criticism to point out the deep sources in
+the nature of the German people from which spring the influences that
+have molded their life. The chief objections to their system may be
+summarized in the statements, that it takes too little account of the
+value of the inexpert; that it tends to suppress latent spontaneity;
+and, especially in the sphere of government, that it ascribes to the
+expert a knowledge of the needs of the people such as no ruling class
+can ever possess. And it overlooks the highest aim of political life and
+activity, which is the education of the inexpert to such a point that
+they may become more or less expert in understanding and promoting the
+public weal.
+
+FELIX ADLER.
+
+[Illustration: MAURICE MAETERLINCK. _See Page_ 144]
+
+[Illustration: EMILE BOUTROUX. _(Photo from Bain News Service.) See Page
+160_]
+
+
+
+
+*When Peace Is Seriously Desired*
+
+*By Arnold Bennett.*
+
+*From The Daily News of London.*
+
+
+When peace is seriously desired in any quarter, the questions to be
+discussed by the plenipotentaries will fall into three groups:
+
+1. Those which affect all Europe.
+
+2. Those which chiefly affect Western Europe.
+
+3. Those which chiefly affect Eastern Europe.
+
+The first group is, of course, the most important, both practically and
+sentimentally. And the main question in it is the question of Belgium.
+The original cause of the war was Germany's deliberate and advertised
+bellicosity, and it might be thought that the first aim of peace would
+be by some means to extinguish that bellicosity. But relative values may
+change during the progress of a war, and the question of Belgium--which
+means the question of the sanction of international pledges--now stands
+higher in the general view than the question of disarmament. Germany has
+outraged the public law of Europe, and she has followed up her outrage
+with a series of the most cowardly and wanton crimes. She ought to pay,
+and she ought to apologize. Only by German payment and German apology
+can international law be vindicated. Germany should pay a sum large
+enough to do everything that money can do toward the re-establishment of
+Belgium's well-being. I have no competence to suggest the amount of the
+indemnity. A hundred million pounds does not appear to me too large.
+
+Then the apology. It may be asked: Why an apology? Would not an apology
+be implied in the payment of an indemnity?
+
+It is undeniable that Germany is now directed by hysteric stupidity
+wielding a bludgeon. Granted, if you will, that half the nation is at
+heart against the stupidity and the bludgeon. So much the worse for the
+half. Citizens who have not had the wit to get rid of the Prussian
+franchise law must accept all the consequences of their political
+ineffectiveness. The peacemakers will not be able to divide Germany into
+two halves.
+
+For Potsdam a first-rate spectacular effect is needed, and that effect
+would best be produced by a German national apology carried by a
+diplomatic mission with ceremony to Brussels and published in all German
+official papers, and emphasized by a procession of Belgian troops down
+Unter den Linden. This visible abasement of German arms in front of the
+Socialists of Berlin would be an invaluable aid to the breaking of
+military tyranny in Prussia.
+
+So much for the Belgium question and the sanction of international
+pledges. The other question affecting the whole of Europe is the hope of
+a universal limitation of armaments. But there is a particular question,
+touching France, which in practice would come before that. I mean
+Alsace-Lorraine. Unless Germany conquers Europe, Alsace-Lorraine should
+be restored to France. A profound national sentiment, to which all
+conceivable considerations of expediency or ultimate advantage are
+unimportant, demands imperatively the return of the plunder. And in the
+councils of the Allies, either alone or with German representatives, the
+attitude of French diplomacy would be: "Is it clear about
+Alsace-Lorraine? If so, we may proceed. If not, it's no use going any
+further."
+
+
+*Question of Armaments.*
+
+We now come to armaments. I have seen it suggested that the destruction
+of Essen, Wilhelmshaven, and Heligoland ought to be a condition of peace
+with Germany. Certainly the disappearance of these phenomena would be a
+gain to the world. So would the disappearance of Rosyth and Toulon. It
+seems to me, however, very improbable that their destruction or
+dismantling by international command would occur after hostilities have
+ceased, or could usefully so occur. If the French Army on its way to
+Berlin can treat the Krupp factory as the German Army on its way to
+Paris treated Rheims Cathedral, well and good! In fact, most excellent!
+And if the British Navy can somehow emasculate Wilhelmshaven and
+Heligoland I shall not complain that its behavior has been purely
+doctrinaire. But otherwise I see nothing practical in the
+Essen-Wilhelmshaven-Heligoland suggestion. Nor in the project for
+dethroning the Kaiser and sending him and his eldest son to settle their
+differences in St. Helena! The Kaiser--happily--is not a Napoleon, nor
+has he yet himself accomplished anything big enough or base enough to
+merit Napoleon's fate. Any dethroning that may enliven the gray monotony
+of the post-bellum era at Potsdam should and will be done by the German
+soldiers themselves. Even in international politics it is futile to try
+to meddle in other people's private affairs.
+
+Disarmament in Germany can be achieved by the exercise of one principle,
+and one principle only. That principle is the principle of mutuality. A
+scheme in which every nation will proportionately share should be
+presented to Germany, and she should be respectfully but quite firmly
+asked to participate in it. There would be no sense in saying to
+Germany: "You must disarm." The magic words would be: "We are going to
+disarm, and so are you, whether you want to or not." As to the procedure
+of disarmament--whether it shall be slow or fast, whether it shall
+include destruction or be content with mere omission to renew, how the
+proportions shall be decided, who shall give the signal to begin--here
+are matters which I am without skill or desire to discuss. All I know
+about them is that they are horribly complicated, unprecedentedly
+difficult, and bursting with danger; and that they will strain the
+wisdom, patience, and ingenuity of the negotiators to the very utmost.
+
+
+*Three Vital Points.*
+
+Compared to disarmament, all remaining questions whatsoever affecting
+peace are simple and secondary. Indemnities for France or Russia, or
+both, a Polish Kingdom, a Balkan United States, the precise number of
+nations into which Austria-Hungary is to be shattered, the ownership of
+the east coast of the Adriatic, even the reparation of the infamy by
+which Denmark was robbed of Schleswig-Holstein--what are these but
+favorable ground for the art of compromise? The vital points, at any
+rate for us Westerners, are only three: Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and
+disarmament. * * * Stay, there is another. It is vital to Great
+Britain's reputation that she should accept nothing--neither indemnity,
+nor colonies; not a single pound, not a single square mile.
+
+Many persons, I gather, find it hard to believe that Prussia will ever
+admit that she is beaten or consent to her own humiliation. Naturally
+her conduct will depend upon the degree to which she is beaten. She has
+admitted defeat and swallowed the leek before, though it is a long time
+ago. Meanwhile she has forgotten, and her opponents seem to have
+forgotten also, that though her name is Prussia she is subject to the
+limitations of the human race. Out of her prodigious score off little
+Denmark, her thrashing of Austria--a country which never wins a war--and
+her victory over France, there grew a legend that Prussia, and therefore
+Germany, was not as other nations. This legend is contrary to fact.
+Every nation must yield to force--here, indeed, is Germany's
+contribution to our common knowledge.
+
+If in July, 1870, it had been prophesied that France would give up
+Alsace-Lorraine and pay two hundred millions to get rid of a foreign
+army of occupation, France would have protested that she would fight to
+the last man and to the last franc first. But nations don't do these
+things. If Germany won the present war and fulfilled her dream of
+establishing an army in this island, we should yield, and we should
+submit to her terms, we who have never been beaten save by our own
+colonies--that is a scientific certainty. And Germany's terms would not
+be amusing; in their terribleness they would outrun our poor Anglo-Saxon
+imagination. Similarly, if Germany is beaten, she will bow the head, and
+to precisely the extent to which she is walloped. We need not worry
+about that. Were she recalcitrant we need not even murmur in her ear:
+"What would you have extorted if you'd won?" A gesture of the still
+uplifted sword would suffice to convince her that facts are facts.
+
+Assuming that the tide turns not again, the chances of a thorough,
+workmanlike common sense peace can only be imperiled by one thing--the
+deep desire of France and of Belgium for repose and recuperation. We in
+England do not know what war is. We have not lived in hell. Our plains
+have not been devastated, nor our women and children shot, nor our ears
+deafened by the boom of cannon, nor our cathedrals shelled, nor our land
+turned into a vast and bloody hospital; and we have not experienced the
+appalling terror and shame of the foe's absolute dominion in our streets
+and lanes. We have suffered; we shall suffer; but our suffering is
+nought and less than nought weighed against the suffering on the
+Continent. Why, in the midst of a war of unparalleled horror, we grumble
+if a train is late! We can talk calmly of fighting Germany to a
+stand-still, even if the job takes two years, and it behooves us to talk
+so, and to prepare for the task; and for myself I am convinced that we
+could make good the word. But France and Belgium will not use that tone,
+if Russia does. Once the German armies are across the frontiers, the
+instinctive pressure in favor of peace would be enormous, and
+considerations of the distant future, of the welfare of our descendants
+and the progress of mankind, would count little in the scale. In that
+moment, if it happily comes, our part and Russia's would be to sustain
+and encourage and salve the supreme victims of fate. A tremendous factor
+in our favor would be the exhaustion of Germany; and the measure of our
+power and of the fear we inspire is the furious intensity of Germany's
+anger against our inconvenient selves. Without us the war could not last
+beyond the end of this year, and the peace would be unsatisfactory.
+
+And even with us, insisting on our own terms of reconciliation, I do not
+see how it can last over six months more on anything like the present
+scale, for the Kaiser, despite his kinship with Deity, can neither
+create men nor extract gold coins out of an empty hat. Military
+arguments, in Germany as elsewhere, hold good only for a certain period.
+
+
+
+
+*Barrie at Bay: Which Was Brown?*
+
+
+*An Interview on the War.*
+
+*From The New York Times, Oct. 1, 1914.*
+
+
+As our reporter entered Sir James Barrie's hotel room by one door, the
+next door softly closed. "I was alone," writes our reporter. "I sprang
+into the corridor and had just time to see him fling himself down the
+elevator. Then I understood what he had meant when he said on the
+telephone that he would be ready for me at 10:30.
+
+I returned thoughtfully to the room, where I found myself no longer
+alone. Sir James Barrie's "man" was there; a stolid Londoner, name of
+Brown, who told me he was visiting America for the first time.
+
+"Sir James is very sorry, but has been called away," he assured me
+without moving a muscle. Then he added: "But this is the pipe," and he
+placed a pipe of the largest size on the table.
+
+"The pipe he smokes?" I asked.
+
+Brown is evidently a very truthful man, for he hesitated. "That is the
+interview pipe," he explained. "When we decided to come to America, Sir
+James said he would have to be interviewed, and that it would be wise to
+bring something with us for the interviewers to take notice of. So he
+told me to buy the biggest pipe I could find, and he practiced holding
+it in his mouth in his cabin on the way across. He is very pleased with
+the way the gentlemen of the press have taken notice of it."
+
+"So that is not the pipe he really smokes?" I said, perceiving I was on
+the verge of a grand discovery. "I suppose he actually smokes an
+ordinary small pipe."
+
+Again Brown hesitated, but again truth prevailed.
+
+"He does not smoke any pipe," he said, "nor cigars, nor cigarettes; he
+never smokes at all; he just puts that one in his mouth to help the
+interviewers."
+
+"It has the appearance of having been smoked," I pointed out.
+
+"I blackened it for him," the faithful fellow replied.
+
+"But he has written a book in praise of My Lady Nicotine."
+
+"So I have heard," Brown said guardedly. "I think that was when he was
+hard up and had to write what people wanted; but he never could abide
+smoking himself. Years after he wrote the book he read it; he had quite
+forgotten it, and he was so attracted by what it said about the delights
+of tobacco that he tried a cigarette. But it was no good; the mere smell
+disgusted him."
+
+
+*Strange Forgetfulness.*
+
+"Odd that he should forget his own book," I said.
+
+"He forgets them all," said Brown. "There is this Peter Pan foolishness,
+for instance. I have heard people talking to him about that play and
+mentioning parts in it they liked, and he tried to edge them off the
+subject; they think it is his shyness, but I know it is because he has
+forgotten the bits they are speaking about. Before strangers call on him
+I have seen him reading one of his own books hurriedly, so as to be able
+to talk about it if that is their wish. But he gets mixed up, and thinks
+that the little minister was married to Wendy."
+
+"Almost looks as if he hadn't written his own works," I said.
+
+"Almost," Brown admitted uncomfortably.
+
+I asked a leading question. "You don't suppose," I said, "that any one
+writes them for him? Such things have been. You don't write them for him
+by any chance, just as you blackened the pipe, you know?"
+
+Brown assured me stolidly that he did not. Suddenly, whether to get away
+from a troublesome subject I cannot say, he vouchsafed me a startling
+piece of information. "The German Kaiser was on our boat coming across,"
+he said.
+
+"Sure?" I asked, wetting my pencil.
+
+He told me he had Sir James's word for it. There was on board, it seems,
+a very small, shrunken gentleman with a pronounced waist and tiny,
+turned-up mustache, who strutted along the deck trying to look fierce
+and got in the other passengers' way to their annoyance until Sir James
+discovered that he was the Kaiser Reduced to Life Size. After that Sir
+James liked to sit with him and talk to him.
+
+Sir James is a great admirer of the Kaiser, though he has not, like Mr.
+Carnegie, had the pleasure of meeting him in society. When he read in
+the papers on arriving here that the Kaiser had wept over the
+destruction of Louvain, he told Brown a story. It was of a friend who
+had gone to an oculist to be cured of some disease in one eye. Years
+afterward he heard that the oculist's son had been killed in some Indian
+war, and he called on the oculist to commiserate with him.
+
+"You cured my eye," he said to him, "and when I read of your loss I wept
+for you, Sir; I wept for you with that eye."
+
+"Sir James," Brown explained, "is of a very sympathetic nature, and he
+wondered which eye it was that the Kaiser wept with."
+
+I asked Brown what his own views were about the war, and before replying
+he pulled a paper from his pocket and scanned it. "We are strictly
+neutral," he then replied.
+
+"Is that what is written on the paper?" I asked. He admitted that Sir
+James had written out for him the correct replies to possible questions.
+"Why was he neutral?" I asked, and he again found the reply on the piece
+of paper: "Because it is the President's wish."
+
+
+*Brown Must Be Neutral.*
+
+So anxious, I discovered, is Sir James to follow the President's bidding
+that he has enjoined Brown to be neutral on all other subjects besides
+the war; to express no preference on matters of food, for instance, and
+always to eat oysters and clams alternately, so that there can be no
+ill-feeling. Also to walk in the middle of the streets lest he should
+seem to be favoring either sidewalk, and to be very cautious about
+admitting that one building in New York is higher than another. I
+assured him that the Woolworth Building was the highest, but he replied
+politely, "that he was sure the President would prefer him to remain
+neutral." I naturally asked if Sir James had given him any further
+instructions as to proper behavior in America, and it seems that he had
+done so. They amount, I gather, to this, that Americans have a sense of
+humor which they employ, when they can, to the visitor's undoing.
+
+"When we reach New York," Sir James seems to have told Brown in effect,
+"we shall be met by reporters who will pretend that America is eager to
+be instructed by us as to the causes and progress of the war; then, if
+we are fools enough to think that America cannot make up its mind for
+itself, we shall fall into the trap and preach to them, and all the time
+they are taking down our observations they will be saying to themselves,
+'Pompous asses.'
+
+"It is a sort of game between us and the reporters. Our aim is to make
+them think we are bigger than we are, and theirs is to make us smaller
+than we are; and any chance we have of succeeding is to hold our
+tongues, while they will probably succeed if they make us jabber. Above
+all, oh, Brown, if you write to the papers giving your views of why we
+are at war--and if you don't you will be the only person who
+hasn't--don't be lured into slinging vulgar abuse at our opponents, lest
+America takes you for another university professor."
+
+There is, I learned, only one person in America about whom it is
+impossible, even in Sir James's opinion, to preserve a neutral attitude.
+This is the German Ambassador, whose splendid work for England day by
+day and in every paper and to all reporters cannot, Sir James thinks, be
+too cordially recognized. Brown has been told to look upon the German
+Ambasador as England's greatest asset in America just now, and to hope
+heartily that he will be long spared to carry on his admirable work.
+
+Lastly, it was pleasant to find that Brown has not a spark of sympathy
+with those who say that, because Germany has destroyed art treasures in
+Belgium and France, the Allies should retaliate with similar rudeness if
+they reach Berlin. He holds that if for any reason best known to
+themselves (such as the wish for a sunnier location) the Hohenzollerns
+should by and by vacate their present residence, a nice villa should be
+provided for them, and that all the ancestral statues in the
+Sieges-Allee should be conveyed to it intact, and perhaps put up in the
+back garden. There the Junkers could drop in of an evening, on their way
+home from their offices, and chat pleasantly of old times. Brown thinks
+they should be allowed to retain all their iron crosses, and even given
+some more, with which, after smart use of their pocket combs, they would
+cut no end of a dash among the nursemaids.
+
+As for the pipe, I was informed that it had now done its work, and I
+could take it away as a keepsake. I took it, but wondered afterward at
+Brown's thinking he had the right to give it me.
+
+A disquieting feeling has since come over me that perhaps it was Sir
+James I had been interviewing all the time, and Brown who had escaped
+down the elevator.
+
+
+
+
+*A "Credo" for Keeping Faith*
+
+*By John Galsworthy.*
+
+
+I believe in peace with all my heart. I believe that war is outrage--a
+black stain on the humanity and the fame of man. I hate militarism and
+the god of force. I would go any length to avoid war for material
+interests, war that involved no principles, distrusting profoundly the
+common meaning of the phrase "national honor."
+
+But I believe there is a national honor charged with the future
+happiness of man, that loyalty is due from those living to those that
+will come after; that civilization can only wax and flourish in a world
+where faith is kept; that for nations, as for individuals, there are
+laws of duty, whose violation harms the whole human race; in sum, that
+stars of conduct shine for peoples, as for private men.
+
+And so I hold that without tarnishing true honor, endangering
+civilization present and to come, and ruining all hope of future
+tranquillity, my country could not have refused to take up arms for the
+defense of Belgium's outraged neutrality, solemnly guaranteed by herself
+and France.
+
+I believe, and claim in proof, the trend of events and of national
+character during the last century, that in democracy alone lies any
+coherent hope of progressive civilization or any chance of lasting peace
+in Europe, or the world.
+
+I believe that this democratic principle, however imperfectly developed,
+has so worked in France, in England, in the United States, that these
+countries are already nearly safe from inclination to aggress, or to
+subdue other nationalities.
+
+And I believe that while there remain autocratic Governments basing
+themselves on militarism, bitterly hostile to the democratic principle,
+Europe will never be free of the surcharge of swollen armaments, the
+nightmare menace of wars like this--the paralysis that creeps on
+civilizations which adore the god of force.
+
+And so I hold that, without betrayal of trusteeship, without shirking
+the elementary defense of beliefs coiled within its fibre, or beliefs
+vital to the future welfare of all men, my country could not stand by
+and see the triumph of autocratic militarism over France, that very
+cradle of democracy.
+
+I believe that democratic culture spreads from west to east, that only
+by maintenance of consolidate democracy in Western Europe can democracy
+ever hope to push on and prevail till the Eastern powers have also that
+ideal under which alone humanity can flourish.
+
+And so I hold that my country is justified at this juncture in its
+alliance with the autocratic power of Russia, whose people will never
+know freedom till her borders are joined to the borders of democracy.
+
+I do not believe that jealous, frightened jingoism has ever been more
+than the dirty fringe of England's peace-loving temper, and I profess my
+sacred faith that my country has gone to war at last, not from fear, not
+from hope of aggrandizement, but because she must--for honor, for
+democracy, and for the future of mankind.
+
+
+
+
+*Hard Blows, Not Hard Words*
+
+*By Jerome K. Jerome.*
+
+*From The London Daily News.*
+
+
+In one of Shaw's plays--I think it is "Superman"--one of the characters
+hints, toward the end of the last act, that the hero is a gentleman
+somewhat prone to talking. The hero admits it, but excuses himself on
+the ground that it is the only way he knows of explaining his opinions.
+
+Times of stress and struggle, whether individual or national, afford men
+and women other methods of expressing their views, and a large number of
+our citizens are, very creditably, taking the present opportunity to act
+instead of shout. There are the young fellows who in their thousands are
+pressing around the door of the recruiting offices. They are throwing
+up, many of them, good jobs for the privilege of drilling for the next
+six months for eight hours a day. Their reward will be certain hardship,
+their share of sickness and wounds, the probability of lying ten deep in
+a forgotten grave, their chance of glory a name printed in small type
+among a thousand others on a War Office report.
+
+There are the mothers and wives and children who are encouraging them to
+go; to whom their going means semi-starvation. The old, bent crones
+whose feeble hands will have to grasp again the hoe and the scrubbing
+brush. The young women who know only too well what is before them--the
+selling of the home just got together; first the easy chair and the
+mirror, and then the bed and the mattress; the weary tramping of the
+streets, looking for work. The children awestruck and wondering.
+
+There are the men who are quietly going on with their work, doing their
+best with straitened means to keep their business going; giving
+employment; getting ready to meet the income tax collector, who next
+year one is inclined to expect will be demanding anything from half a
+crown to five shillings in the pound. There are others. But there is a
+certain noisy and, to me, particularly offensive man (and with him, I am
+sorry to say, one or two women) very much to the fore just now with
+whose services the country could very well dispense. He is the man who
+does his fighting with his mouth. Unable for reasons of his own to get
+at the foe in the field, he thirsts for the blood of the unfortunate
+unarmed and helpless Germans that the fortunes of war have left stranded
+in England. He writes to the paper thoughtfully suggesting plans that
+have occurred to him for making their existence more miserable than it
+must be. He generally concludes his letter with a short homily directed
+against the Prussian Military Staff for their lack of the higher
+Christian principles.
+
+He has spies on the brain. Two quite harmless English citizens have
+already been shot in consequence of the funk this spy mania has created
+among us. The vast majority of Germans in England have come to live in
+England because they dislike Germany. That a certain number of spies are
+among us I take to be highly probable. I take it that if the Allies know
+their business a certain number of English spies are doing what they can
+for us at great personal risk to themselves in Germany. Until the German
+Army has landed on our shores German spies can do little or no harm to
+us. The police can be trusted to know something about them, and if any
+are caught red-handed the rules of war are not likely to be strained for
+their benefit.
+
+
+*A Story from the South.*
+
+From a small town in the South of England comes a story I can vouch for.
+A couple of Boy Scouts had been set to guard the local reservoir. About
+noon one sunny day they remarked the approach, somewhat ostentatious, of
+a desperate-looking character. Undoubtedly a German spy! What can he be
+up to! The boys approached him and he fled, leaving behind him the
+damning evidence--a tin suggestive of sardines and labeled "Poison!"
+That the gentleman should have chosen broad daylight for his nefarious
+design, should have been careful to label his tin, seemed to the good
+townsfolk under present scare conditions proof that they had at last
+discovered the real German spy, full of his devilish cunning. The tin
+was taken possession of by the police. And then the Sergeant's little
+daughter, who happened to have had a few lessons in French, suggested
+that the word on the tin was "Poisson," and the town now breathes again.
+
+So long as the war continues the spy will be among us. I suggest that we
+face the problem of his activities without blue funk and hysteria. The
+men and women who are shrieking for vicarious vengeance upon all the
+Germans remaining in our midst must remember that there are thousands of
+English families at the present moment residing in Germany and Austria.
+The majority of them, comparatively poor people, with all their
+belongings around them, were unable to get away. I shall, until I
+receive convincing proof to the contrary, continue to believe that they
+are living among their German neighbors unmolested. Even were it not so,
+I would suggest our setting the example of humanity rather than our
+slavishly following an example of barbarity.
+
+We are fighting for an idea--an idea of some importance to the
+generations that will come after us. We are fighting to teach the
+Prussian Military Staff that other laws have come to stay--laws
+superseding those of Attila the Hun. We are fighting to teach the German
+people that, free men with brains to think with, they have no right to
+hand themselves over body and soul to their rulers to be used as mere
+devil's instruments; that if they do so they shall pay the penalty, and
+the punishment shall go hard. We are fighting to teach the German Nation
+respect for God! Our weapons have got to be hard blows, not hard words.
+We are tearing at each other's throats; it has got to be done. It is not
+a time for yelping.
+
+Jack Johnson as a boxer I respect. The thing I do not like about him is
+his habit of gibing and jeering at his opponent while he is fighting
+him. It isn't gentlemanly, and it isn't sporting. The soldiers are
+fighting in grim silence. When one of them does talk, it is generally to
+express admiration of German bravery. It is our valiant stay-at-homes,
+our valiant clamorers for everybody else to enlist but themselves, who
+would have us fight like some drunken fish hag, shrieking and spitting
+while she claws.
+
+
+*Incredible Reports of Atrocities.*
+
+Half of these stories of atrocities I do not believe. I remember when I
+was living in Germany at the time of the Boer war the German papers were
+full of accounts of Tommy Atkins's brutality. He spent his leisure time
+in tossing babies on bayonets. There were photographs of him doing it.
+Detailed accounts certified by most creditable witnesses. Such lies are
+the stock in trade of every tenth-rate journalist, who, careful not to
+expose himself to danger, slinks about the byways collecting hearsay. In
+every war each side, according to the other, is supposed to take a
+fiendish pleasure in firing upon hospitals--containing always a
+proportion of their own wounded. An account comes to us from a
+correspondent with the Belgian Army. He tells us that toward the end of
+the day a regrettable incident occurred. The Germans were taking off
+their wounded in motor cars. The Belgian sharpshooters, not noticing the
+red flag in the dusk, kept up a running fire, and a large number of the
+wounded were killed. Had the incident been the other way about it would
+have been cited as a deliberate piece of villainy on the part of the
+Germans. According to other accounts, the Germans always go into action
+with screens of women and children before them. The explanation, of
+course, is that a few poor terrified creatures are rushing along the
+road. They get between the approaching forces, and I expect the bullets
+that put them out of their misery come pretty even from both sides.
+
+The men are mad. Mad with fear, mad with hate, blinded by excitement.
+Take a mere dog fight. If you interfere you have got to be prepared for
+your own dog turning upon you. In war half the time the men do not know
+what they are doing. They are little else than wild beasts. There was
+great indignation at the dropping of bombs into Antwerp. One now hears
+that a French dirigible has been dropping bombs into Luxembourg--a much
+more dignified retort. War is a grim game. Able editors and club-chair
+politicians have been clamoring for it for years past. They thought it
+was all goose-step and bands.
+
+The truth is bad enough, God knows. There is no sense in making things
+out worse than they are. When this war is over we have got to forget it.
+To build up barriers of hatred that shall stand between our children and
+our foemen's children is a crime against the future.
+
+These stories of German naval officers firing on their wounded sailors
+in the water! They are an insult to our intelligence. At Louvain fifty
+of the inhabitants were taken out and shot. On Monday the fifty had
+grown to five hundred; both numbers vouched for by eye-witnesses,
+"Dutchmen who would have had no interest," &c. That the beautiful old
+town has been laid in ashes is undoubted. Some criminal lunatic
+strutting in pipeclay and mustachios was given his hour of authority and
+took the chance of his life. If I know anything of the German people it
+will go hard with him when the war is over, if he has not had the sense
+to get killed. But that won't rear again the grand old stones or wipe
+from Germany's honor the stain of that long line of murdered men and
+women--whatever its actual length may have been. War puts a premium on
+brutality and senselessness. Men with the intelligence and instincts of
+an ape suddenly find themselves possessed of the powers of a god. And we
+are astonished that they do not display the wisdom of a god!
+
+There are other stories that have filtered through to us. There was a
+dying Uhlan who caught a child to his arms and kissed him. One would
+like to be able to kiss one's own child before one dies, but failing
+that--well, after all, there is a sort of family likeness between them.
+The same deep wondering eyes, the same--and then the mist grows deeper.
+Perhaps after all it was Baby Fritz that he kissed.
+
+And of a Belgian woman. She had seen her two sons killed before her
+eyes. She tells of that and of other horrors. Among such, of the German
+lads she had stepped over, their blue eyes quiet in death. The passion
+and the fear and the hate cleansed out of them. Just boys with their
+clothes torn--so like boys.
+
+"They, too, have got mothers, poor lads!" is all she says, thinking of
+them lying side by side with her own.
+
+When the madness and the folly are over, when the tender green is
+creeping in and out among the blackened ruins, it will be well for us to
+think of that dying Uhlan who had to put up with a French baby instead
+of his own; of that Belgian mother to whom the German youngsters were
+just "poor lads"--with their clothes torn.
+
+And the savagery and the cruelty and the guiltiness that go to the
+making of war we will seek to forget.
+
+
+
+
+*"As They Tested Our Fathers"*
+
+*By Rudyard Kipling.*
+
+ _Following is the text of an address by Mr. Kipling to a mass
+ meeting at Brighton, Sept. 8, 1914:_
+
+
+Through no fault nor wish of ours we are at war with Germany, the power
+which owes its existence to three well-thought-out wars; the power which
+for the last twenty years has devoted itself to organizing and preparing
+for this war; the power which is now fighting to conquer the civilized
+world.
+
+For the last two generations the Germans in their books, teachers,
+speeches, and schools have been carefully taught that nothing less than
+this world conquest was the object of their preparations and their
+sacrifices. They have prepared carefully and sacrificed greatly.
+
+We must have men, and men, and men, if we with our allies are to check
+the onrush of organized barbarism.
+
+Have no illusions. We are dealing with a strong and magnificently
+equipped enemy, whose avowed aim is our complete destruction.
+
+The violation of Belgium, the attack on France, and the defense against
+Russia are only steps by the way. The Germans' real objective, as she
+has always told us, is England and England's wealth, trade, and
+worldwide possessions.
+
+If you assume for an instant that that attack will be successful,
+England will not be reduced, as some people say, to the rank of a
+second-rate power, but we shall cease to exist as a nation. We shall
+become an outlying province of Germany, to be administered with what
+severity German safety and interest require.
+
+We arm against such a fate. We enter into a new life in which all the
+facts of war that we had put behind or forgotten for the past hundred
+years have returned to the front and test us as they tested our fathers.
+It will be a long and a hard road, beset with difficulties and
+discouragements, but we tread it together and we will tread it together
+to the end.
+
+Our petty social divisions and barriers have been swept away at the
+outset of our mighty struggle. All the interests of our life of six
+weeks ago are dead. We have but one interest now, and that touches the
+naked heart of every man in this island and in the empire.
+
+If we are to win the right for ourselves and for freedom to exist on
+earth, every man must offer himself for that service and that sacrifice.
+
+
+
+
+*Kipling and "The Truce of the Bear"*
+
+ _STAUNTON, Va., Sept. 25, 1914.--On Sept. 5 The Staunton News
+ printed some verses by Dr. Charles Minor Blackford, an associate
+ editor, addressed to Rudyard Kipling, calling attention to the
+ apparent inconsistency of his attitude of distrust of Russia as
+ shown in his well-known poem, "The Truce of the Bear," and his
+ present advocacy of the alliance between Russia and Great Britain.
+ A copy of the verses was sent to Mr. Kipling and the following
+ reply was received from him:_
+
+Bateman's Burwash, Sussex.
+
+Dear Sir: I am much obliged for your verses of Sept. 4. "The Truce of
+the Bear," to which they refer, was written sixteen years ago, in 1898.
+It dealt with a situation and a menace which have long since passed
+away, and with issues that are now quite dead.
+
+The present situation, as far as England is concerned, is Germany's
+deliberate disregard of the neutrality of Belgium, whose integrity
+Germany as well as England guaranteed. She has filled Belgium with every
+sort of horror and atrocity, not in the heat of passion, but as a part
+of settled policy of terrorism. Her avowed object is the conquest of
+Europe on these lines.
+
+As you may prove for yourself if you will consult her literature of the
+last generation, Germany is the present menace, not to Europe alone, but
+to the whole civilized world. If Germany, by any means, is victorious
+you may rest assured that it will be a very short time before she turns
+her attention to the United States. If you could meet the refugees from
+Belgium flocking into England and have the opportunity of checking their
+statements of unimaginable atrocities and barbarities studiously
+committed, you would, I am sure, think as seriously on these matters as
+we do, and in your unpreparedness for modern war you would do well to
+think very seriously indeed. Yours truly,
+
+RUDYARD KIPLING.
+
+
+
+
+*On the Impending Crisis*
+
+*By Norman Angell.*
+
+
+_To the Editor of The London Times:_
+
+Sir: A nation's first duty is to its own people. We are asked to
+intervene in the Continental war because unless we do so we shall be
+"isolated." The isolation which will result for us if we keep out of
+this war is that, while other nations are torn and weakened by war, we
+shall not be, and by that fact might conceivably for a long time be the
+strongest power in Europe, and, by virtue of our strength and isolation,
+its arbiter, perhaps, to useful ends.
+
+We are told that if we allow Germany to become victorious she would be
+so powerful as to threaten our existence by the occupation of Belgium,
+Holland, and possibly the North of France. But, as your article of
+today's date so well points out, it was the difficulty which Germany
+found in Alsace-Lorraine which prevented her from acting against us
+during the South African War. If one province, so largely German in its
+origin and history, could create this embarrassment, what trouble will
+not Germany pile up for herself if she should attempt the absorption of
+a Belgium, a Holland, and a Normandy? She would have created for herself
+embarrassments compared with which Alsace and Poland would be a trifle;
+and Russia, with her 160,000,000, would in a year or two be as great a
+menace to her as ever.
+
+The object and effect of our entering into this war would be to insure
+the victory of Russia and her Slavonic allies. Will a dominant Slavonic
+federation of, say, 200,000,000 autocratically governed people, with a
+very rudimentary civilization, but heavily equipped for military
+aggression, be a less dangerous factor in Europe than a dominant Germany
+of 65,000,000 highly civilized and mainly given to the arts of trade and
+commerce?
+
+The last war we fought on the Continent was for the purpose of
+preventing the growth of Russia. We are now asked to fight one for the
+purpose of promoting it. It is now universally admitted that our last
+Continental war--the Crimean war--was a monstrous error and
+miscalculation. Would this intervention be any wiser or likely to be
+better in its results?
+
+On several occasions Sir Edward Grey has solemnly declared that we are
+not bound by any agreement to support France, and there is certainly no
+moral obligation on the part of the English people so to do. We can best
+serve civilization, Europe--including France--and ourselves by remaining
+the one power in Europe that has not yielded to the war madness.
+
+This, I believe, will be found to be the firm conviction of the
+overwhelming majority of the English people.
+
+Yours faithfully,
+
+NORMAN ANGELL.
+
+4 Kings Bench Walk, Temple, E.C., July 31.
+
+
+
+
+*Why England Came To Be In It*
+
+*By Gilbert K. Chesterton.*
+
+
+*I.*
+
+
+Unless we are all mad, there is at the back of the most bewildering
+business a story; and if we are all mad, there is no such thing as
+madness. If I set a house on fire, it is quite true that I may
+illuminate many other people's weaknesses as well as my own. It may be
+that the master of the house was burned because he was drunk; it may be
+that the mistress of the house was burned because she was stingy, and
+perished arguing about the expense of the fire-escape. It is,
+nevertheless, broadly true that they both were burned because I set fire
+to their house. That is the story of the thing. The mere facts of the
+story about the present European conflagration are quite as easy to
+tell.
+
+Before we go on to the deeper things which make this war the most
+sincere war of human history, it is easy to answer the question of why
+England came to be in it at all; as one asks how a man fell down a coal
+hole, or failed to keep an appointment. Facts are not the whole truth.
+But facts are facts, and in this case the facts are few and simple.
+
+Prussia, France, and England had all promised not to invade Belgium,
+because it was the safest way of invading France. But Prussia promised
+that if she might break in through her own broken promise and ours she
+would break in and not steal. In other words, we were offered at the
+same instant a promise of faith in the future and a proposal of perjury
+in the present.
+
+Those interested in human origins may refer to an old Victorian writer
+of English, who in the last and most restrained of his historical essays
+wrote of Frederick the Great, the founder of this unchanging Prussian
+policy. After describing how Frederick broke the guarantee he had signed
+on behalf of Maria Theresa he then describes how Frederick sought to put
+things straight by a promise that was an insult. "If she would but let
+him have Silesia, he would, he said, stand by her against any power
+which should try to deprive her of her other dominions; as if he was not
+already bound to stand by her, or as if his new promise could be of more
+value than the old one." That passage was written by Macaulay; but so
+far as the mere contemporary facts are concerned, it might have been
+written by me.
+
+
+*Diplomacy That Might Have Been.*
+
+Upon the immediate logical and legal origin of the English interest
+there can be no rational debate. There are some things so simple that
+one can almost prove them with plans and diagrams, as in Euclid. One
+could make a kind of comic calendar of what would have happened to the
+English diplomatist if he had been silenced every time by Prussian
+diplomacy. Suppose we arrange it in the form of a kind of diary:
+
+ July 24--Germany invades Belgium.
+
+ July 25--England declares war.
+
+ July 26--Germany promises not to annex Belgium.
+
+ July 27--England withdraws from the war.
+
+ July 28--Germany annexes Belgium. England declares war.
+
+ July 29--Germany promises not to annex France. England withdraws
+ from the war.
+
+ July 30--Germany annexes France. England declares war.
+
+ July 31--Germany promises not to annex England.
+
+ Aug. 1--England withdraws from the war. Germany invades England.
+
+How long is anybody expected to go on with that sort of game, or keep
+peace at that illimitable price? How long must we pursue a road in which
+promises are all fetiches in front of us and all fragments behind us?
+No; upon the cold facts of the final negotiations, as told by any of the
+diplomatists in any of the documents, there is no doubt about the story.
+And no doubt about the villain of the story.
+
+These are the last facts, the facts which involved England. It is
+equally easy to state the first facts--the facts which involved Europe.
+The Prince who practically ruled Austria was shot by certain persons
+whom the Austrian Government believed to be conspirators from Servia.
+The. Austrian Government piled up arms and armies, but said not a word
+either to Servia, their suspect, or Italy, their ally. From the
+documents it would seem that Austria kept everybody in the dark, except
+Prussia. It is probably nearer the truth to say that Prussia kept
+everybody in the dark, including Austria.
+
+
+*The Demands on Servia.*
+
+But all that is what is called opinion, belief, conviction, or common
+sense, and we are not dealing with it here. The objective fact is that
+Austria told Servia to permit Servian officers to be suspended by the
+authority of Austrian officers, and told Servia to submit to this within
+forty-eight hours. In other words, the Sovereign of Servia was
+practically told to take off not only the laurels of two great
+campaigns, but his own lawful and national crown, and to do it in a time
+in which no respectable citizen is expected to discharge a hotel bill.
+Servia asked for time for arbitration--in short, for peace. But Russia
+had already begun to mobilize, and Prussia, presuming that Servia might
+thus be rescued, declared war.
+
+
+Between these two ends of fact, the ultimatum to Servia, the ultimatum
+to Belgium, any one so inclined can, of course, talk as if everything
+were relative. If any one asks why the Czar should rush to the support
+of Servia, it is easy to ask why the Kaiser should rush to the support
+of Austria. If any one say that that the French would attack the
+Germans, it is sufficient to answer that the Germans did attack the
+French.
+
+There remain, however, two attitudes to consider, even perhaps two
+arguments to counter, which can best be considered and countered under
+this general head of facts. First of all, there is a curious, cloudy
+sort of argument, much affected by the professional rhetoricans of
+Prussia, who are sent out to instruct and correct the minds of Americans
+or Scandinavians. It consists of going into convulsions of incredulity
+and scorn at the mention of Russia's responsibility for Servia or
+England's responsibility for Belgium; and suggesting that, treaty or no
+treaty, frontier or no frontier, Russia would be out to slay Teutons or
+England to steal colonies.
+
+
+*England Kept Her Contracts.*
+
+Here, as elsewhere, I think the professors dotted all over the Baltic
+plain fail in lucidity and in the power of distinguishing ideas. Of
+course, it is quite true that England has material interests to defend,
+and will probably use the opportunity to defend them; or, in other
+words, of course England, like everybody else, would be more comfortable
+if Prussia were less predominant. The fact remains that we did not do
+what the Germans did. We did not invade Holland to seize a naval and
+commercial advantage; and whether they say that we wished to do it in
+our greed or feared to do it in our cowardice, the fact remains that we
+did not do it. Unless this common sense principle be kept in view, I
+cannot conceive how any quarrel can possibly be judged. A contract may
+be made between two persons solely for material advantages on each side;
+but the moral advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the
+person who keeps the contract. Surely, it cannot be dishonest to be
+honest--even if honesty is the best policy. Imagine the most complex
+maze of indirect motives, and still the man who keeps faith for money
+cannot possibly be worse than the man who breaks faith for money.
+
+It will be noted that this ultimate test applies in the same way to
+Servia as to Belgium and Britain. The Servians may not be a very
+peaceful people; but on the occasion under discussion it was certainly
+they who wanted peace. You may choose to think the Serb a sort of a born
+robber; but on this occasion it was certainly the Austrian who was
+trying to rob. Similarly, you may call England perfidious as a sort of
+historical summary, and declare your private belief that Mr. Asquith was
+vowed from infancy to the ruin of the German Empire--a Hannibal and
+hater of the eagles. But when all is said, it is nonsense to call a man
+perfidious because he keeps his promise. It is absurd to complain of the
+sudden treachery of a business man in turning up punctually to his
+appointment, or the unfair shock given to a creditor by the debtor
+paying his debts. Lastly, there is an attitude not unknown in the crisis
+against which I should particularly like to protest. I should address my
+protest especially to those lovers and pursuers of peace who, very
+shortsightedly, have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude which
+is impatient of these preliminary details about who did this or that and
+whether it was right or wrong. They are satisfied with saying that an
+enormous calamity called war has been begun by some or all of us, and
+should be ended by some or all of us. To these people this preliminary
+chapter about the precise happenings must appear not only dry (and it
+must of necessity be the dryest part of the task), but essentially
+needless and barren. I wish to tell these people that they are wrong;
+that they are wrong upon all principles of human justice and historic
+continuity; but that they are especially and supremely wrong upon their
+own principles of arbitration and international peace.
+
+
+*As to Certain Peace Lovers.*
+
+These sincere and high-minded peace lovers are always telling us that
+citizens no longer settle their quarrels by private violence, and that
+nations should no longer settle theirs by public violence. They are
+always telling us that we no longer fight duels, and need no longer wage
+wars. In short, they perpetually base their peace proposals on the fact
+that an ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an axe.
+
+But how is he prevented from avenging himself with an axe? If he hits
+his neighbor on the head with the kitchen chopper what do we do? Do we
+all join hands, like children playing mulberry bush, and say: "We are
+all responsible for this, but let us hope it will not spread. Let us
+hope for the happy, happy day when he shall leave off chopping at the
+man's head, and when nobody shall ever chop anything forever and ever."
+Do we say: "Let bygones be bygones. Why go back to all the dull details
+with which the business began? Who can tell with what sinister motives
+the man was standing there within reach of the hatchet?"
+
+We do not. We keep the peace in private life by asking for the facts of
+provocation and the proper object of punishment. We do not go into the
+dull details; we do inquire into the origins; we do emphatically inquire
+who it was that hit first. In short, we do what I have done very briefly
+in this place.
+
+Given this, it is indeed true that behind these facts there are
+truths--truths of a terrible, of a spiritual sort. In mere fact the
+Germanic power has been wrong about Servia, wrong about Russia, wrong
+about Belgium, wrong about England, wrong about Italy. But there was a
+reason for its being wrong everywhere, and of that root reason, which
+has moved half the world against it, I shall speak later in this series.
+For that is something too omnipresent to be proved, too indisputable to
+be helped by detail. It is nothing less than the locating, after more
+than a hundred years of recriminations and wrong explanations, of the
+modern European evil--the finding of the fountain from which poison has
+flowed upon all the nations of the earth.
+
+
+
+
+*II.*
+
+*Russian or Prussian Barbarism?*
+
+
+It will hardly be denied that there is one lingering doubt in many who
+recognize unavoidable self-defense in the instant parry of the English
+sword and who have no great love for the sweeping sabre of Sadowa and
+Sedan. That doubt is the doubt of whether Russia, as compared with
+Prussia, is sufficiently decent and democratic to be the ally of liberal
+and civilized powers. I take first, therefore, this matter of
+civilization.
+
+It is vital in a discussion like this that we should make sure we are
+going by meanings and not by mere words. It is not necessary in any
+argument to settle what a word means or ought to mean. But it is
+necessary in every argument to settle what we propose to mean by the
+word. So long as our opponent understands what is the thing of which we
+are talking, it does not matter to the argument whether the word is or
+is not the one he would have chosen. A soldier does not say, "We were
+ordered to go to Mechlin, but I would rather go to Malines." He may
+discuss the etymology and archaeology of the difference on the march,
+but the point is that he knows where to go. So long as we know what a
+given word is to mean in a given discussion, it does not even matter if
+it means something else in some other and quite distinct discussion. We
+have a perfect right to say that the width of a window comes to four
+feet, even if we instantly and cheerfully change the subject to the
+larger mammals and say that an elephant has four feet. The identity of
+the words does not matter, because there is no doubt at all about the
+meanings, because nobody is likely to think of an elephant as four feet
+long, or of a window as having tusks and a curly trunk.
+
+
+*Two Meanings of "Barbarian."*
+
+It is essential to emphasize this consciousness of the thing under
+discussion in connection with two or three words that are, as it were,
+the keywords of this war. One of them is the word "barbarian." The
+Prussians apply it to the Russians, the Russians apply it to the
+Prussians. Both, I think, really mean something that really exists, name
+or no name. Both mean different things. And if we ask what these
+different things are we shall understand why England and France prefer
+Russia, and consider Prussia the really dangerous barbarian of the two.
+
+To begin with, it goes so much deeper even than atrocities; of which, in
+the past, at least, all the three empires of Central Europe have
+partaken pretty equally; as they partook of Poland. An English writer,
+seeking to avert the war by warnings against Russian influence, said
+that the flogged backs of Polish women stood between us and the
+Alliance. But not long before the flogging of women by an Austrian
+General led to that officer being thrashed in the streets of London by
+Barclay and Perkins draymen. And as for the third power, the Prussians,
+it seems clear that they have treated Belgian women in a style compared
+with which flogging might be called an official formality.
+
+But, as I say, something much deeper than any such recrimination lies
+behind the use of the word on either side. When the German Emperor
+complains of our allying ourselves with a barbaric and half Oriental
+power, he is not (I assure you) shedding tears over the grave of
+Kosciusko. And when I say (as I do most heartily) that the German
+Emperor is a barbarian, I am not merely expressing any prejudices I may
+have against the profanation of churches or of children. My countrymen
+and I mean a certain and intelligible thing when we call the Prussians
+barbarians. It is quite different from the thing attributed to Russians;
+and it could not possibly be attributed to Russians. It is very
+important that the neutral world should understand what this thing is.
+
+If the German calls the Russian barbarous, he presumably means
+imperfectly civilized. There is a certain path along which Western
+nations have proceeded in recent times; and it is tenable that Russia
+has not proceeded so far as the others; that she has less of the special
+modern system in science, commerce, machinery, travel, or political
+constitution. The Russ plows with an old plow; he wears a wild beard; he
+adores relics; his life is as rude and hard as that of a subject of
+Alfred the Great. Therefore, he is, in the German sense, a barbarian.
+Poor fellows, like Gorky and Dostoieffsky, have to form their own
+reflections on the scenery, without the assistance of large quotations
+from Schiller on garden seats; or inscriptions directing them to pause
+and thank the All-Father for the finest view in Hesse-Pumpernickel. The
+Russians, having nothing but their faith, their fields, their great
+courage, and their self-governing communes, are quite cut off from what
+is called (in the fashionable street in Frankfort) the true, the
+beautiful, and the good. There is a real sense in which one can call
+such backwardness barbaric, by comparison with the Kaiserstrasse; and in
+that sense it is true of Russia.
+
+Now we, the French and English, do not mean this when we call the
+Prussians barbarians. If their cities soared higher than their flying
+ships, if their trains traveled faster than their bullets, we should
+still call them barbarians. We should know exactly what we meant by it;
+and we should know that it is true. For we do not mean anything that is
+an imperfect civilization by accident. We mean something that is the
+enemy of civilization by design. We mean something that is willfully at
+war with the principles by which human society has been made possible
+hitherto. Of course, it must be partly civilized even to destroy
+civilization. Such ruin could not be wrought by the savages that are
+merely undeveloped or inert. You could not have even Huns without horses
+or horses without horsemanship. You could not have even Danish pirates
+without ships, or ships without seamanship.
+
+
+*The "Positive Barbarian."*
+
+This person, whom I may call the positive barbarian, must be rather more
+superficially up to date than what I may call the negative barbarian.
+Alaric was an officer in the Roman legions, but for all that he
+destroyed Rome. Nobody supposes that Eskimos could have done it at all
+neatly. But (in our meaning) barbarism is not a matter of methods but of
+aims. We say that these veneered vandals have the perfectly serious aim
+of destroying certain ideas which, as they think, the world has
+outgrown; without which, as we think, the world will die.
+
+It is essential that this perilous peculiarity in the Pruss, or positive
+barbarian, should be seized. He has what he fancies is a new idea, and
+he is going to apply it to everybody. As a fact, it is simply a false
+generalization, but he is really trying to make it general. This does
+not apply to the negative barbarian; it does not apply to the Russian or
+the Servian, even if they are barbarians. If a Russian peasant does beat
+his wife, he does it because his fathers did it before him; he is likely
+to beat less rather than more as the past fades away. He does not think,
+as the Prussian would, that he has made a new discovery in physiology in
+finding that a woman is weaker than a man. If a Servian does knife his
+rival without a word, he does it because other Servians have done it. He
+may regard it even as piety--but certainly not as progress. He does not
+think, as the Prussian does, that he founds a new school of horology by
+starting before the word "Go." He does not think he is in advance of the
+world in militarism--merely because he is behind it in morals.
+
+No; the danger of the Pruss is that he is prepared to fight for old
+errors as if they were new truths. He has somehow heard of certain
+shallow simplifications, and imagines that we have never heard of them.
+And, as I have said, his limited but very sincere lunacy concentrates
+chiefly in a desire to destroy two ideas, the twin root ideas, of
+national society. The first is the idea of record and promise; the
+second is the idea of reciprocity.
+
+It is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility through
+time, is what chiefly distinguishes us, I will not say from savages, but
+from brutes and reptiles. This was noted by the shrewdness of the Old
+Testament when it summed up the dark, irresponsible enormity of
+Leviathan in the words, "Will he make a pact with thee?" The promise,
+like the wind, is unknown in nature and is the first mark of man.
+Referring only to human civilization, it may be said with seriousness
+that in the beginning was the Word. The vow is to the man what the song
+is to the bird or the bark to the dog; his voice, whereby he is known.
+Just as a man who cannot keep an appointment is not fit to fight a duel,
+so the man who cannot keep an appointment with himself is not sane
+enough even for suicide. It is not easy to mention anything on which the
+enormous apparatus of human life can be said to depend. But if it
+depends on anything it is on this frail cord, flung from the forgotten
+hills of yesterday to the invisible mountains of tomorrow. On that
+solitary string hangs everything from Armageddon to an almanac, from a
+successful revolution to a return ticket. On that solitary string the
+barbarian is hacking heavily with a sabre which is fortunately blunt.
+
+
+*Prussia's Great Discovery.*
+
+Any one can see this well enough merely by reading the last negotiations
+between London and Berlin. The Prussians had made a new discovery in
+international politics--that it may often be convenient to make a
+promise, and yet curiously inconvenient to keep it. They were charmed,
+in their simple way, with this scientific discovery and desired to
+communicate it to the world. They therefore promised England a promise
+on condition that she broke a promise, and on the implied condition that
+the new promise might be broken as easily as the old one. To the
+profound astonishment of Prussia, this reasonable offer was refused. I
+believe that the astonishment of Prussia was quite sincere. That is what
+I mean when I say that the barbarian is trying to cut away that cord of
+honesty and clear record on which hangs all that men have made.
+
+The friends of the German cause have complained that Asiatics and
+Africans upon the very verge of savagery have been brought against them
+from India and Algiers. And in ordinary circumstances I should
+sympathize with such a complaint made by a European people. But the
+circumstances are not ordinary. Here again the quite unique barbarism of
+Prussia goes deeper than what we call barbarities. About mere
+barbarities, it is true, the Turco and the Sikh would have very good
+reply to the superior Teuton. The general and just reason for not using
+non-European tribes against Europeans is that given by Chatham against
+the use of the red Indian--that such allies might do very diabolical
+things. But the poor Turco might not unreasonably ask, after a week-end
+in Belgium, what more diabolical things he could do than the highly
+cultured Germans were doing themselves.
+
+Nevertheless, as I say, the justification of any extra-European aid goes
+deeper than by any such details. It rests upon the fact that even other
+civilizations, even much lower civilizations, even remote and repulsive
+civilizations, depend as much as our own on this primary principle on
+which the supermorality of Potsdam declares open war. Even savages
+promise things, and respect those who keep their promises. Even
+Orientals write things down; and though they write them from right to
+left, they know the importance of a scrap of paper. Many merchants will
+tell you that the word of the sinister and almost unhuman Chinaman is
+often as good as his bond; and it was amid palm trees and Syrian
+pavilions that the great utterance opened the tabernacle to him that
+sweareth to his hurt and changeth not. There is doubtless a dense
+labyrinth of duplicity in the East; and perhaps more guile in the
+individual Asiatic than in the individual German. But we are not talking
+of the violations of human morality in various parts of the world.
+
+
+*A Fight Against Anarchy.*
+
+We are talking about a new inhuman morality which denies altogether the
+day of obligation. The Prussians have been told by their literary men
+that everything depends upon "mood," and by their politicians that all
+arrangements dissolve before "necessity." That is the importance of the
+German Chancellor's phrase. He did not allege some special excuse in the
+case of Belgium, which might make it seem an exception that proved the
+rule. He distinctly argued, as on a principle applicable to other cases,
+that victory was a necessity and honor was a scrap of paper. And it is
+evident that the half-educated Prussian imagination really cannot get
+any further than this. It cannot see that if everybody's action were
+entirely incalculable from hour to hour, it would not only be the end of
+all promises but the end of all projects.
+
+In not being able to see that, the Berlin philosopher is really on a
+lower mental level than the Arab who respects the salt, or the Brahmin
+who preserves the caste. And in this quarrel we have a right to come
+with scimitars as well as sabres, with bows as well as rifles, with
+assegai and tomahawk and boomerang, because there is in all these at
+least a seed of civilization that these intellectual anarchists would
+kill. And if they should find us in our last stand girt with such
+strange swords and following unfamiliar ensigns and ask us for what we
+fight in so singular a company, we shall know what to reply: "We fight
+for the trust and for the tryst; for fixed memories and the possible
+meeting of men; for all that makes life anything but an uncontrollable
+nightmare. We fight for the long arm of honor and remembrance; for all
+that can lift a man above the quicksands of his needs and give him the
+mastery of time."
+
+
+
+
+*III.*
+
+*Disposing of Germany's Civilizing Mission*
+
+
+In the last summary I suggested that barbarism, as we mean it, is not
+mere ignorance or even mere cruelty. It has a more precise sense, and
+means militant hostility to certain necessary human ideas. I took the
+case of the vow or the contract which Prussian intellectualism would
+destroy. I urged that the Prussian is a spiritual barbarian, because he
+is not bound by his own past, any more than a man in a dream. He avows
+that when he promised to respect a frontier on Monday he did not foresee
+what he calls "the necessity" of not respecting it on Tuesday. In short,
+he is like a child who at the end of all reasonable explanations and
+reminders of admitted arrangements has no answer except "But I want to."
+
+There is another idea in human arrangements so fundamental as to be
+forgotten, but now for the first time denied. It may be called the idea
+of reciprocity; or, in better English, of give and take. The Prussian
+appears to be quite intellectually incapable of this thought. He cannot,
+I think, conceive the idea that is the foundation of all comedy--that in
+the eyes of the other man he is only the other man. And if we carry this
+clue through the institutions of Prussianized Germany we shall find how
+curiously his mind has been limited in the matter. The German differs
+from other patriots in the inability to understand patriotism. Other
+European peoples pity the Poles or the Welsh for their violated borders,
+but Germans only pity themselves. They might take forcible possession of
+the Severn or the Danube, of the Thames or the Tiber, of the Garry or
+the Garonne--and they would still be singing sadly about how fast and
+true stands the watch on the Rhine and what a shame it would be if any
+one took their own little river away from them. That is what I mean by
+not being reciprocal; and you will find it in all that they do, as in
+all that is done by savages.
+
+
+*"Laughs When He Hurts You."*
+
+Here again it is very necessary to avoid confusing this soul of the
+savage with mere savagery in the sense of brutality or butchery, in
+which the Greeks, the French, and all the most civilized nations have
+indulged in hours of abnormal panic or revenge. Accusations of cruelty
+are generally mutual. But it is the point about the Prussian that with
+him nothing is mutual. The definition of the true savage does not
+concern itself even with how much more he hurts strangers or captives
+than do the other tribes of men. The definition of the true savage is
+that he laughs when he hurts you and howls when you hurt him. This
+extraordinary inequality in the mind is in every act and word that comes
+from Berlin.
+
+For instance, no man of the world believes all he sees in the
+newspapers, and no journalist believes a quarter of it. We should
+therefore be quite ready in the ordinary way to take a great deal off
+the tales of German atrocities; to doubt this story or deny that. But
+there is one thing that we cannot doubt or deny--the seal and authority
+of the Emperor. In the imperial proclamation the fact that certain
+"frightful" things have been done is admitted and justified on the
+ground of their frightfulness. It was a military necessity to terrify
+the peaceful populations with something that was not civilized,
+something that was hardly human.
+
+
+*"Howls When You Hurt Him."*
+
+Very well. That is an intelligible policy; and in that sense an
+intelligible argument. An army endangered by foreigners may do the most
+frightful things. But then we turn the next page of the Kaiser's public
+diary, and we find him writing to the President of the United States to
+complain that the English are using dumdum bullets and violating various
+regulations of The Hague Conference. I pass for the present the question
+of whether there is a word of truth in these charges. I am content to
+gaze rapturously at the blinking eyes of the true, or positive,
+barbarian. I suppose he would be quite puzzled if we said that violating
+The Hague Conference was "a military necessity" to us; or that the rules
+of the conference were only a scrap of paper. He would be quite pained
+if we said that dumdum bullets "by their very frightfulness" would be
+very useful to keep conquered Germans in order. Do what he will, he
+cannot get outside the idea that he, because he is he and not you, is
+free to break the law and also to appeal to the law. It is said that the
+Prussian officers play at a game called Kriegspiel, or the war game. But
+in truth they could not play at any game, for the essence of every game
+is that the rules are the same on both sides.
+
+But, taking every German institution in turn, the case is the same; and
+it is not a case of mere bloodshed or military bravado. The duel, for
+example, can legitimately be called a barbaric thing, but the word is
+here used in another sense. There are duels in Germany; but so there are
+in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain; indeed, there are duels wherever there
+are dentists, newspapers, Turkish baths, time tables, and all the curses
+of civilization--except in England and a corner of America. You may
+happen to regard the duel as a historic relic of the more barbaric
+States on which these modern States were built. It might equally well be
+maintained that the duel is everywhere the sign of high civilization,
+being the sign of its more delicate sense of honor, its more vulnerable
+vanity, or its greater dread of social disrepute. But whichever of the
+two views you take, you must concede that the essence of the duel is an
+armed equality. I should not, therefore, apply the word barbaric, as I
+am using it, to the duels of German officers, or even the broadsword
+combats that are conventional among the German students. I do not see
+why a young Prussian should not have scars all over his face if he likes
+them; nay, they are often the redeeming points of interest on an
+otherwise somewhat unenlightening countenance. The duel may be defended;
+the sham duel may be defended.
+
+
+*The One-Sided Prussian Duel.*
+
+What cannot be defended is something really peculiar to Prussia, of
+which we hear numberless stories, some of them certainly true. It might
+be called the one-sided duel. I mean the idea that there is some sort of
+dignity in drawing the sword upon a man who has not got a sword--a
+waiter, or a shop assistant, or even a schoolboy. One of the officers of
+the Kaiser in the affair at Zabern was found industriously hacking at a
+cripple. In all these matters I would avoid sentiment. We must not lose
+our tempers at the mere cruelty of the thing, but pursue the strict
+psychological distinction. Others besides German soldiers have slain the
+defenseless, for loot or lust or private malice, like any other
+murderer. The point is that nowhere else but in Prussian Germany is any
+theory of honor mixed up with such things, any more than with poisoning
+or picking pockets. No French, English, Italian, or American gentleman
+would think he had in some way cleared his own character by sticking his
+sabre through some ridiculous greengrocer who had nothing in his hand
+but a cucumber. It would seem as if the word which is translated from
+the German as "honor" must really mean something quite different in
+German. It seems to mean something more like what we should call
+"prestige."
+
+
+*Absence of the Reciprocal Idea.*
+
+The fundamental fact, however, is the absence of the reciprocal idea.
+The Prussian is not sufficiently civilized for the duel. Even when he
+crosses swords with us his thoughts are not as our thoughts; when we
+both glorify war we are glorifying different things. Our medals are
+wrought like his, but they do not mean the same thing; our regiments are
+cheered as his are, but the thought in the heart is not the same; the
+Iron Cross is on the bosom of his King, but it is not the sign of our
+God. For we, alas! follow our God with many relapses and
+self-contradictions, but he follows his very consistently. Through all
+the things that we have examined, the view of national boundaries, the
+view of military methods, the view of personal honor and self-defense,
+there runs in their case something of an atrocious simplicity; something
+too simple for us to understand; the idea that glory consists in holding
+the steel, and not in facing it.
+
+If further examples were necessary it would be easy to give hundreds of
+them. Let us leave, for the moment, the relations between man and man in
+the thing called the duel. Let us take the relation between man and
+woman, in that immortal duel which we call a marriage. Here again we
+shall find that other Christian civilizations aim at some kind of
+equality, even if the balance be irrational or dangerous. Thus, the two
+extremes of the treatment of women might be represented by what are
+called the respectable classes in America and in France. In America they
+choose the risk of comradeship, in France the compensation of courtesy.
+In America it is practically possible for any young gentleman to take
+any young lady for what he calls (I deeply regret to say) a joy ride;
+but at least the man goes with the woman as much as the woman with the
+man. In France the young woman is protected like a nun while she is
+unmarried; but when she is a mother she is really a holy woman; and when
+she is a grandmother she is a holy terror.
+
+By both extremes the woman gets something back out of life. There is
+only one place where she gets little or nothing back, and that is the
+north of Germany. France and America aim alike at equality; America by
+similarity, France by dissimilarity. But North Germany does definitely
+aim at inequality. The woman stands up with no more irritation than a
+butler; the man sits down with no more embarrassment than a guest. This
+is the cool affirmation of inferiority, as in the case of the sabre and
+the tradesmen. "Thou goest with women; forget not thy whip," said
+Nietzsche. It will be observed that he does not say "poker," which might
+come more naturally to the mind of a more common or Christian
+wife-beater. But, then, a poker is a part of domesticity, and might be
+used by the wife as well as the husband. In fact, it often is. The sword
+and the whip are the weapons of a privileged caste.
+
+Pass from the closest of all differences, that between husband and wife,
+to the most distant of all differences, that of the remote and unrelated
+races who have seldom seen each other's faces, and never been tinged
+with each other's blood. Here we still find the same unvarying Prussian
+principle. Any European might feel a genuine fear of the Yellow Peril,
+and many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have felt and expressed it.
+Many might say, and have said, that the heathen Chinee is very heathen
+indeed; that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture
+and utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people
+do not. Nor do I doubt the German Emperor's sincerity when he sought to
+point out to us how abnormal and abominable such a nightmare campaign
+would be, supposing that it could come.
+
+But now comes the comic irony, which never fails to follow on the
+attempt of the Prussian to be philosophic. For the Kaiser, after
+explaining to his troops how important it was to avoid Eastern
+barbarism, instantly commanded them to become Eastern barbarians. He
+told them, in so many words, to be Huns, and leave nothing living or
+standing behind them. In fact, he frankly offered a new army corps of
+aboriginal Tartars to the Far East, within such time as it may take a
+bewildered Hanoverian to turn into a Tartar. Any one who has the painful
+habit of personal thought will perceive here at once the non-reciprocal
+principle again. Boiled down to its bones of logic, it means simply
+this: "I am a German and you are a Chinaman. Therefore, I being a
+German, have a right to be a Chinaman. But you have no right to be a
+Chinaman, because you are only a Chinaman." This is probably the highest
+point to which the German culture has risen.
+
+
+*"The Principle of Being Unprincipled."*
+
+The principle here neglected, which may be called mutuality by those who
+misunderstand and dislike the word equality, does not offer so clear a
+distinction between the Prussian and the other peoples as did the first
+Prussian principle of an infinite and destructive opportunism; or, in
+other words, the principle of being unprincipled. Nor upon this second
+can one take up so obvious a position touching the other civilizations
+or semi-civilizations of the world. Some idea of oath and bond there is
+in the rudest tribes, in the darkest continents. But it might be
+maintained, of the more delicate and imaginative element of reciprocity,
+that a cannibal in Borneo understands it almost as little as a professor
+in Berlin. A narrow and one-sided seriousness is the fault of barbarians
+all over the world. This may have been the meaning, for aught I know, of
+the one eye of the Cyclops; that the barbarian cannot see around things
+or look at them from two points of view, and thus becomes a blind beast
+and an eater of men. Certainly there can be no better summary of the
+savage than this, which, as we have seen, unfits him for the duel. He is
+the man who cannot love--no, nor even hate--his neighbor as himself.
+
+But this quality in Prussia does have one effect which has reference to
+the same question of the lower civilizations. It disposes once and for
+all at least of the civilizing mission of Germany. Evidently the Germans
+are the last people in the world to be trusted with the task. They are
+as short-sighted morally as physically. What is their sophism of
+"necessity" but an inability to imagine tomorrow morning? What is their
+non-reciprocity but an inability to imagine, not a god or devil, but
+merely another man? Are these to judge mankind? Men of two tribes in
+Africa not only know that they are all men but can understand that they
+are all black men. In this they are quite seriously in advance of the
+intellectual Prussian, who cannot be got to see that we are all white
+men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the Northeast Teuton
+anything that marks him out especially from the more colorless classes
+of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency
+to the gray or the drab. Yet he will explain in serious official
+documents that the difference between him and us is a difference between
+"the master race and the inferior race."
+
+
+*How to Know "The Master Race."*
+
+The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather
+than the end of an argument, and the difficulty here is that there is no
+way of testing which is a master race except by asking which is your own
+race. If you cannot find out, (as is usually the case,) you fall back on
+the absurd occupation of writing history about prehistoric times. But I
+suggest quite seriously that if the Germans can give their philosophy to
+the Hottentots there is no reason why they should not give their sense
+of superiority to the Hottentots. If they can see such fine shades
+between the Goth and the Gaul, there is no reason why similar shades
+should not lift the savage above other savages; why any Ojibway should
+not discover that he is one tint redder than the Dakotas, or any nigger
+in the Kameruns say he is not so black as he is painted. For this
+principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and worst of
+the refusals of reciprocity. The Prussian calls all men to admire the
+beauty of his large blue eyes. If they do, it is because they have
+inferior eyes; if they don't, it is because they have no eyes.
+
+Wherever the most miserable remnant of our race, astray and dried up in
+deserts or buried forever under the fall of bad civilization, has some
+feeble memory that men are men, that bargains are bargains, that there
+are two sides to a question, or even that it takes two to make a
+quarrel--that remnant has the right to assist the New Culture, to the
+knife and club and the splintered stone. For the Prussian begins all his
+culture by that act which is the destruction of all creative thought and
+constructive action. He breaks that mirror in the mind in which a man
+can see the face of his friend or foe.
+
+
+
+
+*IV.*
+
+*Russia Less Despotic Than Prussia*
+
+
+The German Emperor has reproached this country (England) with allying
+itself with "barbaric and semi-Oriental power." We have already
+considered in what sense we use the word barbaric; it is in the sense of
+one who is hostile to civilization, not one who is insufficient in it.
+But when we pass from the idea of the barbaric to the idea of the
+Oriental, the case is even more curious. There is nothing particularly
+Tartar in Russian affairs, except the fact that Russia expelled the
+Tartars. The Eastern invader occupied and crushed the country for many
+years; but that is equally true of Greece, of Spain, and even of
+Austria. If Russia has suffered from the East, she has suffered in order
+to resist it; and it is rather hard that the very miracle of her escape
+should make a mystery about her origin. Jonah may or may not have been
+three days inside a fish; but that does not make him a merman. And in
+all the other cases of European nations who escaped the monstrous
+captivity, we do admit the purity and continuity of the European type.
+We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain.
+Copper-colored men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion
+and patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that "Don Quixote"
+was an African fable on the lines of "Uncle Remus." I have never heard
+that the heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro
+ancestry. In the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognize
+the resurrection of a Christian and cultured nation after its age of
+bondage. But Russia is rather remote; and those to whom nations are but
+names in newspapers can really fancy, like Mr. Baring's friend, that all
+Russian churches are "mosques." Yet the land of Turgenev is not a
+wilderness of fakirs; and even the fanatical Russian is as proud of
+being different from the Mongol as the fanatical Spaniard was proud of
+being different from the Moor.
+
+
+*"Scratch a Russian."*
+
+The town of Reading, as it exists, offers few opportunities for piracy
+on the high seas; yet it was the camp of the pirates in Alfred's days. I
+should think it hard to call the people of Berkshire half Danish merely
+because they drove out the Danes. In short, some temporary submergence
+under the savage flood was the fate of many of the most civilized States
+of Christendom, and it is quite ridiculous to argue that Russia, which
+wrestled hardest, must have recovered least. Everywhere, doubtless, the
+East spread a sort of enamel over the conquered countries; but
+everywhere the enamel cracked. Actual history, in fact, is exactly
+opposite to the cheap proverb invented against the Muscovite. It is not
+true to say, "Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar." In the darkest
+hour of the barbaric dominion it was truer to say, "Scratch a Tartar and
+you find a Russian." It was the civilization that survived under all the
+barbarism. This vital romance of Russia, this revolution against Asia,
+can be proved in pure fact; not only from the almost superhuman activity
+of Russia during the struggle, but also (which is much rarer as human
+history goes) by her quite consistent conduct since. She is the only
+great nation which has really expelled the Mongol from her country and
+continued to protest against presence of the Mongol in her continent.
+Knowing what he had been in Russia, she knew what he would be in Europe.
+In this she pursued a logical line of thought, which was, if anything,
+too unsympathetic with the energies and religions of the East. Every
+other country, one may say, has been an ally of the Turk--that is, of
+the Mongol and the Moslem. The French played them as pieces against
+Austria; the English warmly supported them under the Palmerston régime;
+even the young Italians sent troops to the Crimea; and of Russia and her
+Austrian vassal it is nowadays needless to speak. For good or evil, it
+is the fact of history that Russia is the only power in Europe that has
+never supported the Crescent against the Cross.
+
+That doubtless will appear an unimportant matter, but it may become
+important under certain peculiar conditions. Suppose, for the sake of
+argument, that there were a powerful Prince in Europe who had gone
+ostentatiously out of his way to pay reverence to the remains of the
+Tartar, Mongol, and Moslem left as an outpost in Europe. Suppose there
+were a Christian Emperor who could not even go to the tomb of the
+crucified without pausing to congratulate the last and living crucifier.
+If there were an Emperor who gave guns and guides and maps and drill
+instructors to defend the remains of the Mongol in Christendom, what
+would we say to him? I think at least we might ask him what he meant by
+his impudence when he talked about supporting a semi-Oriental power.
+That we support a semi-Oriental power we deny. That he has supported an
+entirely Oriental power cannot be denied, no, not even by the man who
+did it.
+
+
+_Whom Has Prussia Emancipated?_
+
+But here is to be noted the essential difference between Russia and
+Prussia; especially by those who use the ordinary liberal arguments
+against the latter Russia has a policy, which she pursues, if you will,
+through evil and good; but at least so as to produce good as well as
+evil. Let it be granted that the policy has made her oppressive to the
+Finns, the Poles--though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than
+do the Prussian Poles. But it is a mere historic fact, that if Russia
+has been a despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to
+others. She did, so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians or the
+Montenegrins. But whom did Prussia ever emancipate--even by accident? It
+is, indeed, somewhat extraordinary that in the perpetual permutations of
+international politics the Hohenzollerns have never gone astray into the
+path of enlightenment. They have been in alliance with almost everybody
+off and on; with France, with England, with Austria, with Russia. Can
+any one candidly say that they have left on any one of these people the
+faintest impress of progress or liberation? Prussia was the enemy of the
+French monarchy, but a worse enemy of the French Revolution. Prussia had
+been an enemy of the Czar, but she was a worse enemy of the Duma.
+Prussia totally disregarded Austrian rights; but she is today quite
+ready to inflict Austrian wrongs. This is the strong particular
+difference between the one empire and the other. Russia is pursuing
+certain intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals,
+and for which, therefore, she will make sacrifices and will protect the
+weak. But the North German soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant;
+everywhere and always on the side of materialistic tyranny. This Teuton
+in uniform has been found in strange places; shooting farmers before
+Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in Africa and
+raping girls in Wicklow, but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending
+a hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence of one
+solitary flag. Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression are, there is
+the Prussian; unconsciously consistent, instinctively restrictive,
+innocently evil; "following darkness like a dream."
+
+
+*Disinterested Despotism.*
+
+Suppose we heard of a person (gifted with some longevity) who had helped
+Alva to persecute Dutch Protestants, then helped Cromwell to persecute
+Irish Catholics, and then helped Claverhouse to persecute Scotch
+Puritans--we should find it rather easier to call him a persecutor than
+to call him a Protestant or a Catholic. Curiously enough, this is
+actually the position in which the Prussian stands in Europe. No
+arguments can alter the fact that in three converging and conclusive
+cases he has been on the side of three distinct rulers of different
+religions, who had nothing whatever in common except that they were
+ruling oppressively. In these three Governments, taken separately, one
+can see something excusable, or at least human. When the Kaiser
+encouraged the Russian rulers to crush the revolution, the Russian
+rulers undoubtedly believed they were wrestling with an inferno of
+atheism and anarchy. A Socialist of the ordinary English kind cried out
+upon me when I spoke of Stolypin and said he was chiefly known by the
+halter called "Stolypin's Necktie." As a fact, there were many other
+things interesting about Stolypin besides his necktie--his policy of
+peasant proprietorship, his extraordinary personal courage, and
+certainly none more interesting than that movement in his death agony,
+when he made the sign of the cross toward the Czar, as the crown and
+captain of his Christianity. But the Kaiser does not regard the Czar as
+the captain of Christianity. Far from it. What he supported in Stolypin
+was the necktie, and nothing but the necktie; the gallows, and not the
+cross. The Russian ruler did believe that the Orthodox Church was
+orthodox. The Austrian Archduke did really desire to make the Catholic
+Church catholic. He did really believe that he was being pro-Catholic in
+being pro-Austrian. But the Kaiser cannot be pro-Catholic, and,
+therefore, cannot have been really pro-Austrian; he was simply and
+solely anti-Servian; nay, even in the cruel and sterile strength of
+Turkey, any one with imagination can see something of the tragedy, and,
+therefore, of the tenderness of true belief. The worst that can be said
+of the Moslems is, as the poet put it, they offered to man the choice of
+the Koran or the sword. The best that can be said for the German is that
+he does not care about the Koran, but is satisfied if he can have the
+sword. And for me, I confess, even the sins of these three other
+striving empires take on, in comparison, something that is sorrowful and
+dignified; and I feel they do not deserve that this little Lutheran
+lounger should patronize all that is evil in them, while ignoring all
+that is good. He is not Catholic; he is not Orthodox; he is not
+Mohammedan. He is merely an old gentleman who wishes to share the crime,
+though he cannot share the creed. He desires to be a persecutor by the
+pang without the palm. So strongly do all the instincts of the Prussian
+drive against liberty that he would rather oppress other peoples'
+subjects than think of anybody going without the benefits of oppression.
+He is a sort of disinterested despot. He is as disinterested as the
+devil, who is ready to do any one's dirty work.
+
+
+*The Paradox of Prussia.*
+
+This would seem obviously fantastic were it not supported by solid facts
+which cannot be explained otherwise. Indeed it would be inconceivable if
+we were thinking of a whole people, consisting of free and varied
+individuals. But in Prussia the governing class is really a governing
+class, and a very few people are needed to think along these lines to
+make all the other people act along them. And the paradox of Prussia is
+this: That while its princes and nobles have no other aim on this earth
+but to destroy democracy wherever it shows itself, they have contrived
+to get themselves trusted, not as wardens of the past, but as
+forerunners of the future. Even they cannot believe that their theory is
+popular, but they do believe that it is progressive. Here again we find
+the spiritual chasm between the two monarchies in question. The Russian
+institutions are, in many cases, really left in the rear of the Russian
+people, and many of the Russian people know it. But the Prussian
+institutions are supposed to be in advance of the Prussian people, and
+most of the Prussian people believe it. It is thus much easier for the
+war lords to go everywhere and impose a hopeless slavery upon every one,
+for they have already imposed a sort of hopeful slavery on their own
+simple race.
+
+
+*A Factory of Thumbscrews.*
+
+And when men shall speak to us of the hoary iniquities of Russia and of
+how antiquated is the Russian system we shall answer, "Yes; that is the
+superiority of Russia." Their institutions are part of their history,
+whether as relics or fossils. Their abuses have really been uses; that
+is to say, they have been used up. If they have old engines of terror or
+torment, they may fall to pieces from mere rust, like an old coat of
+armor. But in the case of the Prussian tyranny, if it be tyranny at all,
+it is the whole point of its claim that it is not antiquated, but just
+going to begin, like the showman. Prussia has a whole thriving factory
+of thumbscrews, a whole humming workshop of wheels and racks, of the
+newest and neatest pattern, with which to win Europe back to reaction
+* * * infandum renovare dolorem. And if we wish to test the truth of this,
+it can be done by the same method which showed us that Russia, if her
+race or religion could sometimes make her an invader and an oppressor,
+could also be made an emancipator and a knight errant. In the same way,
+if the Russian institutions are old-fashioned, they honestly exhibit the
+good as well as the bad that can be found in old-fashioned things. In
+their police system they have an inequality which is against our ideas
+of law. But in their commune system they have an equality that is older
+than law itself. Even when they flogged each other like barbarians, they
+called each other by their Christian names like children. At their
+worst, they retained all the best of a rude society. At their best, they
+are simply good, like good children or good nuns. But in Prussia, all
+that is best in the civilized machinery is put at the service of all
+that is worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no
+accidental merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late
+repentances, which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is
+sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose; and that purpose, if
+words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction of liberty
+throughout the world.
+
+
+
+
+*V.*
+
+*The "Bond of Teutonism"*
+
+
+In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what
+seems to be mainly a mental limitation--a kind of knot in the brain.
+Toward the problem of Slav population, of English colonization, of
+French armies, and of reinforcements it shows the same strange
+philosophic sulks. So far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to
+saying, "It is very wrong that you should be superior to me, because I
+am superior to you." The spokesman of this system seems to have a
+curious capacity for concentrating this entanglement or contradiction
+sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a single sentence. I have
+already referred to the German Emperor's celebrated suggestion that in
+order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all become Huns. A
+much stronger instance is his more recent order to his troops touching
+the war in Northern France. As most people know, his words ran: "It is
+my royal and imperial command that you concentrate your energies, for
+the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you
+address all your skill and all the valor of my soldiers to exterminate
+first the treacherous English and to walk over Gen. French's
+contemptible little army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can
+afford to pass over. What I am interested in is the mentality, the train
+of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space.
+If French's little army is contemptible it would seem clear that all the
+skill and valor of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it,
+but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and
+valor of the German Army are concentrated on it it is not being treated
+as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible
+sentiments in his mind, and he insisted on saying them both at once. He
+wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted
+to think of an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the
+same moment, in the utter weakness of the British Nation in their attack
+and the supreme skill and valor of the Germans in repelling such an
+attack. Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for
+England and yet a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying
+to express these contradictory conceptions simultaneously he got rather
+mixed. Therefore he bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with
+the dying agonies of this almost invisible earwig, and let the impure
+blood of this cockroach redden the Rhine down to the sea.
+
+
+*Prof. Harnack's Reproach*.
+
+But it would be unfair to base the criticism on the utterance of any
+accidental and hereditary Prince; and it is quite equally clear in the
+case of the philosophers who have been held up to us, even in England,
+as the very prophets of progress. And in nothing is it shown more
+sharply than in the curious, confused talk about race, and especially
+about the Teutonic race. Prof. Harnack and similar people are
+reproaching us, I understand, for having broken "the bond of
+Teutonism"--a bond which the Prussians have strictly observed, both in
+breach and observance. We note it in the open annexation of lands wholly
+inhabited by negroes, such as Denmark. We note it equally in their
+instant and joyful recognition of the flaxen hair and light blue eyes of
+the Turks. But it is still the abstract principle of Prof. Harnack which
+interests me most, and in following it I have the same complexity of
+inquiry, but the same simplicity of result. Comparing the professor's
+concern about "Teutonism" with his unconcern about Belgium, I can only
+reach the following result: "A man need not keep a promise he has made.
+But a man must keep a promise he has not made." There certainly was a
+treaty binding Britain to Belgium, if it was only a scrap of paper. If
+there was any treaty binding Britain with Teutonism it is, to say the
+least of it, a lost scrap of paper--almost what one might call a scrap
+of waste paper. Here again the pedants under consideration exhibit the
+illogical perversity that makes the brain reel. There is obligation and
+there is no obligation; sometimes it appears that Germany and England
+must keep faith with each other; sometimes that Germany need not keep
+faith with anybody and anything; sometimes that we, alone among European
+peoples, are almost entitled to be Germans; sometimes that besides us
+Russians and Frenchmen almost rise to a Germanic loveliness of
+character. But through all there is, hazy but not hypocritical, this
+sense of some common Teutonism.
+
+Prof. Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained
+to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance
+between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same
+thing. Prof. Haeckel's contribution to biology, in this case, was
+exactly like Prof. Harnack's contribution to ethnology. Prof. Harnack
+knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an Englishman
+is like he simply photographs the same German over again. In both cases
+there is probably sincerity, as well as simplicity. Haeckel was so
+certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely
+related and linked up that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it
+by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman
+are almost alike that he really risks the generalization that they are
+exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish
+face twice over, and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins.
+Thus he can prove the existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively
+as Haeckel has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence
+of God.
+
+
+*Germans and English.*
+
+Now, the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike--except in
+the sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything good
+and evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random from
+the great European family. They are opposite from the roots of their
+history--nay, of their geography. It is an understatement to call
+Britain insular. Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by
+the sea till it nearly splits into three islands, and even the midlands
+can almost smell the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful, and fertile
+inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and
+narrow paths, as people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy
+is really national because it is natural. It has cohered out of hundreds
+of accidental adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and
+after it. But the German Navy is an artificial thing, as artificial as a
+constructed Alp would be in England. William II. has simply copied the
+British Navy, as Frederick II. copied the French Army, and this Japanese
+or antlike assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which
+the Germans have and the English markedly have not. There are other
+German superiorities which are very much superior. The one or two really
+jolly things that the Germans have got are precisely the things which
+the English haven't got, notably a real habit of popular music and of
+the ancient songs of the people; not merely spreading from the towns or
+caught from the professionals. In this the Germans rather resemble the
+Welsh, though heaven knows what becomes of Teutonism if they do. But the
+difference between the Germans and the English goes deeper than all
+these signs of it. They differ more than any other two Europeans in the
+normal posture of the mind.
+
+Above all, they differ in what is the most English of all English
+traits--that shame which the French may be right in calling "the bad
+shame," for it is certainly mixed up with pride and suspicion, the
+upshot of which we call shyness. Even an Englishman's rudeness is often
+rooted in his being embarrassed. But a German's rudeness is rooted in
+his never being embarrassed. He eats and makes love noisily. He never
+feels a speech or a song or a sermon or a large meal to be what the
+English call "out of place" in particular circumstances. When Germans
+are patriotic and religious they have no reactions against patriotism
+and religion, as have the English and the French. Nay, the mistake of
+Germany in the modern disaster largely arose from the facts that she
+thought England was simple, when England is very subtle. She thought
+that because our politics have become largely financial they had become
+wholly financial; that because our aristocrats had become pretty cynical
+they had become entirely corrupt. They could not seize the subtlety by
+which a rather used-up English gentleman might sell a coronet when he
+could not sell a fortress; might lower the public standards and yet
+refuse to lower the flag. In short, the Germans are quite sure that they
+understand us entirely because they do not understand us at all.
+Possibly, if they began to understand us they might hate us even more,
+but I would rather be hated for some small but real reason than pursued
+with love on account of all kinds of qualities which I do not possess
+and which I do not desire. And when the Germans get their first genuine
+glimpses of what modern England is like they will discover that England
+has a very broken, belated, and inadequate sense of having an obligation
+to Europe; but no sort of sense whatever of having any obligation to
+Teutonism.
+
+
+*Slippery Strength of Stupidity.*
+
+This is the last and strongest of the Prussian qualities we have here
+considered. There is in stupidity of this sort a strange, slippery
+strength, because it can be not only outside rules, but outside reason.
+The man who really cannot see that he is contradicting himself has a
+great advantage in controversy, though the advantage breaks down when he
+tries to reduce it to simple addition, to chess--or to the game called
+war. It is the same about the stupidity of the one-sided kinship. The
+drunkard who is quite certain that a total stranger is his long-lost
+brother has a great advantage until it comes to matters of detail. "We
+must have chaos within," said Nietzsche, "that we may give birth to a
+dancing star."
+
+In these slight notes I have suggested the principal strong points of
+the Prussian character--a failure in honor which almost amounts to a
+failure in memory; an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that
+the other party is an ego, and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny
+and interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the
+proud. To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness, which can
+expand or contract without reference to reason or record--a potential
+infinity of excuses. If the English had been on the German side the
+German professors would have noted what irresistible energies had
+evolved the Teutons. As the English are on the other side, the German
+professors will say that these Teutons were not sufficiently evolved; or
+they will say they were just sufficiently evolved to show that they were
+not Teutons. Probably they will say both. But the truth is that all that
+they call evolution should rather be called evasion. They tell us they
+are opening windows of enlightenment and doors of progress. The truth is
+that they are breaking up the whole house of the human intellect that
+they may abscond in any direction. There is an ominous and almost
+monstrous parallel between the position of their overrated philosophers
+and of their comparatively underrated soldiers. For what their
+professors call roads of progress are really routes of escape.
+
+
+
+
+*South Africa's Boers and Britons*
+
+*By H. Rider Haggard.*
+
+
+The heart of South Africa, Boer and Briton, is with England in this war.
+Here and there you will find an individual who cherishes bitter and
+hostile memories, of which there has been an example in Mr. Beyers
+letter the other day, so effectually answered by Gen. Botha. But such
+instances, I believe, are so rare that really they are the exceptions
+which seem to prove the rule. Of course, it goes without saying that
+every person of English descent is heartily with the mother country, and
+I do not suppose it would be an overestimate to add that quite 80 per
+cent, of the Dutch are of the same way of thinking.
+
+Still, there is a party among the South African Dutch that sees no
+necessity for the invasion of German Southwest Africa. This party
+overlooks the fact that the Germans have for long been preparing to
+invade them; also that if by any chance Germany should conquer in this
+war South Africa would be one of the first countries that they would
+seize.
+
+In speaking of this I talk of what I understand, since for the last two
+and a half years it has been my duty to travel around the British Empire
+upon the service of his Majesty. In addition to South Africa, I have
+visited India, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and Canada. I have
+recently traveled throughout South Africa as a member of the Dominion's
+Royal Commission. It was my first visit there after the lapse of a whole
+generation, and I can only say that everywhere I have found the most
+intense loyalty and devotion to the old mother land. The empire is one
+and indivisible; together it will stand or together it will fall.
+
+South Africa is united; it has forgotten its recent labor troubles. I
+answer "absolutely" all such things are past history, blown away and
+destroyed by this great wind of war. South Africa, down to its lowest
+Hottentot, has, I believe, but one object, to help England to win in
+this vast battle of the nations. Why, even the natives, as you may have
+noticed, are sending subscriptions from their scanty hoards and praying
+to be allowed "to throw a few stones for the King." Did not Poutsma say
+as much the other day?
+
+In the old days, of course, there were very strained relations between
+the English and Boers, which had their roots in foolish and inconsistent
+acts carried out by the Home Government, generally to forward party
+ends. I need not go into them because they are too long.
+
+Then came the Boer war, which, as you know, proved a much bigger
+enterprise than the Home Government had anticipated. It cost Britain
+20,000 lives and £300,000,000 of English money before the Boers were
+finally subdued. Only about half a score of years have gone by since
+peace was declared. Within two or three years of that peace the British
+Government made up its mind to a very bold step and one which was viewed
+with grave doubts by many people--namely, to give full self-government
+to the Transvaal and the Orange River Colonies.
+
+
+*Astonished at Results.*
+
+When I traveled through South Africa the other day this new Constitution
+had been working for a few years, and I can only say that I was
+astonished at the results. Here and there in the remoter districts, it
+is true, some racial feeling still prevailed, but taken as a whole this
+seems absolutely to have died away. Briton and Boer have come together
+in a manner for which I believe I am right in saying there is no
+precedent in the history of the world, so shortly, at any rate, after a
+prolonged and bitter struggle to the death. I might give many instances,
+but I will only take one. At Pretoria I was asked to inspect a company
+of Boy Scouts, and there I found English and Dutch lads serving side by
+side with the utmost brotherhood. Again I met most of the men who had
+been leaders of the Boers in the war. One and all professed the greatest
+loyalty to England. Moreover, I am certain that this was not lip
+loyalty; it was from the heart. Especially was I impressed by that great
+man, Gen. Botha, with whom I had several conversations. I am convinced
+that at this moment the King has no truer or more faithful servant than
+Gen. Botha. Again and again did I hear from prominent South Africans of
+Dutch or Huguenot extraction that never more was there any chance of
+trouble between Boer and Briton.
+
+I know it is alleged by some that this is because the Dutch feel that
+they have on the whole made a good bargain, having won absolute
+constitutional liberty and the fullest powers of self-government, plus
+the protection of the British fleet. There may be something in this
+view, but I am sure that the feeling goes a great deal deeper than
+self-interest. Mutual respect has arisen between those who ten years ago
+were enemies fighting each other.
+
+
+*Appeal to People's Imagination.*
+
+Moreover, the Boer now knows a great deal more of the British Empire and
+what it means than he did then. Lastly, the supreme generosity evinced
+by Britain in giving their enemy of the day before every right and
+privilege that is owned by her other oversea dominions with whom she has
+never had a quarrel appeals deeply to the imagination of the Dutch
+people. Now, the world sees the results. Germany, which has
+miscalculated so much in connection with this war and the part that the
+British Empire would play in it, miscalculated nowhere more than it did
+in the case of South Africa. The German war lords hoped that India and
+Egypt would rise, they trusted that Canada and Australia would prove
+lukewarm, but they were certain that South Africa would seize the
+opportunity to rebel. How could it be otherwise, they thought, seeing
+that but yesterday she was at death grips with us. Then came the great
+surprise. Lo and behold! instead of rebelling, South Africa promptly
+cabled to England saying that every British soldier might be withdrawn
+from her shores, and, further, that the burghers of the land would
+themselves undertake the conquest of the German possessions of Southwest
+Africa for the Crown. They are doing so at this moment. I believe that
+today there is no British soldier left at the Cape, and I know that now
+a great force is moving on Southwest Africa furnished by Boer and Briton
+alike. Can the history of the world tell us of any parallel case to
+this--that a country conquered within a dozen years should not only need
+no garrison, but by its own free will undertake war against the enemies
+of its late victor? Surely this is something of which Britain may feel
+proud.
+
+
+*Deep Distrust of Germany.*
+
+Now, some of your readers may ask: "Why is it? How did this miracle, for
+it is little less, happen?" My answer is that it has been caused first
+by a supreme and glorious trust in the justice and generosity of
+England, which knows how to rule colonies as no other nation has done in
+the history of the earth, and secondly by a deep distrust of Germany. To
+my own knowledge, Germany has been intriguing in South Africa for the
+last quarter of a century. I remember, I suppose it must be almost
+twenty years ago, sending to the late Mr. Chamberlain, who was then
+Colonial Secretary, information to this effect which reached me from
+undoubted sources in South Africa. Again, not long ago, I was shown a
+document which was found among the papers of the Zulu Prince Dinizulu,
+son of King Cetewayo, who died the other day. It was concluded between
+himself and Germans, and under it the poor man had practically sold his
+country nominally to a German firm, but doubtless to more powerful
+persons behind. In short, there is no question that for many years
+Germany has had its eye upon South Africa as a desirable field of
+settlement for its subjects under the German and not the British flag.
+Now, the Boers are perfectly well acquainted with this fact and have no
+wish to exchange the beneficent rule of Britain for that of Potsdam, the
+King Log of George V. for the King Stork of Kaiser Wilhelm.
+
+You ask me if I think that the Boers are likely to succeed in their
+attack on Southwest Africa, where it must be remembered that the Germans
+have a very formidable force; indeed, I have been told, I do not know
+with what accuracy, that they have accumulated there the vast arsenal of
+war material that was obviously intended to be used on some future
+occasion in the invasion of the Cape. I answer: "Certainly, they will
+succeed, though not easily." Remember what stock these Boers come from.
+They are descendants of the men who withstood and beat Alva in the
+sixteenth century.
+
+
+*Botha of Huguenot Descent.*
+
+I happen to be well acquainted with that period of history. I wrote a
+story called "Lysbeth" concerning it, and to do this I found it
+necessary not only to visit Holland on several occasions, but to read
+all the contemporary records. In the light of the information which I
+thus obtained, I state positively that the world has no record of a more
+glorious and heroic struggle than that made by the Dutch against all the
+power of Spain. Well, the Boers are descended from these men and women
+(for both fought). Also, they include a very large dash of some of the
+best blood of Europe, namely, that of the Huguenots. For instance, Botha
+himself is of Huguenot descent. It is impossible for a person like
+myself, who have that same blood in me, to talk with him for five
+minutes without becoming aware of his origin. Long before he told me so
+I knew that he was in part a Frenchman. Men so great are not easily
+conquered, as we know to our cost. Why, it took quite 250,000 soldiers
+and three years of strenuous guerrilla warfare to enable Britain to
+defeat 40,000 or 50,000 Dutch farmers. Therefore I have personally not
+the least fear of the ultimate result of the campaign against Southwest
+Africa.
+
+I went as a lad as Secretary to the Governor of Natal. That was in 1875.
+Subsequently I accompanied Sir Theophilus Shepstone, one of the greatest
+men that ever lived in South Africa, on his famous mission to the
+Transvaal. I am now, I believe, the only survivor of that mission, and
+certainly the only man who knows all the inner political history of that
+event. Afterward I held office in the Transvaal, and was in the country
+during all the disastrous period of the first Boer war. For instance, I
+dined with Gen. Colley the night before he started on his ill-fated
+expedition. I think there were thirteen of us present at that historical
+dinner. Within a few weeks six or eight of these were dead, including
+Colley himself, killed in the fight of Majuba, of which I heard the
+guns. Of those present at that dinner party there now survive only Lady
+Colley, my wife, and myself.
+
+
+*Felt Like Rip Van Winkle.*
+
+After this I left Africa, and more than thirty years went by before I
+returned as a commissioner in the service of the Crown. It was a very
+extraordinary experience; indeed, I felt like a new Rip Van Winkle, for
+nearly all my old chiefs and colleagues were dead, and another
+generation had arisen. I can only say that I was deeply touched by the
+reception which I received throughout the country. It was with strange
+feelings that almost on the very spot where I helped to read the
+proclamation of annexation of the Transvaal, in 1877, and with my own
+hands hoisted the British flag over the land, I listened to my health
+being proposed by the Dutch Chief Justice of the Transvaal territory,
+once more a part of the British Empire. Such was my greeting everywhere.
+Three and thirty years before I had left the shores of Africa, believing
+that soon or late the British power was doomed to failure and probably
+to extinction there. When I left them again, six months ago, it was with
+the glad knowledge that, by the united wish of the inhabitants of South
+Africa, it was re-established, never again to pass away. It is a
+wonderful thing for a man in his own lifetime to see a country pass
+through so many vicissitudes, and in the end to appear in the face of
+the world no longer as England's enemy, but as a constituent part of the
+great British Empire, one of her best friends and supporters, glorying
+in her flag, which now floats from Cape Agalhas to the Zambesi, and soon
+will float over those contingent regions that have been seized by the
+mailed fist of Germany.
+
+
+
+
+*Capt. Mark Haggard's Death in Battle*
+
+
+_To the Editor of The [London] Times_:
+
+Sir: In various papers throughout England has appeared a letter, or part
+of a letter, written by Private C. Derry of the Second Battalion, Welsh
+Regiment. It concerns the fall of my much-loved nephew, Capt. Mark
+Haggard, of the same regiment, on Sept. 13 in the battle of the Aisne.
+
+Since this letter has been published and, vivid, pathetic, and
+pride-inspiring as it is, does not tell all the tale, I have been
+requested, on behalf of Mark's mother, young widow, and other members of
+our family, to give the rest of it as it was collected by them from the
+lips of Lieut. Somerset, who lay wounded by him when he died. Therefore
+I send this supplementary account to you in the hope that the other
+journals which have printed the first part of the story will copy it
+from your columns.
+
+It seems that after he had given the order to fix bayonets, as told by
+Private Derry, my nephew charged the German Maxims at the head of his
+company, he and his soldier servant outrunning the other men. Arrived at
+the Maxim in front of him, with the rifle which he was using as Derry
+describes, he shot and killed
+
+[Illustration: GERHART HAUPTMANN
+
+_See Page_ 175]
+
+[Illustration: LUDWIG FULDA.
+
+_See Page 180_ ]
+
+the three soldiers who were serving it, and then was seen "fighting and
+laying out" the Germans with the butt end of his empty gun, "laughing"
+as he did so, until he fell mortally wounded in the body and was carried
+away by his servant.
+
+His patient and heroic end is told by Private Derry, and I imagine that
+the exhortation to "Stick it, Welsh!" which from time to time he uttered
+in his agony, will not soon be forgotten in his regiment. Of that end we
+who mourn him can only say in the simple words of Derry's letter, that
+he "died as he had lived--an officer and a gentleman."
+
+Perhaps it would not be inappropriate to add as a thought of consolation
+to those throughout the land who day by day see their loved ones thus
+devoured by the waste of war, that of a truth these do not vainly die.
+Not only are they crowned with fame, but by the noble manner of their
+end they give the lie to Bernhardi and his school, who tell us that we
+English are an effete and worn-out people, befogged with mean ideals;
+lost in selfishness and the lust of wealth and comfort. Moreover, the
+history of these deeds of theirs will surely be as a beacon to those
+destined to carry on the traditions of our race in that new England
+which shall arise when the cause of freedom for which we must fight and
+die has prevailed--to fall no more.
+
+I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
+
+H. RIDER HAGGARD.
+
+Ditchingham, Norfolk, Oct. 9.
+
+
+
+
+*An Anti-Christian War*
+
+*By Robert Bridges.*
+
+
+_To the Editor of The [London] Times_:
+
+Sir: Since the beginning of this war the meaning of it has in one
+respect considerably changed, and I hope that our people will see that
+it is primarily a holy war. It is manifestly a war declared between
+Christ and the devil.
+
+The conduct of the German conscripts has demonstrated that they have
+been instructed to adopt in full practice the theories of their
+political philosophers, and that they have heartily consented to do this
+and freely commit every cruelty that they think will terrorize the
+people whom they intend to crush. The details of their actions are too
+beastly to mention.
+
+Their philosophers, as I read them, teach openly that the law of love is
+silly and useless, but that brutal force and cruelty are the useful and
+proper means of attaining success in all things. Shortly, you are not to
+do to others as you wish they should do to you, but you should do
+exactly what you wish they should not do to you; that is, you should cut
+their throats and seize their property, and then you will get on.
+
+As for these enlightened philosophers, their doctrines are plainly an
+apostasy from the Gospel--and this they do not scruple to avow; and
+their tenets are only a recrudescence or reassertion of the barbarism
+which we hoped we had grown out of; it is all merely damnable. But it
+seems to me that, judged only as utilitarian policy, it is stupid; and
+that they blundered in neglecting the moral force (for that is also a
+force) of the antagonism that they were bound to arouse in all gentle
+minds, whether simple or cultured. It was stupid of them not to perceive
+that their hellish principles would shock everything that is most
+beloved and living in modern thought, both the "humanitarian" tendency
+of the time and the respect which has grown up for the rights of
+minorities and nationalities. Now, not to reckon with such things was
+stupid, unless they can win temporary justification by immediate
+success.
+
+What success is possible for those who thus openly outrage humanity
+remains to be seen; but they cannot be allowed the advantage of any
+doubt as to what they are about. Those who fight for them will fight for
+"the devil and all his works"; and those who fight against them will be
+fighting in the holy cause of humanity and the law of love. If the
+advocacy of their bad principles and their diabolical conduct do not set
+the whole world against them, then the world is worse than I think. My
+belief is that there are yet millions of their own countrymen who have
+not bowed the knee to Satan, and who will be as much shocked as we are;
+and that this internal moral disruption will much hamper them. This
+morning I have a legal notice sent me from a German resident in England
+announcing that he has changed his name, for shame (I suppose) of his
+Fatherland.
+
+All their apology throughout has been a clumsy tissue of
+self-contradictory lies, and their occasional hypocrisy has been hastily
+pretended and ill-conceived. The particular contention against us--that
+we were betraying the cause of civilization by supporting the barbarous
+Slav--does not come very convincingly from them if their apostle is
+Nietzsche, while the Russian prophet is Tolstoy.
+
+The infernal machine which has been scientifically preparing for the
+last twenty-five years is now on its wild career like one of Mr. Wells's
+inventions, and wherever it goes it will leave desolation behind it and
+put all material progress back for at least half a century. There was
+never anything in the world worthier of extermination, and it is the
+plain duty of all civilized nations to unite to drive it back into its
+home and exterminate it there. I am, &c.,
+
+ROBERT BRIDGES.
+
+Sept. 1.
+
+
+
+
+*English Artists' Protest*
+
+
+ _Art lovers in Great Britain have drawn up a protest against the
+ vandalism of German soldiers. Copies of this protest have been sent
+ to the Comte de Lalaing, Belgian Minister in London; the American
+ Ambassador, with a humble request that it may be forwarded to the
+ President of the United States; and Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, Art
+ Adviser to the Belgian Government. Those who have signed include
+ well-known collectors, Trustees of the British Museum, the National
+ Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Galleries
+ of Scotland; the Director and Principal Librarian of the British
+ Museum; the Directors of the National Gallery, the Victoria and
+ Albert Museum, and the National Galleries of Scotland and Ireland;
+ the Keepers of the Wallace Collection and the National Gallery of
+ British Art; Keepers in the British Museum; the Joint Honorary
+ Secretaries of the National Art Collections Fund, and many critics
+ and others prominent in the art world._
+
+The whole civilized world has witnessed with horror the terrible effects
+of modern warfare on helpless inhabitants of Belgium and France, and on
+ancient buildings and other works of art which are the abiding monuments
+of the piety and culture of their ancestors.
+
+Some of the acts of the invading German army against buildings may be
+defensible from the military standpoint; but it seems certain from
+present information that in some signal instances, notably at Louvain
+and Rheims, this defense cannot hold good against the mass of evidence
+to the contrary.
+
+The signatories of this protest claim that they are in no sense a
+partisan body. Their contention in this matter is that the splendid
+monuments of the arts of the Middle Ages which have been destroyed or
+damaged are the inheritance of the whole world, and that it is the duty
+of all civilized communities to endeavor to preserve them for the
+benefit and instruction of posterity. While France and Belgium are
+individually the poorer from such wanton destruction, the world at large
+is no less impoverished.
+
+On these grounds, therefore, we desire to express our strong indignation
+and abhorrence at the gratuitous destruction of ancient buildings that
+has marked the invasion of Belgium and France by the German Army, and we
+wish to enter a protest in the strongest terms against the continuance
+of so barbarous and reckless a policy. That it is the result of a
+policy, and not of an accident, is shown by the similarity of the fate
+of Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Senlis, and finally Rheims.
+
+Many of us have had the opportunity of showing that our love and respect
+for art are not bounded by our nationality, but we feel compelled to
+publish to the world our horror and detestation of the barbarous acts
+committed by the army that represents a country which has done so much
+to promote and advance the study of art and its history.
+
+The signatories are:
+
+ DEVONSHIRE.
+ CHOLMONDELEY.
+ LANSDOWNE.
+ FEVERSHAM.
+ MABEL FEVERSHAM.
+ LEICESTER.
+ LONSDALE.
+ NORMANTON.
+ NORTHBROOK.
+ PLYMOUTH.
+ DILLON.
+ ALINGTON.
+ D'ABERNON.
+ ISABEL SOMERSET.
+ FREDERICK L. COOK.
+ AUDLEY D. NEELD.
+ HERBERT RAPHAEL.
+ SIDNEY COLVIN.
+ MARTIN CONWAY.
+ CHARLES HOLROYD.
+ FREDERIC G. KENYON.
+ HUGH LANE.
+ FRANCIS BEAUFORT PALMER.
+ C. HERCULES READ.
+ CECIL HARCOURT SMITH.
+ ISIDORE SPIELMANN.
+ HERBERT B. TREE.
+ WHITWORTH WALLIS.
+ CHARLES AITKEN.
+ OTTO BEIT.
+ MAURICE W. BROCKWELL.
+ A.H. BUTTERY.
+ C.S. CARSTAIRS.
+ JAMES L. CAW.
+ HERBERT COOK.
+ D.H.S. CRANAGE.
+ LIONEL CUST.
+ CAMPBELL DODGSON.
+ CHARLES DOWDESWELL.
+ DAVID ERSKINE.
+ H.A.L. FISHER.
+ J.L. GARVIN.
+ PERCIVAL GASKELL.
+ ALGERNON GRAVES.
+ JAMES GREIG.
+ O. GUTEKUNST.
+ EDWARD HUTTON.
+ G.B. CROFT-LYONS.
+ D.S. MACCOLL.
+ ERIC MACLAGAN.
+ G. MAYER.
+ MORTIMER MENPES.
+ ALMERIC H. PAGET.
+ J.S.R. PHILLIPS.
+ G.N. COUNT PLUNKETT.
+ JANET ROSS.
+ ROBERT ROSS.
+ M.E. SADLER.
+ MARION SPIELMANN.
+ A.J. SULLEY.
+ D. CROAL THOMSON.
+ T. HUMPHRY WARD.
+ W.H. JAMES WEALE.
+ FREDERICK A. WHITE.
+ R.C. WITT.
+
+
+
+
+*To Arms!*
+
+*By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.*
+
+
+Is it possible that there are still some of our people who do not
+understand the causes of this war, and are ignorant of the great stakes
+at issue which will speedily have so important a bearing upon the lives
+of each and all of them? It is hard to believe it, and yet it is so
+stated by some who profess to know. Let me try, in the shortest space
+and in the clearest words that I can command, to lay before them both
+the causes and the possible effects, and to implore them now, now, at
+this very moment, before it is too late, to make those efforts and
+sacrifices which the occasion demands. In Germany, every man from the
+ages of sixteen to fifty-five is with the colors. The last man has been
+called up. And yet we hear--we could not bear to see--that young
+athletic men in this country are playing football or cricket, while our
+streets are full of those who should be in our camps. All our lives have
+been but a preparation for this supreme moment. All our future lives
+will be determined by how we bear ourselves in these few months to come.
+Shame, shame on the man who fails his country in this its hour of need!
+I would not force him to serve. I could not think that the service of
+such a man was of any avail. Let the country be served by free men, and
+let them deal with the coward or the sluggard who flinches.
+
+The causes of the war are only of moment to us, at this stage, in that
+we gain more strength in our arms and more iron in our souls by a
+knowledge that it is for all that is honorable and sacred for which we
+fight. What really concerns us is that we are in a fight for our
+national life, that we must fight through to the end, and that each and
+all of us must help, in his own fashion, to the last ounce of his
+strength, that this end may be victory. That is the essence of the
+situation. It is not words and phrases that we need, but men, men--and
+always more men. If words can bring the men then they are of avail. If
+not they may well wait for the times to mend. But if there is a doubt in
+the mind of any man as to the justice of his country's quarrel, then
+even a writer may find work ready to his hand.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Let us cast our minds back upon the events which have led up to this
+conflict. They may be divided into two separate classes, those which
+prepared the general situation, and those which caused the special
+quarrel. Each of these I will treat in its turn.
+
+
+*Teuton Intoxication.*
+
+It is a matter of common knowledge, one which a man must be blind and
+deaf not to understand, that for many years Germany, intoxicated by her
+success in war and by her increase of wealth, has regarded the British
+Empire with eyes of jealousy and hatred. It has never been alleged by
+those who gave expression to this almost universal national passion that
+Great Britain had in any way, either historically or commercially, done
+Germany a mischief. Even our most bitter traducers, when asked to give
+any definite historical reasons for their dislike, were compelled to put
+forward such ludicrous excuses as that the British had abandoned the
+Prussian King in the year 1761, quite oblivious of the fact that the
+same Prussian King had abandoned his own allies in the same war under
+far more damaging circumstances, acting up to his own motto that no
+promises are binding where the vital interests of a State are in
+question. With all their malevolence they could give no examples of any
+ill turn done by us until their deliberate policy had forced us into
+antagonism. On the other hand, a long list of occasions could very
+easily be compiled on which we had helped them in some common cause,
+from the days of Marlborough to those of Blucher. Until the twentieth
+century had turned they had no possible cause for political hatred
+against us. In commerce our record was even more clear. Never in any way
+had we interfered with that great development of trade which has turned
+them from one of the poorest to one of the richest of European States.
+Our markets were open to them untaxed, while our own manufactures paid
+20 per cent. in Germany. The markets of India, of Egypt, and of every
+portion of the empire which had no self-appointed tariff, were as open
+to German goods as to British ones. Nothing could possibly have been
+more generous than our commercial treatment. No doubt there was some
+grumbling when cheap imitations of our own goods were occasionally found
+to oust the originals from their markets. Such a feeling was but natural
+and human. But in all matters of commerce, as in all matters political
+before the dawn of this century, they have no shadow of a grievance
+against us.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+And yet they hated us with a most bitter hatred, a hatred which long
+antedates the days when we were compelled to take a definite stand
+against them. In all sorts of ways this hatred showed itself, in the
+diatribes of professors, in the pages of books, in the columns of the
+press. Usually it was a sullen, silent dislike. Sometimes it would flame
+up suddenly into bitter utterance, as at the time of the unseemly
+dispute around the deathbed of the Emperor's father, or on the occasion
+of the Jameson Raid. And yet this bitter antagonism was in no way
+reciprocated in this country. If a poll had been taken at any time up to
+the end of the century as to which European country was our natural
+ally, the vote would have gone overwhelmingly for Germany. "America
+first and then Germany" would have been the verdict of nine men out of
+ten. But then occurred two events which steadied the easy-going Briton,
+and made him look more intently and with a more questioning gaze at his
+distant cousin over the water. Those two events were the Boer war and
+the building of the German fleet. The first showed us, to our amazement,
+the bitter desire which Germany had to do us some mischief, the second
+made us realize that she was forging a weapon with which that desire
+might be fulfilled.
+
+
+_The Boer War and Germany._
+
+We are most of us old enough to remember the torrent of calumny and
+insult which was showered upon us in the day of our temporary distress
+by the nation to whom we had so often been a friend and an ally. It is
+true that other nations treated us little better, and yet their
+treatment hurt us less. The difference as it struck men at the time may
+be summarized in this passage from a British writer of the period.
+
+"But it was very different with Germany," he says. "Again and again in
+the world's history we have been the friends and the allies of these
+people. It was so in the days of Marlborough, in those of the Great
+Frederick, and in those of Napoleon. When we could not help them with
+men we helped them with money. Our fleet has crushed their enemies. And
+now, for the first time in history, we have had a chance of seeing who
+were our friends in Europe, and nowhere have we met more hatred and more
+slander than from the German press and the German people. Their most
+respectable journals have not hesitated to represent the British
+troops--troops every bit as humane and as highly disciplined as their
+own--not only as committing outrages on person and property, but even as
+murdering women and children.
+
+"At first this unexpected phenomenon merely surprised the British
+people, then it pained them, and finally, after two years of it, it has
+roused a deep, enduring anger in their minds."
+
+He goes on to say: "The continued attacks upon us have left an enduring
+feeling of resentment, which will not and should not die away in this
+generation. It is not too much to say that five years ago a complete
+defeat of Germany in a European war would have certainly caused British
+intervention. Public sentiment and racial affinity would never have
+allowed us to see her really go to the wall. And now it is certain that
+in our lifetime no British guinea and no soldier's life would under any
+circumstances be spent for such an end. That is one strange result of
+the Boer war, and in the long run it is possible that it may prove not
+the least important."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Such was the prevailing mood of the nation when they perceived Germany,
+under the lead of her Emperor, following up her expressions of enmity by
+starting with restless energy to build up a formidable fleet, adding
+programme to programme, out of all possible proportion to the German
+commerce to be defended or to the German coastline exposed to attack.
+Already vainglorious boasts were made that Germany was the successor to
+Britain upon the seas. "The Admiral of the Atlantic greets the Admiral
+of the Pacific," said the Kaiser later in a message to the Czar. What
+was Britain to do under this growing menace? So long as she was isolated
+the diplomacy of Germany might form some naval coalition against her.
+She took the steps which were necessary for her own safety, and without
+forming an alliance she composed her differences with France and Russia
+and drew closer the friendship which united her with her old rival
+across the Channel. The first fruit of the new German fleet was the
+entente cordiale. We had found our enemy. It was necessary that we
+should find our friends. Thus we were driven into our present
+combination.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+And now we had to justify our friendship. For the first time we were
+compelled to openly oppose Germany in the deep and dangerous game of
+world politics. They wished to see if our understanding was a reality or
+a sham. Could they drive a wedge between us by showing that we were a
+fair-weather friend whom any stress would alienate? Twice they tried it,
+once in 1906 when they bullied France into a conference at Algeciras but
+found that Britain was firm at her side, and again in 1911 when in a
+time of profound peace they stirred up trouble by sending a gunboat to
+Agadir, and pushed matters to the very edge of war. But no threats
+induced Britain to be false to her mutual insurance with France. Now for
+the third and most fatal time they have demanded that we forswear
+ourselves and break our own bond lest a worse thing befall us. Blind and
+foolish, did they not know by past experience that we would keep our
+promise given? In their madness they have wrought an irremediable evil
+to themselves, to us, and to all Europe.
+
+I have shown that we have in very truth never injured nor desired to
+injure Germany in commerce nor have we opposed her politically until her
+own deliberate actions drove us into the camp of her opponents. But it
+may well be asked why then did they dislike us, and why did they weave
+hostile plots against us? It was that, as it seemed to them, and as
+indeed it actually may have been, we, independently of our own wills,
+stood between Germany and that world empire of which she dreamed. This
+was caused by circumstances over which we had no control and which we
+could not modify if we had wished to do so. Britain, through her
+maritime power and the energy of her merchants and people, had become a
+great world power when Germany was still unformed. Thus, when she had
+grown to her full stature, she found that the choice places of the world
+and those most fitted for the spread of a transplanted European race
+were already filled up. It was not a matter which we could help nor
+could we alter it, since Canada, Australia, and South Africa would not,
+even if we could be imagined to have wished it, be transferred to German
+rule. And yet the Germans chafed, and if we can put ourselves in their
+places we may admit that it was galling that the surplus of their
+manhood should go to build up the strength of an alien and possibly a
+rival State. So far we could see their grievance, or, rather their
+misfortune, since no one was in truth to blame in the matter. Had their
+needs been openly and reasonably expressed, and had the two States moved
+in concord in the matter, it is difficult to think that no helpful
+solution of any kind could have been found.
+
+
+*As Germans See England.*
+
+But the German method of approaching the problem has never been to ask
+sympathy and co-operation, but to picture us as a degenerate race from
+whom anything might be gained by playing upon our imagined weakness and
+cowardice. A nation which attends quietly to its own sober business
+must, according to their mediaeval notions, be a nation of decadent
+poltroons. If we fight our battles by means of free volunteers instead
+of enforced conscripts then the military spirit must be dead among us.
+Perhaps, even in this short campaign, they have added this delusion also
+to the dust-bin of their many errors. But such was their absurd
+self-deception about the most virile of European races. Did we propose
+disarmament, then it was not humanitarianism but cowardice that prompted
+us, and their answer was to enlarge their programme. Did we suggest a
+navy-building holiday, it was but a cloak for our weakness and an
+incitement that they should redouble their efforts. Our decay had become
+a part of their national faith. At first the wish may have been the
+father to the thought, but soon under the reiterated assertions of their
+crazy professors the proposition became indisputable. Bernhardi in his
+book upon the next war cannot conceal the contempt in which he has
+learned to hold us. Neibuhr long ago had prophesied the coming fall of
+Britain, and every year was believed to bring it nearer and to make it
+more certain. To these jaundiced eyes all seemed yellow, when the
+yellowness lay only in themselves. Our army, our navy, our colonies, all
+were equally rotten. "Old England, old, indeed, and corrupt, rotten
+through and through." One blow and the vast sham would fly to pieces,
+and from those pieces the victor could choose his reward. Listen to
+Prof. Treitschke, a man who, above all others, has been the evil genius
+of his country, and has done most to push it toward this abyss: "A thing
+that is wholly a sham," he cried, in allusion to our empire, "cannot, in
+this universe of ours, endure forever. It may endure for a day, but its
+doom is certain." Were ever words more true when applied to the narrow
+bureaucracy and swaggering Junkerdom of Prussia, the most artificial and
+ossified sham that ever our days have seen? See which will crack first,
+our democracy or this, now that both have been plunged into the furnace
+together. The day of God's testing has come, and we shall see which can
+best abide it.
+
+
+*The Blame Not England's.*
+
+I have tried to show that we are in no way to blame for the hostility
+which has grown up between us. So far as it had any solid cause at all
+it has arisen from fixed factors, which could no more be changed by us
+than the geographical position which has laid us right across their exit
+to the oceans of the world. That this deeply rooted national sentiment,
+which forever regarded us as the Carthage to which they were destined to
+play the part of Rome, would, sooner or later, have brought about war
+between us, is, in my opinion, beyond all doubt. But it was planned to
+come at the moment which was least favorable for Britain. "Even English
+attempts at a rapprochement must not blind us to the real situation,"
+says Bernhardi. "We may, at most, use them to delay the necessary and
+inevitable war until we may fairly imagine we have some prospect of
+success." A more shameless sentence was never penned, and one stands
+marveling which is the more grotesque--the cynicism of the sentiment or
+the folly which gave such a warning to the victim. For be it remembered
+that Bernhardi's words are to be taken very seriously, for they are not
+the ravings of some Pan-German monomaniac, but the considered views of
+the foremost military writer of Germany, one who is in touch with those
+inner circles whose opinions are the springs of national policy. "Our
+last and greatest reckoning is to be with Great Britain," said the
+bitter Treitschke. Sooner or later the shock was to come. Germany sat
+brooding over the chessboard of the world waiting for the opening which
+should assure a winning game.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+It was clear that she should take her enemies separately rather than
+together. If Britain were attacked it was almost certain that France and
+Russia would stand by her side. But if, on the contrary, the quarrel
+could be made with these two powers, and especially with Russia, in the
+first instance, then it was by no means so certain that Great Britain
+would be drawn into the struggle. Public opinion has to be strongly
+moved before our country can fight, and public opinion under a Liberal
+Government might well be divided upon the subject of Russia. Therefore,
+if the quarrel could be so arranged as to seem to be entirely one
+between Teuton and Slav there was a good chance that Britain would
+remain undecided until the swift German sword had done its work. Then,
+with the grim acquiescence of our deserted allies, the still bloody
+sword would be turned upon ourselves, and that great final reckoning
+would have come.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Such was the plan, and fortune favored it. A brutal murder had, not for
+the first time, put Servia into a position where a State may be blamed
+for the sins of individuals. An ultimatum was launched so phrased that
+it was impossible for any State to accept it as it stood and yet remain
+an independent State. At the first sign of argument or remonstrance the
+Austrian Army marched upon Belgrade. Russia, which had been already
+humiliated in 1908 by the forcible annexation of Bosnia, could not
+possibly submit a second time to the Caudine Forks. She laid her hand
+upon her sword hilt. Germany sprang to the side of her ally. France
+ranged herself with Russia. Like a thunderclap the war of the nations
+had begun.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+So far all had worked well for German plans. Those of the British public
+who were familiar with the past and could look into the future might be
+well aware that our interests were firmly bound with those of France,
+and that if our faggots were not tied together they would assuredly be
+snapped each in its turn. But the unsavory assassination which had been
+so cleverly chosen as the starting point of the war bulked large in the
+eyes of our people, and, setting self-interest to one side, the greater
+part of the public might well have hesitated to enter into a quarrel
+where the cause seemed remote and the issues ill-defined. What was it to
+us if a Slav or a Teuton collected the harbor due of Saloniki! So the
+question might have presented itself to the average man who in the long
+run is the ruler of this country and the autocrat of its destinies. In
+spite of all the wisdom of our statesmen, it is doubtful if on such a
+quarrel we could have gained that national momentum which might carry us
+to victory. But at that very moment Germany took a step which removed
+the last doubt from the most cautious of us and left us in a position
+where we must either draw our sword or stand forever dishonored and
+humiliated before the world. The action demanded of us was such a
+compound of cowardice and treachery that we ask ourselves in dismay what
+can we ever have done that could make others for one instant imagine us
+to be capable of so dastardly a course. Yet that it was really supposed
+that we could do it, and that it was not merely put forward as an excuse
+for drawing us into war, is shown by the anger and consternation of the
+Kaiser and his Chancellor when we drew back from what the British Prime
+Minister had described as "an infamous proposal." One has only to read
+our Ambassador's description of his interview with the German Chancellor
+after our decision was announced, "so evidently overcome by the news of
+our action," to see that through some extraordinary mental aberration
+the German rulers did actually believe that a vital treaty with
+Britain's signature upon it could be regarded by this country as a mere
+"scrap of paper."
+
+
+*The Treaty of 1839.*
+
+What was this treaty which it was proposed so lightly to set aside? It
+was the guarantee of the neutrality of Belgium signed in 1839 (confirmed
+verbally and in writing by Bismarck in 1870) by Prussia, France, and
+Britain, each of whom pledged their word to observe and to enforce it.
+On the strength of it Belgium had relied for her security amid her
+formidable neighbors. On the strength of it also France had lavished all
+her defenses upon her eastern frontier, and left her northern exposed to
+attack. Britain had guaranteed the treaty, and Britain could be relied
+upon. Now, on the first occasion of testing the value of her word it was
+supposed that she would regard the treaty as a worthless scrap of paper,
+and stand by unmoved while the little State which had trusted her was
+flooded by the armies of the invader. It was unthinkable, and yet the
+wisest brains of Germany seem to have persuaded themselves that we had
+sunk to such depths of cowardly indolence that even this might go
+through. Surely they also have been hypnotized by those foolish dreams
+of Britain's degeneration, from which they will have so terrible an
+awakening.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+As a matter of fact the General Staff had got ahead of the diplomatists,
+and the German columns were already over the border while the point was
+being debated at Berlin. There was no retreat from the position which
+had been taken up. "It is to us a vital matter of strategy and is beyond
+argument," said the German soldier. "It is to us a vital matter of honor
+and, is beyond argument," answered the British statesman. The die was
+cast. No compromise was possible. Would Britain keep her word or would
+she not? That was the sole question at issue. And what answer save one
+could any Briton give to it? "I do not believe," said our Prime
+Minister, "that any nation ever entered into a great controversy with a
+clearer conscience and stronger conviction that it is fighting, not for
+aggression, not for the maintenance of its own selfish interest, but in
+defense of principles the maintenance of which is vital to the
+civilization of the world." So he spoke, and history will indorse his
+words, for we surely have our quarrel just.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+So much for the events which have led us to war. Now for a moment let us
+glance at what we may have to hope for, what we may have to fear, and,
+above all, what we must each of us do that we win through to a lasting
+peace.
+
+What have we to gain if we win? That we have nothing material to gain,
+no colonies which we covet, no possessions of any sort that we desire,
+is the final proof that the war has not been provoked by us. No nation
+would deliberately go out of its way to wage so hazardous and costly a
+struggle when there is no prize for victory. But one enormous indirect
+benefit we will gain if we can make Germany a peaceful and harmless
+State. We will surely break her naval power and take such steps that it
+shall not be a menace to us any more. It was this naval power, with its
+rapid increase and the need that we should ever, as Mr. Churchill has so
+well expressed it, be ready at our average moment to meet an attack at
+their chosen moment--it was this which has piled up our war estimates
+during the last ten years until they have bowed us down. With such
+enormous sums spent upon ships and guns, great masses of capital were
+diverted from the ordinary channels of trade, while an even more serious
+result was that our programmes of social reform had to be curtailed from
+want of the money which could finance them. Let the menace of that
+lurking fleet be withdrawn--the nightmare of those thousand hammers
+working day and night in forging engines for our destruction--and our
+estimates will once again be those of a civilized Christian country,
+while our vast capital will be turned from measures of self-protection
+to those of self-improvement. Should our victory be complete, there is
+little which Germany can yield to us save the removal of that shadow
+which has darkened us so long. But our children and our children's
+children will never, if we do our work well now, look across the North
+Sea with the sombre thoughts which have so long been ours, while their
+lives will be brightened and elevated by money which we, in our darker
+days, have had to spend upon our ships and our guns.
+
+Consider, on the other hand, what we should suffer if we were to lose.
+All the troubles of the last ten years would be with us still, but in a
+greatly exaggerated form. A larger and stronger Germany would dominate
+Europe and would overshadow our lives. Her coast line would be
+increased, her ports would face our own, her coaling stations would be
+in every sea, and her great army, greater then than ever, would be
+within striking distance of our shores. To avoid sinking forever into
+the condition of a dependant, we should be compelled to have recourse to
+rigid compulsory service, and our diminished revenues would be all
+turned to the needs of self-defense. Such would be the miserable
+condition in which we should hand on to our children that free and
+glorious empire which we inherited in all the fullness of its richness
+and its splendor from those strong fathers who have built it up. What
+peace of mind, what self-respect could be left for us in the remainder
+of our lives! The weight of dishonor would lie always upon our hearts.
+And yet this will be surely our fate and our future if we do not nerve
+our souls and brace our arms for victory. No regrets will avail, no
+excuses will help, no after-thoughts can profit us. It is now--now--even
+in these weeks and months that are passing that the final reckoning is
+being taken, and when once the sum is made up no further effort can
+change it. What are our lives or our labors, our fortunes or even our
+families, when compared with the life or death of the great mother of us
+all? We are but the leaves of the tree. What matter if we flutter down
+today or tomorrow, so long as the great trunk stands and the burrowing
+roots are firm. Happy the man who can die with the thought that in this
+greatest crisis of all he has served his country to the uttermost, but
+who would bear the thoughts of him who lives on with the memory that he
+had shirked his duty and failed his country at the moment of her need?
+
+There is a settled and assured future if we win. There is darkness and
+trouble if we lose. But if we take a broader sweep and trace the
+meanings of this contest as they affect others than ourselves, then ever
+greater, more glorious are the issues for which we fight. For the whole
+world stands at a turning point of its history, and one or other of two
+opposite principles, the rule of the soldier or the rule of the citizen,
+must now prevail. In this sense we fight for the masses of the German
+people, as some day they will understand, to free them from that
+formidable military caste which has used and abused them, spending their
+bodies in an unjust war and poisoning their minds by every device which
+could inflame them against those who wish nothing save to live at peace
+with them. We fight for the strong, deep Germany of old, the Germany of
+music and of philosophy, against this monstrous modern aberration the
+Germany of blood and of iron, the Germany from which, instead of the old
+things of beauty, there come to us only the rant of scolding professors
+with their final reckonings, their Weltpolitik, and their Godless
+theories of the Superman who stands above morality and to whom all
+humanity shall be subservient. Instead of the world-inspiring phrases of
+a Goethe or a Schiller, what are the words in the last decade which have
+been quoted across the sea? Are they not always the ever-recurring words
+of wrath from one ill-balanced man? "Strike them with the mailed fist."
+"Leave such a name behind you as Attila and his Huns." "Turn your
+weapons even upon your own flesh and blood at my command." These are the
+messages which have come from this perversion of a nation's soul.
+
+
+*A Mighty Despotism.*
+
+But the matter lies deep. The Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs have used
+their peoples as a great landowner might use the serfs upon his estate.
+It was, and is, their openly expressed theory that they were in their
+position by the grace of God, that they owed no reckoning to any man,
+and that kingdom and folk were committed for better or worse to their
+charge. Round this theory of the Dark Ages there gathered all the forces
+of the many courts of the empire, all the nobility who make so huge a
+class in Germanic countries, all the vast army to whom strict discipline
+and obedience were the breath of life, all the office-holders of the
+State, all the purveyors of warlike stores. These and their like were
+the natural setting to such a central idea. Court influence largely
+controlled the teaching at school and universities, and so the growing
+twig could be bent. But all these forces together could not have upheld
+so dangerous and unnatural a theory had it not been for the influence of
+a servile press. How that press was managed, how the thoughts of the
+people could be turned to the right or the left with the same precision
+as a platoon of grenadiers, has been shown clearly enough in the memoirs
+of Bismarck. Public opinion was poisoned at its very roots. The average
+citizen lived in a false atmosphere where everything was distorted to
+his vision. He saw his Kaiser, not as an essentially weak and impetuous
+man with a dangerous entourage who were ever at his ear, but as Germany
+personified, an angel with a flaming sword, beating back envious
+assailants from the beloved Fatherland. He saw his neighbors not as
+peaceful nations who had no possible desire to attack him, but on the
+contrary lived in constant fear of him, but as a band, of envious and
+truculent conspirators who could only be kept in order by the sudden
+stamp of the jackboot and the menacing clatter of the sabre. He
+insensibly imbibed the Nietzsche doctrine that the immorality of the
+Superman may be as colossal as his strength and that the slave-evangel
+of Christianity was superseded by a sterner law. Thus, when he saw acts
+which his reason must have told him were indefensible he was still
+narcotized by this conception of some new standard of right. He saw his
+Kaiser at the time of a petty humiliation to Great Britain sending a
+telegram of congratulation to the man who had inflicted this rebuff.
+Could that be approved by reason? At a time when all Europe was
+shuddering over the Armenian massacres he saw this same Kaiser paying a
+complimentary visit to the Sultan whose hands were still wet with the
+blood of murdered Christians. Could that be reconciled with what is
+right? A little later he saw the Kaiser once again pushing himself into
+Mediterranean politics, where no direct German interest lay, and
+endeavoring to tangle up the French developments in Northern Africa by
+provocative personal appearances at Morocco, and, later, by sending a
+gunboat to intrude upon a scene of action which had already by the
+Treaty of Algeciras been allotted to France. How could an honest German
+whose mind was undebauched by a controlled press justify such an
+interference as that? He is or should be aware that, in annexing Bosnia,
+Austria was tearing up a treaty without the consent of the other
+signatories, and that his own country was supporting and probably
+inciting her ally to this public breach of faith. Could he honestly
+think that this was right? And, finally, he must know, for his own
+Chancellor has publicly proclaimed it, that the invasion of Belgium was
+a breach of international right, and that Germany, or, rather, Prussia,
+had perjured herself upon the day that the first of her soldiers passed
+over the frontier. How can he explain all this to himself save on a
+theory that might is right, that no moral law applies to the Superman,
+and that so long as one hews one's way through, the rest can matter
+little? To such a point of degradation have public morals been brought
+by the infernal teachings of Prussian military philosophy, dating back
+as far as Frederick II., but intensified by the exhortations of press
+and professors during our own times. The mind of the average kindly
+German citizen has been debauched and yet again debauched until it
+needed just such a world crisis as this to startle him at last from his
+obsession and to see his position and that of his country in its true
+relation with humanity and progress.
+
+
+*The Final Stakes.*
+
+Thus I say, that for the German who stands outside the ruling classes,
+our victory would bring a lasting relief, and some hope that in future
+his destiny should be controlled by his own judgment and not by the
+passions or interests of those against whom he has at present no appeal.
+A system which has brought disaster to Germany and chaos to all Europe
+can never, one would think, be resumed, and amid the debris of his
+empire the German may pick up that precious jewel of personal freedom
+which is above the splendor of foreign conquest. A Hapsburg or a
+Hohenzollern may find his true place as the servant rather than the
+master of a nation. But apart from Germany, look at the effects which
+our victory must have over the whole wide world. Everywhere it will mean
+the triumph of reasoned democracy, of public debate, of ordered freedom
+in which every man is an active unit in the system of his own
+Government, while our defeat would stand for a victory to a priviliged
+class, the thrusting down of the civilian by the arrogance and
+intolerance of militarism, and the subjection of all that is human and
+progressive to all that is cruel, narrow, and reactionary. This is the
+stake for which we play, and the world will lose or gain as well as we.
+You may well come, you democratic oversea men of our blood, to rally
+round us now, for all that you cherish, all that is bred in your very
+bones, is that for which we fight. And you, lovers of freedom in every
+land, we claim at least your prayers and your wishes, for if our sword
+be broken you will be the poorer. But fear not, for our sword will not
+be broken, nor shall it ever drop from our hands until this matter is
+forever set in order. If every ally we have upon earth were to go down
+in blood and ruin, still would we fight through to the appointed end.
+Defeat shall not daunt us. Inconclusive victory shall not turn us from
+our purpose. The grind of poverty and the weariness of hopes deferred
+shall not blunt the edge of our resolve. With God's help we shall go to
+the end, and when that goal is reached it is our prayer that a new era
+shall come as our reward, an era in which, by common action of State
+with State, mutual hatreds and strivings shall be appeased, land shall
+no longer be estranged from land, and huge armies and fleets will be
+nightmares of the past. Thus, as ever, the throes of evil may give birth
+to good. Till then our task stands clear before us--a task that will ask
+for all we have in strength and resolution. Have you who read this
+played your part to the highest? If not, do it now, or stand forever
+shamed.
+
+
+
+
+*Conan Doyle on British Militarism*
+
+
+Early last year, in the course of some comments which I made upon the
+slighting remarks about our army by Gen. von Bernhardi, I observed: "It
+may be noted that Gen. von Bernhardi has a poor opinion of our troops.
+This need not trouble us. We are what we are, and words will not alter
+it. From very early days our soldiers have left their mark upon
+Continental warfare, and we have no reason to think that we have
+declined from the manhood of our forefathers." Since then he has
+returned to the attack.
+
+With that curious power of coming after deep study to the absolutely
+diametrically wrong conclusion which the German expert, political or
+military, appears to possess, he says in his "War of Today": "The
+English Army, trained more for purposes of show than for modern war,"
+adding in the same sentence a sneer at our "inferior colonial levies."
+
+He will have an opportunity of reconsidering his views presently upon
+the fighting value of our oversea troops, and surely, so far as our own
+are concerned, he must already be making some interesting notes for his
+next edition, or, rather, for the learned volume upon "Germany and the
+Last War," which will, no doubt, come from his pen. He is a man to whom
+we might well raise a statue, for I am convinced that his frank
+confession of German policy has been worth at least an army corps to
+this country. We may address to him John Davidson's lines to his enemy:
+
+ Unwilling friend, let not your spite abate.
+ Spur us with scorn and strengthen us with hate.
+
+There is another German gentleman who must be thinking rather furiously.
+He is a certain Col. Gadke, who appeared officially at Aldershot some
+years ago, was hospitably entertained, being shown all that he desired
+to see, and on his return to Berlin published a most deprecatory
+description of our forces. He found no good thing in them. I have some
+recollection that Gen. French alluded in a public speech to this
+critic's remarks, and expressed a modest hope that he and his men would
+some day have the opportunity of showing how far they were deserved.
+Well, he has had his opportunity, and Col. Gadke, like so many other
+Germans, seems to have made a miscalculation.
+
+
+*Germans Untried in War.*
+
+An army which has preserved the absurd parade schritt, an exercise which
+is painful to the bystander, as he feels that it is making fools of
+brave men, must have a tendency to throw back to earlier types. These
+Germans have been trained in peace and upon the theory of books. In all
+that vast host there is hardly a man who has stood at the wrong end of a
+loaded gun. They live on traditions of close formations, vast cavalry
+charges, and other things which will not fit into modern warfare. Braver
+men do not exist, but it is the bravery of men who have been taught to
+lean upon each other, and not the cold, self-contained, resourceful
+bravery of the man who has learned to fight for his own hand. The
+British have had the teachings of two recent campaigns fought with
+modern weapons--that of the Tirah and of South Africa. Now that the
+reserves have joined the colors there are few regiments which have not a
+fair sprinkling of veterans from these wars in their ranks. The Pathan
+and the Boer have been their instructors in something more practical
+than those imperial grand manoeuvres where the all-highest played with
+his puppets in such a fashion that one of his Generals remarked that the
+chief practical difficulty of a campaign so conducted would be the
+disposal of the dead.
+
+Boers and Pathans have been hard masters and have given many a slap to
+their admiring pupils, but the lesson has been learned. It was not show
+troops, General, who, with two corps, held five of your best day after
+day from Mons to Compiègne. It is no reproach to your valor, but you
+were up against men who were equally brave and knew a great deal more of
+the game. This must begin to break upon you, and will surely grow
+clearer as the days go by. We shall often in the future take the knock
+as well as give it, but you will not say that we are a slow army if you
+live to chronicle this war, nor will your imperial master be proud of
+the adjective which he has demeaned himself in using before his troops
+had learned their lesson.
+
+
+*The South African Lesson.*
+
+The fact is that the German Army, with all its great traditions, has
+been petrifying for many years back. They never learned the lesson of
+South Africa. It was not for want of having it expounded to them, for
+their military attache--"'im with the spatchcock on 'is 'elmet,'" as I
+heard him described by a British orderly--missed nothing of what
+occurred, as is evident from their official history of the war. And yet
+they missed it, and with all those ideas of individual efficiency and
+elastic independent formation which are the essence of modern
+soldiering. Their own more liberal thinkers were aware of it. Here are
+the words which were put into the mouth of Güntz, the representative of
+the younger school, in Beverlein's famous novel:
+
+"The organization of the German Army rested upon foundations which had
+been laid a hundred years ago. Since the great war they had never
+seriously been put to the proof, and during the last three decades they
+had only been altered in the most trifling details. In three long
+decades! And in one of those decades the world at large had advanced as
+much as in the previous century.
+
+"Instead of turning this highly developed intelligence to good account,
+they bound it hand and foot on the rack of an everlasting drill which
+could not have been more soullessly mechanical in the days of Frederick.
+It held them together as an iron hoop holds together a cask, the dry
+staves of which would fall asunder at the first kick."
+
+Lord Roberts has said that if ten points represent the complete soldier,
+eight should stand for his efficiency as a shot. The German maxim has
+rather been that eight should stand for his efficiency as a drilled
+marionette. It has been reckoned that about two hundred books a year
+appear in Germany upon military affairs, against about twenty in
+Britain. And yet, after all this expert debate, the essential point of
+all seems to have been missed--that in the end everything depends upon
+the man behind the gun, upon his hitting his opponent and upon his
+taking cover so as to avoid being hit himself.
+
+After all the efforts of the General Staff, the result when shown upon
+the field of battle has filled our men with a mixture of admiration and
+contempt--contempt for the absurd tactics and admiration for the poor
+devils who struggle on in spite of them. Listen to the voices of the men
+who are the real experts. Says a Lincolnshire Sergeant: "They were in
+solid square blocks, and we couldn't help hitting them." Says Private
+Tait (Second Essex): "Their rifle shooting is rotten. I don't believe
+they could hit a haystack at 100 yards." "They are rotten shots with
+their rifles," says an Oldham private. "They advance in close column,
+and you simply can't help hitting them," writes a Gordon Highlander.
+"You would have thought it was a big crowd streaming out from a cup
+tie," says Private Whitaker of the Guards. "It was like a farmer's
+machine cutting grass," so it seemed to Private Hawkins of the
+Coldstreams. "No damned good as riflemen," says a Connemara boy. "You
+couldn't help hitting them. As to their rifle fire, it was useless."
+"They shoot from the hip, and don't seem to aim at anything in
+particular."
+
+
+*Not Books That Count.*
+
+These are the opinions of the practical men upon the field of battle.
+Surely a poor result from the 200 volumes a year and all the weighty
+labors of the General Staff! "Artillery nearly as good as our own, rifle
+fire beneath contempt." That is the verdict. How will the well-taught
+parade schritt avail them when it comes to a stricken field?
+
+But let it not seem as if this were meant for disparagement. We should
+be sinking to the Kaiser's level if we answer his "contemptible little
+army" by pretending that his own troops are anything but a very
+formidable and big army. They are formidable in numbers, formidable,
+too, in their patriotic devotion, in their native courage, and in the
+possession of such material, such great cannon, aircraft, machine guns,
+and armored cars as none of the Allies can match. They have every
+advantage which a nation would be expected to have when it has known
+that war was a certainty, while others have only treated it as a
+possibility. There is a minuteness and earnestness of preparation which
+are only possible for an assured event. But the fact remains, and it
+will only be brought out more clearly by the Emperor's unchivalrous
+phrase, that in every arm the British have already shown themselves to
+be the better troops. Had he the Froissart spirit within him he would
+rather have said: "You have today a task which is worthy of you. You are
+faced by an army which has a high repute and a great history. There is
+real glory to be won today." Had he said this then, win or lose, he
+would not have needed to be ashamed of his own words--the words of
+ungenerous spirit.
+
+It is a very strange thing how German critics have taken for granted
+that the British Army had deteriorated, while the opinion of all those
+who were in close touch with it was that it was never so good. Even some
+of the French experts made the same mistake, and Gen. Bonnat counseled
+his countrymen not to rely upon it, since "it would take refuge amid its
+islands at the first reverse." One would think that the cause which
+makes for its predominance were obvious. Apart from any question of
+national spirit there is the all-important fact that the men are there
+of their own free will, an advantage which I trust that we shall never
+be compelled to surrender. Again, the men are of longer service in every
+arm, and they have far more opportunities of actual fighting than come
+to any other force. Finally they are divided into regiments with
+centuries of military glories streaming from their banners, which carry
+on a mighty tradition. The very words the Guards, the Rifles, the
+Connaught Rangers, the Buffs, the Scots Greys, the Gordons, sound like
+bugle calls. How could an army be anything but dangerous which had such
+units in its line of battle?"
+
+
+*History Repeating Itself*.
+
+And yet there remains the fact that both enemies and friends are
+surprised at our efficiency. This is no new phenomenon. Again and again
+in the course of history the British armies have had to win once more
+the reputation which had been forgotten. Continentals have always begun
+by refusing to take them seriously. Napoleon, who had never met them in
+battle, imagined that their unbroken success was due to some weakness in
+his Marshals rather than in any excellence of the troops. "At last I
+have them, these English," he exclaimed as he gazed at the thin, red
+line at Waterloo. "At last they have me, these English," may have been
+his thought that evening as he spurred his horse out of the débacle. Foy
+warned him of the truth. "The British infantry is the devil," said he.
+"You think so because you were beaten by them," cried Napoleon. Like von
+Kluck or von Kluck's master, he had something to learn.
+
+Why this continual depreciation? It may be that the world pays so much
+attention to our excellent right arm that it cannot give us credit for
+having a very serviceable left as well. Or it may be that they take
+seriously those jeremiads over our decay which are characteristic of our
+people, and very especially of many of our military thinkers. I have
+never been able to understand why they should be of so pessimistic a
+turn of mind, unless it be a sort of exaltation of that grumbling which
+has always been the privilege of the old soldier. Croker narrates how he
+met Wellington in his later years, and how the Iron Duke told him that
+he was glad he was so old, as he would not live to see the dreadful
+military misfortunes which were about to come to his country. Looking
+back, we can see no reason for such pessimism as this. Above all, the
+old soldier can never make any allowance for the latent powers which lie
+in civilian patriotism and valor. Only a year ago I had a long
+conversation with a well-known British General, in which he asserted
+with great warmth that in case of an Anglo-German war with France
+involved the British public would never allow a trained soldier to leave
+these islands. He is at the front himself and doing such good work that
+he has little time for reminiscence, but when he has he must admit that
+he underrated the nerve of his countrymen.
+
+
+*Assurance Beneath Pessimism.*
+
+And yet under the pessimism of such men as he there is a curious
+contradictory assurance that there are no troops like our own. The late
+Lord Goschen used to tell a story of a letter that he had from a Captain
+in the navy at the time when he was First Lord. This Captain's ship was
+lying alongside a foreign cruiser in some port, and he compared in his
+report the powers of the two vessels. Lord Goschen said that his heart
+sank as he read the long catalogue of points in which the British ship
+was inferior--guns, armor, speed--until he came to the postscript, which
+was: "I think I could take her in twenty minutes."
+
+With all the grumbling of our old soldiers, there is always some
+reservation of the sort at the end of it. Of course, those who are
+familiar with our ways of getting things done would understand that a
+good deal of the croaking is a means of getting our little army
+increased, or at least preventing its being diminished. But whatever the
+cause, the result has been the impression abroad of a "contemptible
+little army." Whatever surprise in the shape of 17-inch howitzers or
+900-foot Zeppelins the Kaiser may have for us, it is a safe prophecy
+that it will be a small matter compared to that which Sir John French
+and his men will be to him.
+
+But above all I look forward to the development of our mounted riflemen.
+This I say in no disparagement of our cavalry, who have done so
+magnificently. But the mounted rifleman is a peculiarly British
+product--British and American--with a fresh edge upon it from South
+Africa. I am most curious to see what a division of these fellows will
+make of the Uhlans. It is good to see that already the old banners are
+in the wind, Lovat's Horse, Scottish Horse, King Edward's Horse, and the
+rest. All that cavalry can do will surely be done by our cavalry. But I
+have always held, and I still very strongly hold, that the mounted
+rifleman has it in him to alter our whole conception of warfare, as the
+mounted archer did in his day; and now in this very war will be his
+first great chance upon a large scale. Ten thousand well-mounted,
+well-trained riflemen, young officers to lead them, all broad Germany,
+with its towns, its railways and its magazines before them--there lies
+one more surprise for the doctrinaires of Berlin.
+
+
+
+
+*The Need of Being Merciless*
+
+*By Maurice Maeterlinck.*
+
+*From The London Daily Mail.*
+
+
+At these moments of tragedy none should be allowed to speak who cannot
+shoulder a rifle, for the written word seems so monstrously useless and
+so overwhelmingly trivial in face of this mighty drama that will for a
+long time and maybe forever free mankind from the scourge of war--the
+one scourge among all that cannot be excused and that cannot be
+explained, since alone among all scourges it issues entirely from the
+hands of man.
+
+But it is while this scourge is upon us--while we have our being in its
+very centre--that we shall do well to weigh the guilt of those who
+committed this inexpiable crime. It is now, when we are in the awful
+horror, undergoing and feeling it, that we have the energy and
+clearsightedness needed to judge it. From the depths of the most fearful
+injustice justice is best perceived. When the hour shall have come for
+settling accounts--it will not be long delayed--we shall have forgotten
+much of what we have suffered and a censurable pity will creep over us
+and cloud our eyes.
+
+
+*Will Seek Sympathy.*
+
+This is the moment, therefore, for us to frame our inexorable
+resolution. After the final victory, when the enemy is crushed--as
+crushed as he will be--efforts will be made to enlist our sympathy. We
+shall be told that the unfortunate German people are merely the victims
+of their monarch and their feudal caste; that no blame attaches to the
+Germany we know that is so sympathetic and cordial--the Germany of
+quaint old houses and open-hearted greetings; the Germany that sits
+under its lime trees beneath the clear light of the moon--but only to
+Prussia, hateful, arrogant Prussia; that homely, peace-loving Bavaria,
+the genial, hospitable dwellers on the banks of the Rhine, the Silesian
+and Saxon--I know not who besides--have merely obeyed and been compelled
+to obey orders they detested, but were unable to resist.
+
+We are in the face of reality now. Let us look at it well and pronounce
+our sentence, for this is the moment when we hold the proofs in our
+hands; when the elements of the crime are hot before us and should
+out--the truth that will soon fade from our memory. Let us tell
+ourselves now therefore that all we shall be told hereafter will be
+false. Let us unflinchingly adhere to what we decide at this moment when
+the glare of the horror is on us.
+
+
+*No Degrees of Guilt.*
+
+It is not true that in this gigantic crime there are innocent and guilty
+or degrees of guilt. They stand on one level, all who have taken part.
+The German from the north has no more especial craving for blood than
+the German from the south has especial tenderness and pity. It is very
+simple. It is the German from one end of the country to the other who
+stands revealed as a beast of prey that the firm will of our planet
+finally repudiates. We have here no wretched slaves dragged along by a
+tyrant King who alone is responsible. Nations have the Government they
+deserve, or rather the Government they have is truly no more than a
+magnified public projection of the private morality and mentality of the
+nation.
+
+If eighty million innocent people merely expose the inherent falseness
+and superficiality of their innocence--and it is a monster they maintain
+at their head who stands for all that is true in their nature, because
+it is he who represents the eternal aspirations of their race, which lie
+far deeper than their apparent transient virtues--let there be no
+suggestion of error, of intelligent people having been tricked and
+misled. No nation can be deceived that does not wish to be deceived. It
+is not intelligence that Germany lacks. In the sphere of intellect such
+things are not possible, nor in the region of the enlightened,
+reflecting will. No nation permits herself to be coerced into the one
+crime man cannot pardon. It is of her own accord she hastens toward it.
+Her chief has no need to persuade. It is she who urges him on.
+
+We have forces here quite different from those on the surface--forces
+that are secret, irresistible, profound. It is these we must judge, must
+crush under heel once for all, for they are the only ones that will not
+be improved, softened or brought into line by experience, progress, or
+even the bitterest lesson. They are unalterable, immovable. Their
+springs lie far beneath hope or influence. They must be destroyed as we
+destroy a nest of wasps, since we know these never can change into a
+nest of bees.
+
+Even though individually and singly Germans are all innocent and merely
+led astray, they are none the less guilty in mass. This is the guilt
+that counts--that alone is actual and real, because it lays bare
+underneath their superficial innocence, the subconscious criminality of
+all. No influence can prevail on the unconscious or subconscious. It
+never evolves. Let there come a thousand years of civilization, a
+thousand years of peace, with all possible refinements, art, and
+education, the German spirit which is its underlying element will remain
+absolutely the same as today and would declare itself when the
+opportunity came under the same aspect with the same infamy.
+
+Through the whole course of history two distinct will-powers have been
+noticed that would seem to be the opposing elemental manifestations of
+the spirit of our globe, one seeking only evil, injustice, tyranny,
+suffering, the other strives for liberty, right, radiance, joy. These
+two powers stand once again face to face. Our opportunity is to
+annihilate the one that comes from below. Let us know how to be pitiless
+that we have no more need for pity. It is the measures of organic
+defense--it is essential that the modern world should stamp out Prussian
+militarism as it would stamp out a poisonous fungus that for half a
+century had poisoned its days. The health of our planet is the question.
+Tomorrow the United States and Europe will have to take measures for the
+convalescence of the earth.
+
+
+
+
+*Letters to Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler*
+
+*By Baron d'Estournelles de Constant.*
+
+
+ _Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, has
+ permitted_ THE NEW YORK TIMES _to have the extracts printed
+ herewith from letters sent to him since the beginning of the war by
+ Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, Senator of France, and Member of
+ the International Court at The Hague._
+
+
+*First Letter.*
+
+PARIS, Aug. 15, 1914.--* * * Today I am full of grief to feel myself
+impotent before the murderous conflicts now going on in Belgium and at a
+number of points on our northern and eastern frontiers, while awaiting
+the great battles and hecatombs which will follow; my thought is full of
+these terrible calamities willfully brought about; so many precious
+lives already wiped out or soon to be; so much avoidable mourning which
+one neither can nor wishes now to avoid!
+
+In France there is not a single family which has not given without
+hesitation all its children of military age to fight for the repulse of
+the invader. All the men from Créans, of ages 20 to 48 years, have gone,
+with one exception, and he is now going; and meanwhile no work has
+ceased because of their absence. In all the communes, in all the hamlets
+of the whole of France, the women, the children, and the men over 48
+have assumed all duties, in particular the gathering of the harvests,
+which I see already finished as in normal times. * * *
+
+When one thinks that Servia alone, even though exhausted by two
+atrocious wars, is sufficient to hold in check imperial Austria; when
+one sees Italy remain neutral, and in reality hostile to Austria, and
+Russia open slowly, inexorably, her reservoir of men, resources, and
+infinite energy on the eastern frontier of Germany, one asks truly if
+the Pan-Germanists have not been the veritable plague of God for their
+country; the Fatherland, which men like Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven had
+made so cultured, so glorious, and which asked only to live and to
+prosper, the Pan-Germanists have isolated only to deliver it to the
+execration of the world. It was the same in France formerly, when she
+ceded to chauvinistic influences.
+
+
+*Second Letter.*
+
+PARIS, Sept. 3, 1914.
+
+* * * May you never witness such calamities as have fallen upon Europe.
+The visions of horror, which formerly we evoked in order to terrify the
+world and to try to conjure them away, are now surpassed; and we are
+only at the commencement of the war! The trains, thronged with youth and
+enthusiasm, which I saw leave are now returning crowded with the
+wounded. They have filled all the hospitals, the barracks which had been
+left empty, the lyceums, and the schools throughout France. In but a few
+days they have arrived everywhere in the south, the west and the centre
+of the country. At La Flèche alone we have five improvised hospitals
+with 1,200 beds. Créans is a hospital annex, and so it is in all the
+villages and in the dwellings which can provide one or more beds. The
+wounded who occupy these beds are happy, very happy. One of them, who
+has only a broken leg, but who thinks of the thousands of his comrades
+who remain wounded upon the fields of battle, said to me, "I am in
+heaven." * * *
+
+The worst of all, (I have always said it, but it is even worse than I
+had thought,) the worst is that each of the combatants, for the most
+part incapable of cruelty under ordinary conditions, is now devoted to
+the horrible work of hatred and of reprisal; and even more than the
+combatants, their children, their orphans, all those who are to remain
+in mourning. * * *
+
+As far as France is concerned, our first reverses have served to exalt
+the national spirit and to fortify the unanimous resolution to conquer
+or to die. It is important that this be well understood in the United
+States and that it be given due consideration if it is desired to
+intervene without irritating the most noble scruples. * * *
+
+It is the Prussian military system of domination with its contagion
+which has done the harm and which ought to disappear, and that system
+itself is the fruit of Napoleonic imperialism. The struggle is always,
+and more now than ever, between imperialism and liberty, between force
+and right. May you in the United States profit by this lesson, so that
+you may avoid falling into the European error. * * * It is barbarity
+triumphant. But that triumph will be only momentary, and all agree at
+the conclusion of this terrible drama on having a United States of
+Europe with disarmament, or at least with armaments limited to a
+collective police force.
+
+
+*Third Letter.*
+
+PARIS, Sept. 8, 1914.
+
+* * * You have comprehended that France is struggling for justice and
+peace. Be sure that she will resist even to the last man, with the
+certainty that she is defending not herself alone but also civilization.
+Never have I suspected to what degree of savagery man can be degraded by
+unrestrained violence. I had believed that the world could never again
+see the time of the Massacre of the Innocents; I deceived myself; we
+have returned to barbarity, and the Prussian Army leaves us no
+alternative between victory and extermination; should she become
+mistress of Paris, which I doubt, and of the half of France, she will
+find the other half which will bury her under its ruins. * * *
+
+The English troops march on our roads, stop at Clermont-Créans! Oh,
+miracle! I see among my compatriots the worst chauvinists, those who
+openly desire for me the fate of Jaurès, those who fought me in 1902
+with cries of "Fashoda" or "Chicago," hasten to meet the English
+soldiers in order to aid and acclaim them, in this country still full of
+the memories and the ruins of the hundred years' war! It is because the
+English troops are also defending the land of liberty, theirs as ours
+and as yours. Every one except the Prussians comprehend this, and this
+it is which exalts their souls! * * *
+
+The whole misfortune, I repeat, is the result of the crime committed
+forty-three years ago, the crime which we accepted to avoid recommencing
+the war. Our resignation has not sufficed; it has not caused the trouble
+to disappear; the German Government has none the less been obliged to
+confirm it each day. The misfortune has been the forcible annexation of
+Alsace-Lorraine. For that the Germans are paying today; for that they
+will pay until they have made atonement for their fault. In this regard
+France is irreproachable; she has resisted the chauvinists; our general
+elections, the conferences of Berne and of Basle, have proved that, far
+from seeking revenge, she wished by mutual concessions to arrive
+worthily at reconciliation in peace.
+
+The Germans are paying today for their fault of 1870-71, because that
+fault has corrupted and poisoned them. I have said it a thousand times.
+In order to keep those two unfortunate provinces under their domination
+it has been necessary for them to use force, to institute a régime of
+force. * * * It has been necessary to prevent revolts by repressive
+measures, as at Saverne, which have disgusted, and even disquieted, the
+whole world; that ignominious brutality become sovereign mistress, by
+the force of circumstances, even against the will of the Kaiser and
+against the protestation of all the élite of Germany, of such men as
+Zorn, Förster, Nippold, and Bebel, has ended by being a menace and a
+danger to Germany itself. All this is connected, and, whatever happens,
+Germany cannot emerge victorious from a war which is itself but the
+logical result of the abuse of her victories. She cannot conquer
+civilization; it is impossible. * * *
+
+Comprehend this well, repeat it, publish it if you wish; France,
+Belgium, and England may suffer check after check; they are prepared for
+this, they expect it, but they will not be discouraged. The German
+armies may exhaust themselves uselessly in killing, burning, and
+destroying. They will destroy themselves in the end. Our national policy
+is to take them in their own trap and to wear them out.
+
+The day of reckoning is coming, when the inexorable advance of the
+Slavic race, always increasing in numbers--it little matters whether it
+is well or badly organized--will come from the rear to attack the
+Germans at the time when they are confident of victory and to drown them
+in the floods of blood which they have caused to flow; terrible
+punishment for a war which we and our friends have done everything to
+prevent. The victims of this punishment will be at least a half million
+of French, Belgians, and Englishmen, together with a whole nation which
+desired peace as we did, but which has allowed herself to be misled by a
+Government mad enough to wish to reconcile the irreconcilable, namely,
+the maintenance of peace and the spirit of conquest. May this punishment
+at least begin an era of new peace! Alas! how may we hope for this when
+we see the human beast awakening in a delirium of fury and getting
+beyond our control to destroy the masterpieces of human genius.
+
+
+*Fourth Letter.*
+
+PARIS, Sept. 11, 1914.
+
+The Germans appear to have comprehended that the atrocities which have
+bitterly aggravated the remorseless violation of Belgian neutrality have
+only aroused general indignation, and have at the same time exasperated
+the opposing nations and armies. Contrary to the tales which appear in
+the sensational journals, which are naturally as eager today to embitter
+the war as they were formerly to bring it about, I am assured that the
+German armies in France are repudiating the unworthy excesses of the
+beginning of the campaign and are respecting life and private property.
+This will alleviate the horrors of the war, but France nevertheless will
+place no limit on the sacrifices which she will make. She will wear out
+the German Army and destroy it, day after day, in continuous battles.
+* * *
+
+The Belgians with us at Clermont-Créans, instead of being a burden, as I
+had feared, are making themselves useful. They are very welcome. They
+are gradually recognized and appreciated as estimable people, and are
+employed in the homes and farms and fields. We should like to have more
+of them. How we shall regret them when they leave! * * *
+
+The German Emperor must stand either as a pacifist or as a conqueror. He
+cannot pass as both. All the results which may follow this war could
+well have been obtained in peace by a general effort of good-will. On
+the other hand, the legacy of the war will be endless rancor, hatred,
+reprisal, and savagery. When it shall be understood that, in spite of
+Governments and Parliaments, the war has been, in large part, excited by
+the manoeuvres of an international band of the dealers in military
+supplies and by their all-powerful newspapers, when it shall be
+thoroughly comprehended that these dealers and these newspapers have
+played with rumors of war as with a scarecrow, for the purpose of
+keeping up a general condition of disquiet favorable to their sinister
+operations, then, too late, alas! there will be a revulsion of public
+opinion to sustain finally those men, like our friends, who have urged
+arbitration rather than war, and conciliation rather than arbitration.
+
+* * * More than ever our motto, "Pro patria per orbis concordiam," will
+be that of every good patriot who wishes to develop the internal
+prosperity of his country through friendly foreign relations. * * * More
+than a century ago you Americans condemned and executed British
+imperialism; subsequently Europe condemned and executed Napoleonic
+imperialism; Europe is now going to condemn and execute Germanic
+imperialism; profit by this threefold lesson to make an end of
+imperialism in your country, and by your good example to render to
+Europe an incalculable service.
+
+Such an example will be more efficacious than overhasty or superficial
+intervention, however well intentioned it might be. Above all, beware of
+offering aid to Europe in a spirit of opportunism rather than of high
+principle. Especially, do not try to take advantage of some
+circumstances in order to urge a lame and ephemeral peace. Public
+opinion will be bitterly divided if the war is brought to an end merely
+by lassitude and a desire for comfort. Public opinion will accept only a
+peace inspired with high ideals, without needless humiliation for the
+conquered, and equally without sacrifice of any principles which have
+brought together the anti-German coalition.
+
+The war itself, however atrocious it has been and still may be, will
+have been only a commencement, the beginning of continual wars into
+which the New World will be drawn, if we do not leave the desire of life
+and the means of living to Germany, conquered but still alive. It is
+possible to conquer and to exterminate armies, but it is not possible to
+exterminate a nation of 70,000,000 people. It will then be necessary to
+make a place for Germany which will permit the exercise of her fecund
+activity in the struggle of universal competition. If we yield to the
+temptation to make an end of German competition, we shall neither end
+the competition nor shall we end war.
+
+For years I have repeated this to our English friends who were
+intoxicated with the theories of Chamberlain. I see without surprise but
+with sorrow that serious journals of London and Paris spread before the
+eyes of their readers the absurd idea that this war will kill the German
+foreign commerce, while the English and French production will be
+enriched without a rival, and consequently without effort. Place should
+be made for Germany from Berlin to Vienna in the organization of a
+general European confederation which will give full satisfaction to
+Italy at Trieste, will install the Turkish Government in Asia, will
+bring about an agreement between the Christian Balkan States, and give
+the free disposal of their destinies to Poland, Denmark, Finland,
+Hungary, Rumania, and Alsace-Lorraine.
+
+In this manner the worst problems on which general peace depends would
+be solved, and with these problems that of armaments, which it would no
+longer be dangerous nor humiliating to reduce if the general reduction,
+extending even to Japan and seconded by all the republics of the New
+World, were agreed to by all. Certainly such an agreement would be
+difficult to develop; it would terrify the diplomats, but outside of
+such an agreement I see in perspective nothing but perpetual war,
+internal revolution, and general ruin.
+
+
+*Fifth Letter.*
+
+PARIS, Sept. 18, 1914.
+
+
+* * * The pride of an empire may not be crushed without a bitter
+struggle. The German Government has at its disposition the live force of
+a young and growing people. However, the day is coming when that people,
+aware that they have been deceived, will be able to repudiate their
+Government, just as the French people did after Sedan. Meanwhile the
+German armies have stopped their retreat in order to form a new line of
+resistance. But to what good? This line will be overthrown, and in the
+end the German Army will be obliged to retreat in disorder and again to
+cross the land which it has laid waste.
+
+The true difficulties, in my opinion, are going to commence when the
+conquered Germans must submit to the conditions made by the conquerors.
+The victors will be able to agree, I believe, to stop the war and to
+dictate conditions. But will they agree to make these conditions
+moderate? That is the question. At that moment even France will be far
+from unanimous, as she has been unanimous in defending herself. France
+is of one opinion on these principal points:
+
+1. Alsace-Lorraine ought to be liberated at last, free to return to
+France; her rights ought to be respected and recognized. Such liberation
+should extend as far as possible to every country in Europe whose right
+has been violated.
+
+2. We must make an end of ruinous armed peace, invented, so it was said,
+to prevent war, but which has made war inevitable. German militarism
+must be crushed unless it is again to become a menace and give the
+signal for another competition of armaments. This peace will be only a
+truce, a sinister comedy, unless it is crowned by a general convention
+of disarmament, to which Germany must subscribe with all the others and
+before all the others.
+
+3. Arbitration, conciliation, all the means already provided for
+amicable adjustment, and if possible for the prevention of international
+conflicts, should be organized on a more solid and more definite basis
+than in the past, with the sanction, or at least the maximum of
+necessary precautions, of a federated Europe. All which we have done at
+The Hague, far from being lost, will serve as a foundation for the
+building of a pacific federation.
+
+On these three points one may prophesy a unanimity almost complete; but
+the division will begin when it comes to distinguishing between Germany
+and the empire, between the German people who have a right to live and
+the German Empire which opposed the right to live; the division will
+begin when some demand the humiliation of Germany, others the ruin of
+her colonies, and of her very life. France, who has defended peace,
+will, I am sure, also defend justice; but justice will not triumph
+without difficulty. And it is here that the United States will render
+great service, if the United States has preserved, as one can see so
+clearly in the Mexican crisis, her moral authority and
+disinterestedness.
+
+In the cuttings from the American papers which you have sent me I have
+read with great disquietude an article which says that, after all, the
+United States "will be the beneficiary of the European war." This
+article claims that the United States may profit very easily by this war
+to take away from Germany her commerce in the three Americas, &c. It is
+a dangerous form of reasoning, which, however, is not new.
+
+If war has attracted ardent partisans it is because it appeals to the
+temperament of many people, it flatters their self-pride, but also it
+serves their interests. I have never understood it as I do at present. I
+see, for example, the town of Mons enriching itself through the war;
+cafés, restaurants, the hotels, are unable to accommodate all who come
+to them; the farmers are seen disputing about their products. There are
+also the military requisitions by which one can profit in getting rid of
+an old horse, of a wagon, an automobile, &c.; there are the butchers,
+the bakers, the dealers in cutlery, &c., who have never had so many
+purchasers; the furnishers of materials for the hospitals, pharmacists,
+orthopedists, &c.
+
+Add to these an immense number of furnishers of military supplies, not
+only those who sell cannon, arms, and ammunition, but the accessories,
+the uniforms, material for the transports, and for the administrative
+work, &c. They are legion. Add to these all the combatants who have been
+promised positions as officers, Colonels, Generals. * * * Napoleon I.
+gave titles and honors. * * * You will understand that after the war, if
+there is an infinite number of unfortunates who mourn and who are ruined
+by the war, there are others, on the contrary, who have profited very
+well, who have enriched themselves and been raised to a privileged,
+fortunate class, who will find it quite natural to demand war or whose
+children will demand it later; while the mass of unfortunates, without
+strength, without resources, without protection, will need years to
+reconquer in peace the rights which they legally enjoyed before the war,
+and which the war suddenly took from them.
+
+If to this class, more powerful than numerous, of natural partisans of
+the war in Europe you are going to add the American partisans of the
+European war, you will commit a grave fault, for the Americans have more
+than ever everything to gain by peace and all to lose in war, which they
+will not be able to limit if it breaks out again in the world.
+
+The truth is that the Americans evidently gain in the war, but they lose
+more. Europe is something else to them than a market over which to
+dispute, she is a reservoir of experiences, good and bad, but of
+experiences which you cannot do without. To wish for the continuation of
+the war in Europe or even to take sides with it as a sort of half evil
+is for the Americans a crime, a sort of suicide; that would be to
+applaud the destruction of models which civilization seems to have
+collected for your edification and for your development. Later, the
+United States can do without many of these lessons which she learns from
+Europe, but she will always have need of the inspiration of the
+masterpieces of our civilization. It is only a barbarous reasoning which
+allows one to see in the European war profit for the United States; it
+is a loss, a mourning, a shame for the whole world, and particularly for
+the free countries which are the guides of other peoples and which can
+only fulfill their mission in times of peace.
+
+I have often heard the profits of war discussed. The undertakers of
+impressive funeral services can also congratulate themselves over
+catastrophes. A railroad accident which puts an entire country in
+mourning can enrich them. The most murderous battles bring profit in the
+final reckoning to somebody, if it is only to the jackals and the crows;
+but it is the whole of a country, and for the United States it is the
+whole world, which must be considered, and the more the whole world
+prospers the more will the United States find friends, collaborators,
+and clients. The more the world is troubled, on the contrary, the more
+commerce and general activities will suffer from it, without mention of
+the development of instruction and of the progress of human thought,
+which will be paralyzed.
+
+I have been surprised to see a serious American paper bring up these old
+questions for discussion, and I conclude that we are going to feel in
+Europe the result of our errors. It is going to be necessary to find
+money to fill up the financial gulf which we dig each day under our feet
+without realizing it; a gulf twice made, by the billions which it has
+been necessary to spend for the war, by the billions of ordinary income
+which must now go by default. We cannot reasonably expect that Germany
+will be able to pay all the deficits in France, England, Russia,
+Belgium, and Japan; she will have no longer her foreign commerce; her
+misery is going to be frightful; it will be necessary then that each of
+the adversaries which she has so rashly provoked limit his demands; we
+must ourselves limit her ruin unless our own credit shall be ruined
+also.
+
+In a word, there are two victories equally difficult for the Allies to
+win: the first over Germany, the second over themselves. Let us prepare
+ourselves to the uttermost and with all the authority which we can
+husband to facilitate the first here, and from your side as well as from
+ours, the second. To make war there is the first difficulty; but to
+finish well, that is what makes me anxious for the future.
+
+
+*Sixth Letter.*
+
+PARIS, Sept. 24, 1914.
+
+In spite of all, unity of purpose is maintained among the Allies as well
+as among Frenchmen. I say in spite of all, because at Berlin this was
+hardly believed possible at the beginning of the war.
+
+* * * All the men have left Créans; my farm is empty, and as I told you,
+the work is accomplished just the same. Means are found to feed the
+wounded English, becoming more and more numerous, the wounded Belgians
+and the prisoners. At the mill the miller's wife has four sons and a
+son-in-law in the army. I went to see her; not a tear, she looked
+straight before her absorbed in her work and said only "It is
+necessary." She continues her work as yesterday, as always, only with
+more energy and seriousness than formerly, with the purpose to
+accomplish double.
+
+Meanwhile in spite of lack of news, we are beginning to learn that many
+sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers whom we saw go away will never
+return. Each day a few of the wounded are buried, and so it is in all
+the communities in the country which are not occupied by the Germans. In
+every town, village, home, and heart the national tribulations have
+their local echo.
+
+If all France were victim of a catastrophe of nature, an earthquake, a
+conflagration, or a flood, the country would be crushed; but, no, the
+contrary is now true, for the present catastrophe has been brought about
+by an evil will and each one comprehends that this will, if left free to
+act, will continue to do evil until it has been crushed. We have neither
+the time nor the wish to complain; we fight. * * *
+
+The people, all those who are now devoted to my policy, to our policy,
+remain more faithful than ever. They keep silent awaiting the end of the
+war and knowing well that in fact it is not so much a question of
+Germany as of German reaction, German imperialism, and German
+militarism. They know also that if the German reaction might have been
+crushed sooner, the war would not have broken out. Thus, far from being
+blind, public opinion is alive to the truth. The grandeur, and to speak
+the whole truth, alas, the beauty of the atrocious war is that it is a
+war of liberation. * * *
+
+It is impossible that the New World should remain a simple spectator
+before the gigantic struggle which is progressing in Europe. I do not
+ask that the New World intervene by armed force, but that it shall not
+conceal its opinion, its aversion for that horror which is called
+reaction and which truly is only death; that it shall not conceal its
+indignation for the abominable calculation of that reaction which is
+incapable of comprehending anything of the life, the work, the science
+and the art of human genius. I ask that the New World shall not remain
+skeptical before the senile attacks of those armies which respect
+nothing, neither women, children, old men, unfortified cities, museums,
+nor cathedrals. * * *
+
+It is impossible that the free United States, born out of the sacred
+struggle against European domination, enlarged, enriched, and ennobled
+by that struggle, and now in the front rank among nations as the fruit
+of that struggle, should hesitate between revolution and reaction,
+between right and conquest, between peace and war.
+
+Americans are too generous to hesitate, too wise, also, for Prussian
+reaction is cracking and is going to crumble; even Americans of German
+origin would be acting against their own fatherland if they, by their
+sympathies, should sustain the régime of caporalism which is now
+destroying it.
+
+
+
+
+*The Vital Energies of France*
+
+*By Henri Bergson.*
+
+*From The Bulletin des Armees, Nov. 5, 1914.*
+
+
+The issue of the war is not doubtful: Germany will succumb. Material
+force and moral force, all that sustains her will end by failing her
+because she lives on provisions garnered once for all, because she
+wastes them and will not know how to renew them.
+
+Everything has been said about her material resources. She has money,
+but her credit is sinking, and it is not apparent where she can borrow.
+She needs nitrates for her explosives, oil for her motors, bread for her
+sixty-five millions of inhabitants. For all this she has made provision,
+but the day will come when her granaries will be empty and her
+reservoirs dry. How will she fill them? War as she practices it consumes
+a frightful number of her men, and here, too, all revitalization is
+impossible; no aid will come from without, since an enterprise launched
+to impose German domination, German "culture," German products, does not
+and never will interest those who are not Germans. Such is the situation
+of Germany confronting a France who keeps her credit intact and her
+ports open, who procures provisions and ammunition according to her
+need, who reinforces her army with all that her Allies bring to her, and
+who can count--since her cause is that of humanity itself--upon the
+increasingly active sympathy of the civilized world.
+
+But it is not merely a question of material force, of visible force.
+What of the moral force that cannot be seen and that is more important
+than the other--which to a certain degree can be supplied--that is
+essential, since without it nothing avails?
+
+The moral energy of nations, like that of individuals, can only be
+sustained by some ideal superior to themselves, stronger than they are,
+to which they can cling with a strong grip when they feel their courage
+vacillate. Where lies the ideal of contemporary Germany? The time has
+past when her philosophers proclaimed the inviolability of justice, the
+eminent dignity of the person, (the individual?), the obligation laid
+upon nations to respect one another. Germany militarized by Prussia has
+thrust far from her those noble ideas which came to her formerly for the
+most part from the France of the eighteenth century and the Revolution.
+She has made for herself a new soul, or rather, she has docilely
+accepted that which Bismarck has given her. To that statesman has been
+attributed the famous phrase: "Might makes right." As a matter of fact
+Bismarck never said it, because he was unable to distinguish between
+might and right; in his eyes right was simply that which is desired by
+the strongest, that which is declared in the law imposed by the victor
+upon the vanquished. His whole moral philosophy is summed up in that.
+The Germany of the present knows no other. She also worships brute
+force. And as she believes herself strongest she is entirely absorbed in
+adoration of herself. Her energy has its origin in this pride. Her moral
+force is only the confidence by which her material force inspires her.
+That is to say, that here also she lives on her reserves, that she has
+no means of revitalization. Long before England was blockading her
+coasts she had blockaded herself, morally, by isolating herself from all
+ideals capable of revivifying her.
+
+Therefore she will see her strength and her courage worn out. But the
+energy of our soldiers is linked to something which cannot be worn out,
+to an ideal of justice and liberty. Time has no hold on us. To a force
+nourished only by its own brutality we oppose one that seeks outside of
+itself, above itself, a principle of life and of renewal. While the
+former is little by little exhausted, the latter is constantly revived.
+The former already is tottering, the latter remains unshaken. Be without
+fear: the one will be destroyed by the other.
+
+
+
+
+*France Through English Eyes*
+
+With Rene Bazin's Appreciation.
+
+
+ _Referring to the article printed below, which appeared in The
+ London Times Literary Supplement of Oct. 1, and which the French
+ Government ordered to be read in all Parisian schools, M. Rene
+ Bazin writes in l'Echo de Paris:_
+
+Is not this language admirable? What full and flowing phrases. They are
+like a ship filled with grain sailing into port with her sails full.
+Preserve them, these fugitive lines written by a neighbor, and read them
+to your children. They will teach them the greatness of France and the
+greatness of England.
+
+The whole world recognizes two qualities in the Englishman: his bravery
+and his common sense. We know that the Englishman is true to his given
+word, and that even in the antipodes he never changes his habits. As I
+write, the postman brings me a letter from the front, dated Oct. 17. The
+cavalryman who sends it tells of our Allies. "We are fighting the
+enemy's cavalry," he writes, "and for two days my brigade was in action
+with the British. They know how to fight and they astonish us by their
+marvelous powers of organization and their coolness."
+
+Yes, we know that of old. We also know that England never closes her
+doors to liberty. We have a confused memory of the hospitality given to
+our priests in the times of the Revolution. Now England provides us with
+fresh proof of her kindness of heart. You have heard the news--the
+professors and students of the Catholic University of Louvain invited to
+Cambridge. The destroyed Belgian university reconstituted in the home of
+the celebrated English university. What a magnificent idea!
+
+I do not know whether the author who has spoken so well of France in the
+great English newspaper has ever visited this country. But he has surely
+meditated on our history and has divined the reason of the very
+existence of France; why she merits love beyond her frontiers, and why
+she should be defended "like a treasure." England is not made up of
+traders, soldiers, sailors, politicians, but also--and that is what the
+French people will learn better every day--of poets, subtle
+philosophers, and of thoughtful and religious spirits.
+
+In truth, the day which Joan of Arc foresaw has arrived. She did not
+hate the English. It was only their intolerable rule of the kingdom
+which was hateful to her. The good maid of Lorraine said that after
+having driven the English out of France she would reconcile them with
+the French and lead them together in a crusade. This has become true.
+Her dream is accomplished. The crusade is not against the Saracens, but
+it is a crusade all the same.
+
+
+
+
+*France*
+
+*From The London Times Literary Supplement*
+
+
+Among all the sorrows of this war there is one joy for us in it: that it
+has made us brothers with the French as no other two nations have ever
+been brothers before. There has come to us, after ages of conflict, a
+kind of millennium of friendship; and in that we feel there is a hope
+for the world that outweighs all our fears, even at the height of the
+worldwide calamity. There were days and days, during the swift German
+advance, when we feared that the French armies were no match for the
+German, that Germany would be conquered on the seas and from her eastern
+frontier, that after the war France would remain a power only through
+the support of her Allies. For that fear we must now ask forgiveness;
+but at least we can plead in excuse that it was unselfish and free from
+all national vanity. If, in spite of ultimate victory, France had lost
+her high place among the nations, we should have felt that the victory
+itself was an irreparable loss for the world. And now we may speak
+frankly of that fear because, however unfounded it was, it reveals the
+nature of the friendship between France and England.
+
+That is also revealed in the praise which the French have given to our
+army. There is no people that can praise as they can: for they enjoy
+praising others as much as some nations enjoy praising themselves, and
+they lose all the reserve of egotism in the pleasure of praising well.
+But in this case they have praised so generously because there was a
+great kindliness behind their praise, because they, like us, feel that
+this war means a new brotherhood stronger than all the hatreds it may
+provoke, a brotherhood not only of war but of the peace that is to come
+after it. That welcome of English soldiers in the villages of France,
+with food and wine and flowers, is only a foretaste of what is to be in
+both countries in a happier time. It is what we have desired in the past
+of silly wrangles and misunderstandings, and now we know that our desire
+is fulfilled.
+
+
+*"That Sweet Enemy."*
+
+For behind all those misunderstandings, and in spite of the difference
+of character between us, there was always an understanding which showed
+itself in the courtesies of Fontenoy and a hundred other battles. When
+Sir Philip Sidney spoke of France as that sweet enemy, he made a phrase
+for the English feeling of centuries past and centuries to be. We
+quarrelled bitterly and long; but it was like a man and woman who know
+that some day their love will be confessed and are angry with each other
+for the quarrels that delay the confession. We called each other
+ridiculous, and knew that we were talking nonsense; indeed, as in all
+quarrels without real hatred, we made charges against each other that
+were the opposite of the truth. We said that the French were frivolous;
+and they said that we were gloomy. Now they see the gayety of our
+soldiers and we see the deep seriousness of all France at this crisis of
+her fate. She, of all the nations at war, is fighting with the least
+help from illusion, with the least sense of glory and romance. To her
+the German invasion is like a pestilence; to defeat it is merely a
+necessity of her existence; and in defeating it she is showing the
+courage of doctors and nurses, that courage which is furthest removed
+from animal instinct and most secure from panic reaction. There is no
+sign in France now of the passionate hopes of the revolutionary wars;
+1870 is between them and her; she has learned, like no other nation in
+Europe, the great lesson of defeat, which is not to mix material dreams
+with spiritual; she has passed beyond illusions, yet her spirit is as
+high as if it were drunk with all the illusions of Germany.
+
+And that is why we admire her as we have never admired a nation before.
+We ourselves are an old and experienced people, who have, we hope,
+outlived gaudy and dangerous dreams; but we have not been tested like
+the French, and we do not know whether we or any other nation could
+endure the test they have endured. It is not merely that they have
+survived and kept their strength. It is that they have a kind of
+strength new to nations, such as we see in beautiful women who have
+endured great sorrows and outlived all the triumphs and passions of
+their youth, who smile where once they laughed; and yet they are more
+beautiful than ever, and seem to live with a purpose that is not only
+their own, but belongs to the whole of life. So now we feel that France
+is fighting not merely for her own honor and her own beautiful country,
+still less for a triumph over an arrogant rival, but for what she means
+to all the world; and that now she means far more than ever in the past.
+
+
+*Furia Francese.*
+
+This quarrel, as even the Germans confess, was not made by her. She saw
+it gathering, and she was as quiet as if she hoped to escape war by
+submission. The chance of revenge was offered as it had never been
+offered in forty years; yet she did not stir to grasp it. Her enemy gave
+every provocation, yet she stayed as still as if she were spiritless;
+and all the while she was the proudest nation on the earth, so proud
+that she did not need to threaten or boast. Then came the first failure,
+and she took it as if she had expected nothing better. She had to make
+war in a manner wholly contrary to her nature and genius, and she made
+it as if patience, not fire, were the main strength of her soul. Yet
+behind the new patience the old fire persisted; and the _Furia Francese_
+is only waiting for its chance. The Germans believe they have determined
+all the conditions of modern war, and, indeed of all modern competition
+between the nations to suit their own national character. It is their
+age, they think, an age in which the qualities of the old peoples,
+England and France, are obsolete. They make war, after their own
+pattern, and we have only to suffer it as long as we can. But France has
+learned what she needs from Germany so that she may fight the German
+idea as well as the German armies; and when the German armies were
+checked before Paris there was an equal check to the German idea. Then
+the world, which was holding its breath, knew that the old nations, the
+old faith and mind and conscience of Europe, were still standing fast
+and that science had not utterly betrayed them all to the new barbarism.
+Twice before, at Tours and in the Catalaunian fields, there had been
+such a fight upon the soil of France, and now for the third time it is
+the heavy fate and the glory of France to be the guardian nation. That
+is not an accident, for France is still the chief treasury of all that
+these conscious barbarians would destroy. They knew that while she
+stands unbroken there is a spirit in her that will make their Kultur
+seem unlovely to all the world. They know that in her, as in Athens long
+ago, thought remains passionate and disinterested and free. Their
+thought is German and exercised for German ends, like their army; but
+hers can forget France in the universe, and for that reason her armies
+and ours will fight for it as if the universe were at stake. Many forms
+has that thought taken, passing through disguises and errors, mocking at
+itself, mocking at the holiest things; and yet there has always been the
+holiness of freedom in it. The French blasphemer has never blasphemed
+against the idea of truth even when he mistook falsehood for it. In the
+Terror he said there was no God, because he believed there was none, but
+he never said that France was God so that he might encourage her to
+conquer the world. Voltaire was an imp of destruction perhaps, but with
+what a divine lightning of laughter would he have struck the Teutonic
+Antichrist, and how the everlasting soul of France would have risen in
+him if he could have seen her most sacred church, the visible sign of
+her faith and her genius, ruined by the German guns. Was there ever a
+stupidity so worthy of his scorn as this attempt to bombard the spirit?
+For, though the temple is ruined, the faith remains; and whatever war
+the Germans may make upon the glory of the past, it is the glory of the
+future that France fights for. Whatever wounds she suffers now she is
+suffering for all mankind; and now, more than ever before in her
+history, are those words become true which one poet who loved her gave
+to her in the Litany of Nations crying to the earth:
+
+ I am she that was thy sign and standard bearer,
+ Thy voice and cry;
+ She that washed thee with her blood and left thee fairer,
+ The same am I.
+ Are not these the hands that raised thee fallen, and fed thee,
+ These hands defiled?
+ Am not I thy tongue that spake, thine eye that led thee,
+ Not I thy child?
+
+
+
+
+*The Soldier of 1914*
+
+*By Rene Doumic.*
+
+
+ _In spite of the great European war, which struck France with the
+ full force of its horrors, the Institute of France, which includes
+ the world-famous French Academy, held its regular session on Oct.
+ 26 last. The feature of this session, widely heralded beforehand,
+ was the address of the celebrated critic, M. Rene Doumic of the
+ Academy, on "The Soldier of 1914." "Every sentence, every word of
+ it, was punctuated with acclamations from the audience," says Le
+ Figaro in its report. Below is a translation of M. Doumic's
+ address:_
+
+The soldier of 1914. We think only of him. We live only for him, just as
+we live only through him. I have not chosen this subject; it has forced
+itself upon me. My only regret is that I come here in academician's
+costume, with its useless sword, to speak to you about those whose
+uniforms are torn by bullets, whose rifles are black with powder.
+
+And I am ashamed, above all, of placing so feeble a voice at the service
+of so great a cause. But what do words matter, when the most brilliant
+of them would pale before acts of which each day makes us the witnesses?
+For these acts we have only words, but let us hope that these, coming
+from the heart, may bring to those who are fighting for their country
+somewhere near the frontier the spirit of our gratitude and the fervor
+of our admiration.
+
+Our history is nothing but the history of French valor, so ingenious in
+adopting new forms and adapting itself each time to the changing
+conditions of warfare. Soldiers of the King or of the republic, old
+"grognards" of Napoleon, who always growled yet followed just the same,
+youngsters who bit their cartridges with childish lips, veterans of
+fights in Africa, cuirassieurs of Reichshofen, gardes-mobiles of the
+Loire, all, at the moment of duty and sacrifice, did everything that
+France expected of her sons.
+
+So, too, for this war, the soldier needed has arisen. After so many
+heroes he has invented a new form of heroism.
+
+I say the soldier, for the soldier is what one must say. Here begins
+what is clearly expressed in one phrase only--the French miracle. This
+national union in which all opinions have become fused is merely a
+reflection of the unity which has been suddenly created in our army.
+
+
+*When War Broke Out.*
+
+When war broke out it found military France ready and armed; mere
+troopers, officers none of whom ever thought that he would one day lead
+his men under fire, and that admirable General Staff which, never
+allowing itself to be deflected from its purpose, did its work silent
+and aloof.
+
+But there was beside this France another France, the France of
+civilians, accustomed by long years of peace to disbelieve in war;
+which, in conjuring up a picture of Europe delivered over to fire and
+blood, could not conceive that any human being in the world would assume
+the responsibility for such an act before history. War surprised the
+employe at his desk, the workman in his workshop, the peasant in his
+field. It snatched them from the intimacy of their hearths, from the
+amenities of family life which in France is sweeter than elsewhere.
+These men were obliged to leave behind beings whom they loved tenderly.
+For the last time they clasped in their arms the beloved partners of
+their lives, so deeply moved yet so proud, and their children, the
+eldest of whom have understood and will never forget. And all of them,
+artist and artisan, priest and teacher, those who dreamed of revenge and
+those who dreamed of the fraternity of nations, those of every mind,
+every profession, every age, as they stepped into their places, were
+endowed with the soul of the soldier of France, every one of them, and
+became thus the same soldier.
+
+The war which lay in wait for these men, many of whom did not seem made
+for war, was a war of which nobody had ever seen the like. We have heard
+tell of wars of giants, of battles of nations, but nobody had ever seen
+a war extending from the Marne to the Vistula, nor battles with a front
+of hundreds of kilometers, lasting weeks without respite day or night,
+fought by millions of men. Never in its worst nightmares had
+hallucinated imagination conjured up the progress made in the art of
+mowing down human lives. The German Army, to which the German Nation has
+never refused anything, either moral support or money, the nerve of war,
+has been able to profit by all this progress, to reduce to a formula the
+violence which drives forward the attack, to prepare the spy system
+which watches over the unarmed foe, to organize even incendiarism, and
+to become thus, forged by forty-four years of hatred, the most
+formidable tool of destruction that has ever sown ruin and death.
+
+
+*German Meets Belgian.*
+
+The Germans arrived, with the irresistible impetus of their masses, with
+the fury of a tempest, with the roar of thunder, enraged at having been
+confronted on their road by that little Belgian Nation which has just
+inscribed its name among the first on the roster of heroism. Already the
+German chiefs imagined themselves lords of Paris, which they threatened
+to reduce to ashes--and which did not tremble.
+
+It was to meet this colossus of war that our little soldier marched
+forth. And he made it fall back.
+
+To this new war he brings his old qualities, the qualities of all time.
+Courage--let us not speak of that. Can one speak of courage? Just read
+the short sentences in the army orders.
+
+Corporal Voituret of the Second Dragoons, mortally wounded on a
+reconnoissance, cries: "Vive la France! I die for her! I die happy!"
+Private Chabannes of the Eighteenth Chasseurs, unhorsed and wounded,
+replies to the Major who asks him why he had not surrendered: "We
+Frenchmen never surrender!" And remember those who, mortally wounded,
+stick to their posts so as to fight to the end with their men, and those
+wounded men who have but one desire--every one of us can vouch for
+this--to return to the firing line! And that one who, hopelessly
+mutilated, said to me: "It is not being crippled that hurts me; it is
+that I shall not be able to see the best part of the thing!" These, and
+the others, the thousands of others, shall we speak of their courage?
+--what would it mean to speak of their courage?
+
+And the dash of them!--the only criticism to which they lay themselves
+open is that they are too fiery, that they do not wait the right moment
+for the charge, in order to drive back the enemy at the point of the
+bayonet. What spirit! What gayety! All the letters from our soldiers are
+overflowing with cheerfulness. Where, for instance, does that nickname
+come from applied by them to the enemy--the "Boches"? It comes from
+where so many more have come; its author is nobody and everybody; it is
+the spontaneous product of that Gallic humor which jokes at danger,
+takes liberities with it.
+
+What pride! What sense of honor! Whereas the German officer, posted
+behind his men, drives them forward like a flock of sheep, revolver in
+his hand and insults on his lips, we, on our side, hear nothing but
+those beautiful, those radiant words: "Forward! For your country!"--the
+call of the French officer to his children, whom he impels forward by
+giving them the example, by plunging under fire first, before all of
+them, at their head.
+
+
+*The Password: "Smile!"*
+
+And--supreme adornment of all--with what grace they deck their
+gallantry! A few seconds before being killed by an exploding shell, Col.
+Doury, ordered to resist to the last gasp, replies: "All right! We will
+resist. And now, boys, here is the password: Smile!" It is like a flower
+thrown on the scientific brutality of modern war, that memory of the
+days when men went to war with lace on their sleeves. There we recognize
+the French soldier such as we have always known him through fifteen
+centuries of the history of France.
+
+But now we look upon him in a form of which we did not suspect the
+existence, the form in which he has just revealed himself to us.
+
+To go forward is all very well; but to fall back in good order, to
+understand that a retreat may be a masterpiece of strategy, to find in
+himself that other kind of courage which consists in not getting
+discouraged, to be able to wait without getting demoralized, to preserve
+unshaken the certainty of the final outcome--in these things lies a
+virtue which we did not know we possessed: the virtue of patience. It
+won us our victory of the Marne. One man is its personification today,
+that great chief, wise and prudent, who spares his men, who makes up his
+mind not to give battle except in his own time on his own ground, that
+chief toward whom at this moment the calm and confident eyes of the
+entire country are turned.
+
+To carry a position by assault is one thing. But to stand impassive in a
+rain of shot, amid exploding shells, amid infernal din and blinding
+smoke; to fire at an invisible enemy, to dispute foot by foot ground
+covered with traps, to retake the same village ten times, to burrow into
+the soil and crouch there, to watch day after day for the moment when
+the beast at bay ventures from his lair--where have we acquired the
+phlegmatic coolness for such things? Has it come from the proximity of
+our English allies? It is in the English reports that we read the
+eulogies of our army for its endurance and tenacity.
+
+We have always known how to pluck the laurels of the brave on fields of
+battle and to water them with our blood. We Frenchmen, all of us, are
+lovers of glory. The stories of war which we read in our childhood
+days--captures of redoubts, fiery charges, furious fights around the
+flag--made us thrill. And, like the Athenians who left the performance
+of a tragedy by Aeschylus thirsting to close their books and march on
+the enemy, we dreamed of combats in which we were to win fame.
+
+But since those days military literature has undergone somewhat of a
+change, and the communiqués which we devour twice a day, hungry for
+news, give us no such tales of prowess.
+
+"On the left wing we have progressed. On the right wing we have repulsed
+violent counter-attacks. On the front the situation remains without
+change." Where are our men? What troops are meant? What Generals?
+Nothing is told of such things. The veil of anonymity shrouds great
+actions, a barrier of impenetrable mystery protects the secret of the
+operations.
+
+
+*Great Things Done Simply.*
+
+Our soldiers have endured every hardship, braved every danger, never
+knowing whether each dawning day was their last, yet the cleverest
+manoeuvring, the most gallant feats, are obliterated, effaced, lost, in
+the calculated colorlessness of an enigmatic report. But that sacrifice
+also have they made. To be at the post assigned to them, to play a great
+or infinitesimal role in the common work, is the only reward they
+desire. Can it be that the disease of individualism is a thing of
+yesterday? The soldier of 1914 has cured us of it. Never have
+disinterestedness and modesty been pushed so far.
+
+Let us say it in a word: Never have great things been done so simply.
+
+But he knows why he is fighting. It is not for the ambition of a
+sovereign or the impatience of his heir, for the arrogance of a caste of
+country squires or the profit of a firm of merchants. No; he fights for
+the land where he was born and where his dead sleep; he fights to free
+his invaded country and give her back her lost provinces, for her past,
+struck to the heart by the shells that bombarded the Cathedral of
+Rheims; he fights so that his children may have the right to think,
+speak, and feel in French, so that there may still be in the world a
+French race, which the world needs. For this war of destruction is aimed
+at the destruction of our race, and our race has been moved to its
+depths. It has risen as one man and assembled together; it has called up
+from its remotest history all its energy, in order to reincarnate them
+in the person of him whose duty is to defend the race today; it has
+inspired in him the valor of the knights of old, the endurance of the
+laborer bending over his furrow, the modesty of the old masters who made
+of our cathedrals masterpieces of anonymity, the honesty of the
+bourgeois, the patience of humble folk, the consciousness of duty which
+mothers teach to their children, all those virtues which, developed from
+one generation to another, become a tradition, the tradition of an
+industrious people, made strong by a long past and made to endure. It is
+these qualities, all of them together, which we admire in the soldier of
+1914, the complete and superb type of the entire race.
+
+
+*A Holy Intoxication.*
+
+When it has such an aim, the noblest of all, war is sublime; all who go
+into it are as if transfigured. It exalts, expands, and purifies souls.
+On approaching the battlefield a holy intoxication, a holy happiness,
+takes possession of those for whom has been reserved the supreme joy of
+braving death for their country. Death is everywhere, but they do not
+believe in it any more. And when, on certain mornings, to the sound of
+cannon that mix their rumblings with mystic voices of bells, in the
+devastated church which cries to the heavens through every breach opened
+in its walls, the Chaplain blesses the regiment that he will accompany
+the next minute to the firing line, every head will be bent at the same
+time and all will feel on their brows the breath of God.
+
+Alas! the beauty of the struggle does not hide from me its sadness. How
+many went away, full of youth and hope, to return no more. How many have
+fallen already without seeing realized what they so ardently desired;
+sowers they, who to make the land fertile have watered it with their
+blood, yet will not see the harvest.
+
+But at least their sacrifice will not have been in vain. They have
+brought reconciliation to their divided country, they have made her
+become conscious of herself again, they have made her learn enthusiasm
+once again. They have not seen victory, but they have merited it. Honor
+to them, struck down first, and glory to those who will avenge them! We
+enfold them both in our devotion to the same sacred cause.
+
+Would that a new era might dawn, thanks to them, that a new world might
+be born in which we might breathe more freely, where injustices
+centuries old might be made good, where France, arising from long
+humiliation, might resume her rank and destiny. Then, in that cured,
+vivified France, what an awakening, what a renewal, what a sap, what a
+magnificent flowering there would be! This will be thy work, soldier of
+1914! To you we shall owe this resurrection of our beloved country. And
+later on, and always, in everything beautiful and good that may be done
+among us, in the creations of our poets and the discoveries of our
+savants, in the thousand forms of national activity, in the strength of
+our young men and the grace of our young women, in all that will be the
+France of tomorrow, there will be, soldier so brave and so simple in
+your greatness, a little of your heroic soul!
+
+
+
+
+*Germany's Civilized Barbarism*
+
+*By Emile Boutroux.*
+
+*From the Revue des Deux Mondes.*
+
+
+I sincerely thank M. Emile Boutroux for the letter he has been good
+enough to write to me; and the readers of the Revue will join me, for it
+is addressed to them also. No one could speak of Germany more
+authoritatively than M. Boutroux; no one, indeed, is better acquainted
+with the Germany of yesterday and that of today, or better equipped to
+draw a comparison between them, which for the Prussianized Germany of
+the present is a verdict and a condemnation. The violence, brutality,
+barbarism which she displays--a frightful spectacle--doubtless spring
+from the deepest instincts of race; but man always feels the need of
+justifying his conduct, and the Germans are too much philosophers not to
+seek justification for theirs in a scientific system in which these
+doctrinaires of a new sort are encouraged to persevere without the least
+scruple or pity. M. Boutroux explains to us the detestable sophism which
+has perverted the entire German soul and made of a nation which our
+grandfathers loved and admired, a monster whose implacable egotism
+weighs heavily on the world. But let M. Boutroux speak.
+
+FRANCIS CHARMES.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+PARIS, 28 September, 1914.
+
+To the Director of the Revue des Deux Mondes:
+
+Mr. Director and Dear Colleague: You have done me the honor to ask me,
+as I have lived in Germany and studied in part German philosophy and
+literature, whether I was not prepared to submit some observations
+touching the present war. I confess that at this moment words, and even
+thoughts, seem to me to amount to little. Like every Frenchman,
+
+[Illustration: FREDERIC HARRISON. _See Page_ 192]
+
+[Illustration: YVES GUYOT. _See Page_ 194]
+
+I am given up wholly to the task of the hour; all my interest is in
+our generous and admirable army, and my sole concern is to take part,
+however modestly, in the work of the nation. True, a thousand memories
+and reflections crowd my mind; the notion of pausing to express them in
+writing had not occurred to me, but it would be ungracious in me to
+decline your kind invitation. Please omit from the ideas I throw on
+paper whatever seems to you to be lacking in interest.
+
+
+*Mephistopheles Appears.*
+
+In the presence of such events as are passing before our eyes, how can
+we keep our minds free? We have to say to ourselves: "See what has come
+of that philosophic, artistic, scientific development whose grandeur and
+idealistic character all the world has proclaimed!" "That is what the
+infernal cur had in his belly," said Faust as he saw the dog which was
+playing at his side change into Mephistopheles. What! Having declared
+the morality of Plato and Aristotle inadequate and mediocre, having
+preached duty for duty's sake, having established the unconditioned
+supremacy of moral worth, the royalty of the intellect, to end by
+officially declaring that a signed engagement is but a scrap of paper,
+and that juridic or moral laws do not count if they incommode us and if
+we are the strongest! Having given to the world marvelous music, in
+which the purest and deepest aspirations seem to be heard; having raised
+art and poetry to a sort of religion, in which man communes with the
+Eternal by the worship of the ideal; having exalted the universities as
+the most sublime of human creations, temples of science and of
+intellectual freedom, to come to bombarding Louvain, Malines, and the
+Cathedral of Rheims! Having assumed the role of representative par
+excellence of culture, of civilization in its loftiest form, at the end
+to aim at the subjugation of the world and to strive toward that aim by
+the methodical letting loose of brute force, wickedness, and barbarism!
+To boast of having attained the highest plane of human nature, and to
+reveal themselves as survivors of the Huns and Vandals!
+
+Only yesterday Germany was feared throughout the world because of her
+power, but esteemed for her science and her heritage of idealism. Today,
+on the contrary, there is a common cry of reprobation and horror raised
+against her from one end of the earth to the other. Fear is overcome by
+indignation. On every side it is asserted that the victory of German
+imperialism and militarism would be the triumph of despotism, brutality,
+and barbarism. These ideas are expressed to us by Americans of the North
+and South, by Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, Swiss, and Rumanians. The
+nation which burned the University of Louvain and the Cathedral of
+Rheims has brought dishonor upon itself.
+
+What shall we think of the prodigious contrast which manifests itself
+between the high culture of Germany and the end at which she aims, the
+means which she employs in the present war? Is it enough to explain this
+contrast, to allege that in spite of all their science the Germans are
+but slightly civilized, that in the sixteenth century they were still
+boorish and uncultivated and that their science, an affair of
+specialists and pundits, has never penetrated their soul or influenced
+their character?
+
+This explanation is justified. Consider the German professor in the beer
+garden, in the relations of everyday life, in his amusements. With
+certain notable exceptions he excels only in discovering and collecting
+materials for study and in drawing from them, by mechanical operations,
+solutions that rest wholly upon text and argument and make no appeal
+whatever to ordinary judgment and good sense. What a disproportion often
+between his science and his real education. What vulgarity of tastes and
+sentiments and language. What brutality of methods on the part of this
+man whose authority is indisputable in his specialty. Take this learned
+man from his university chair, place him on that scene of war where
+force can alone reign and where the gross appetites are unchained, it is
+not surprising that his conduct approaches that of savages.
+
+
+*A Culture of Violence.*
+
+That is the current judgment and not without reason. The savant and the
+man, among the Germans, are only too often strangers to each other. The
+German in war is inhuman not merely because of an explosion of his true
+nature, gross and violent, but by order. His brutality is calculated and
+systematized. It justifies the words of La Harpe, "There is such a thing
+as a scientific barbarity." In 1900 the German Emperor haranguing his
+soldiers about to set sail for China, exhorted them to leave nothing
+living in their path and to bear themselves like Huns.
+
+If, then, in this war, in the manner in which they have prepared and
+provoked it and now conduct it, they violate without scruple the laws of
+the civilized world, it is not despite their superior culture, it is in
+consequence of that very culture. They are barbarous because they are
+more civilized. How can such a combination of contradictory elements,
+such a synthesis, be possible?
+
+Fichte in the famous discourses to the German Nation which he delivered
+at the University of Berlin during the Winter of 1807 and 1808, had one
+object: to arouse the German Nation by kindling its self-consciousness,
+that is to say, its pure Germanic essence, _Deutschheit_, in order to
+realize that essence when possible beyond its borders and to make it
+dominate the world. The general idea which must guide Germany in the
+accomplishment of this double task is: Germany is to all the rest of the
+world as good is to evil.
+
+The appeal of Fichte was heard. During the century which followed,
+Germany in the most precise and practical manner, on the one hand built
+up the theory of Germanism or _Deutschtum_, on the other hand prepared
+the domination of Germanism in the world. This notion of Germanism
+furnishes, if I am not mistaken, the principle of the inference which I
+wish to indicate, the explanation of the surprising solidarity which
+Germans have created between culture and barbarism.
+
+It would be interesting to probe this notion and follow its development.
+
+In the first place how can a people come to claim for its ideas, its
+virtue, its achievements, not only the right to exist and to be
+respected by other people, but the privilege of being the sole
+expression of the true and the good while everything which emanates from
+other peoples represents nothing but error and evil?
+
+The philosopher Fichte after having built up his system under the
+influence of Kant and of French ideas, notably under the influence of
+Rousseau--of whom he said "peace to his ashes, for he has done
+things"--could think of nothing better to reinforce the German soul
+after Jena than to persuade it that in itself and itself alone there was
+to be found the sense of the ideal combined with power to realize that
+ideal in the world.
+
+
+*The Power to Realize.*
+
+Starting from a certain notion of the absolute he found after Jena that
+this very notion constituted the foundation of the German genius. Soon
+this mystic method was merged in a more concrete method better adapted
+to the positive spirit of modern generations. The one science where all
+knowledge and ideas which concern human life are concentrated is
+history. To this science our epoch has devoted a veritable worship. Now
+the Germans have drawn from history two lessons of the highest
+importance. One is that history is not only the succession of events,
+which mark the life of humanity, it is the judgment of God upon the
+rivalries of peoples. Everything which is wishes to be, and to endure,
+struggle, and impose itself. History tells us which are the men and the
+things Providence has elected. The sign of that election is success. To
+subsist, grow, conquer, dominate is to prove that one is the confidant
+of the thought of Providence, the dispenser of the power of Providence.
+If one people appears designated by history to dominate the others then
+that people is the vicegerent of God upon earth, is God Himself, visible
+and tangible for His creatures.
+
+The second lesson which German erudition has drawn from the study of
+history is that the actual existence of a people charged with
+representing God is not a myth, that such a people exists and that the
+German people is that people. From the victory of Hermann (Arminius)
+over Varus in the forest of Teutoburg in the year 9 A.D., the will of
+God is evident. The Middle Ages show it, and if in modern times Germany
+has appeared to efface herself it is because she was reposing to collect
+her force and strike more heavily. When she was not obviously the first,
+she was so virtually. It was in 1844 that Hoffmann von Fallersleben
+composed the national song, _Deutschland über alles, über alles in der
+Welt_. Germany over all, Germany over all the world, Germany extending
+from the Meuse to the Niemen, from the Adige to the Belt.
+
+Not only is Germany the elect of Providence but the sole elect, and
+other nations are rejected. The sign of her election is the annihilation
+of the three legions of Quinctilius Varus, and her eternal task is to
+revenge herself for the insolence of the Roman General. "We shall give
+battle to Hermann and we shall avenge ourselves, "_und wollen Rache
+haben_." Thus ran the celebrated national song. _Der Gott, der Eisen
+wachsen liess_.
+
+
+*Germanism and God.*
+
+German civilization has developed in antagonism with the Greco-Roman
+civilization. To adopt the former was on the part of God to reject the
+latter. Therefore German consciousness, realized without hindrance in
+all its force, is but the Divine consciousness. _Deutschtum_ = God and
+God = _Deutschtum_. In practice it is enough that an idea is
+authentically German in order that we may and must conclude that it is
+true, that it is just, and that it ought to prevail.
+
+What are the essential dogmas of this truth, which is German because it
+is true and which is true because it is German? German metaphysicians
+explain that to us more clearly than is usual by thought. The first
+quality of this truth is that it is in opposition to what classic or
+Greco-Latin thought would recognize as true. The latter has sought to
+discover what in man is essentially human, to render man superior to
+other beings, and to substitute more and more the superior elements for
+the inferior elements in human life--reason for blind impulse, justice
+for force, good for wickedness. It has undertaken to create in the world
+a moral force capable of controlling and humanizing material forces. To
+this doctrine, which rests upon man as its centre and which was
+essentially human, German thought opposes itself as the infinite opposes
+the finite, the absolute the relative, the whole the part. The disciples
+of the Greeks had at their disposition no light except that of human
+reason; the German genius possesses a transcendent reason which pierces
+the mysteries of the absolute, of the Divine. What would light be
+without the shadow from which it is detached? How could the ego exist if
+there was not somewhere a non ego to which it is opposed? Evil is not
+less indispensable than good in the transcendent symphony of the whole.
+
+There is something more. It may be a satisfaction for a Greco-Latin,
+impelled by his mediocre logic to say that good is good, evil is evil,
+but these simple formulas are contrary to the truth per se. Good by
+itself is absolutely impotent to realize itself. It is only an idea, an
+abstraction. The power and faculty of creation belong to evil alone. So
+that if good is to be realized it can only be by means of evil, and by
+means of evil left entirely to itself. God could not exist if He were
+not created by the devil, and thus, in a sense, evil is good and good is
+bad. Evil is good because it creates. Good is bad because it is
+impotent. The supreme and true divine law is just this: That evil left
+to itself, evil as evil, gives birth to good, which, by itself, would
+never be able to advance from the ideal to the real. "I am," said
+Mephistopheles, "part of that force which always wishes evil and always
+creates the good." Such is the divine order. He who undertakes to do
+good by good will only do evil. It is only in unchaining the power of
+evil that one has a chance to realize any good.
+
+From these metaphysical principles questions raised by the idea of
+civilization receive most remarkable solutions.
+
+
+*The Essence of Civilization.*
+
+What is civilization in the German and true sense of the word?
+
+Nations in general, especially the Latin nations, put the essence of
+civilization in the moral element of human life, in the softening of
+human manners. To those who understand human culture in this way the
+Germans will apply the words of Ibsen's Brand, "You wish to do great
+things but you lack energy. You expect success from mildness and
+goodness." According to the German thought, mildness and goodness are
+only weakness and impotence. Force alone is strong and force _par
+excellence_ is science, which puts at our disposal the powers of nature
+and indefinitely multiplies our strength. Science, then, should be the
+principal object of our efforts. From science and from the culture of
+scientific intelligence there will necessarily result, by the effect of
+Divine grace, the progress of the will and of the conscience which is
+called moral progress. It is in this sense that Bismarck said,
+"Imagination and sentiment are to science and intelligence what the
+tares are to the wheat. The tares threaten to stifle the wheat; that is
+why they are cut down and burned." True civilization is a virile
+education, aiming at force and implying force. A civilization which
+under pretext of humanity and of courtesy enervates and softens man is
+fit only for women and for slaves.
+
+Is that to say that the notion of right which men invoke against force
+has in reality no meaning, and that a highly civilized people would
+disregard it? We must clearly understand the relation which exists
+between the notion of right and the notion of force. Force is not the
+right. All existing forces do not have an equal right to exist; mediocre
+forces in reality have but a feeble share in the Divine force; but in
+proportion as a force becomes greater it is more noble. A universally
+victorious and all-powerful force would be identical with Divine force
+and should, therefore, be obeyed and honored in the same degree. Justice
+and force, moreover, belong to two different worlds--the natural and the
+spiritual. The former is the phenomenon and symbol of the latter. We
+live in a world of symbols; and so preponderant force is for us the
+visible and practical equivalent of right.
+
+It is, then, puerile to admit the existence of a natural right inherent
+in individuals or in nations, and manifested in their aspirations, their
+powers, their sympathies, their wills. The right of peoples should be
+determined by a purely objective method.
+
+Now in this sense people should be divided into _Naturvölker_,
+_Halbkulturvölker_, and _Kulturvölker_--people in the state of nature,
+half-cultivated people, and cultivated people. This is not all. There
+are people who are simply cultivated--_Naturvölker_--and people who are
+wholly cultivated--_Vollkulturvölker_. Now the degree of right depends
+on the degree of culture. As compared with the _Kulturvölker_ the
+_Naturvölker_ have no rights. They have only duties--submission,
+docility, obedience. And if there exists a people which deserves more
+than all others the title of _Vollkulturvölker_--completely cultured
+people--to this people the earth belongs and the supremacy thereof. Its
+mission is to bend all other peoples beneath the yoke of its omnipotence
+co-ordinated with its supreme culture.
+
+
+*The Master Nation.*
+
+Such is the idea of the master nation. This nation must not be simply an
+abstract type, it must necessarily be able to realize itself in our
+world. In effect the spirit is the supreme form of being; it necessarily
+wishes to be; and as it is infinite, it can be realized only by means of
+an infinite force. A nation capable of imposing its will upon everybody
+is the necessary instrument of the Divine will which can grant the
+prayer: "Our Father, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it
+is done in heaven."
+
+As a master nation is necessary in the world there must be subordinate
+nations. There can be no efficient "yes" without a decided "no." The
+ego, says Fichte, is effort. Therefore it presupposes something that
+resists it, namely, that which we call matter. The master nation
+commands. Therefore nations must exist who are made to obey it. It is
+needful even that these nations, which are to the master nation what the
+non ego is to the ego, should resist the action of this superior nation.
+For this resistance is necessary to enable the latter to develop and
+employ its force and to become fully itself; that is, to become the
+whole, enriching itself by the spoils of its enemies.
+
+The ideal nation is thus defined by a transcendental deduction, and this
+same deduction leads us to affirm that the master nation must be not
+merely an idea but a reality. Now, it is plain that this realization of
+the ideal nation is going on under our eyes in the German Nation, which
+represents the highest created race and which surpasses all other
+nations in science and in power. It is to her, and to her alone, that
+the task of accomplishing the will of God upon earth is consigned.
+
+
+*Means of Success.*
+
+To succeed in it, what means must she employ?
+
+In the first place she must acquire complete consciousness of her
+superiority and of her own genius. Nothing German is found in the same
+degree of excellence in other nations. German women, German fidelity,
+German wine, the German song, hold the first rank in the world. To
+combat Satan, that is to say, enemies of Germany, the Germans have at
+their service the ancient god, the German god, _der alte, der deutsche
+Gott_, who identifies His cause with theirs. And as everything which is
+German is by that very fact unique and inimitable, so it is
+correspondingly true that everything which the world has of excellence
+belongs to Germany in fact and in right. Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Ibsen,
+are Germans. A German brain alone could understand them and has a right
+to admire them. It is doubtful if even Joan of Arc, that sublime
+heroine, is French. German savants have maintained her German
+nationality. If the people of Alsace and Lorraine are faithful to France
+that only proves that they ought to be German subjects, because fidelity
+is a German virtue.
+
+As Germany possesses, in principle, all the virtues, all the
+perfections, she suffices to herself and can learn nothing from other
+people. By still stronger reason she owes them no duty of respect or
+good-will. What is called humanity has no meaning for the German. The
+_mot_ of William II., "Humanity for me stops at the Vosges," is not
+merely an instance of national egoism. The German Emperor feels that
+what is for the present beyond his empire can only acquire value when it
+shall be annexed to it.
+
+How, then, ought Germany to behave to other nations?
+
+There are people who wish to be loved, who believe that among nations as
+between individuals, courtesy may have a place and that it would be an
+advance for humanity to admit that justice and equity may rule
+international relations. But Germany, as regards other nations, makes no
+account of justice. She has nothing but scorn for that feminine
+sentiment which particularly characterizes the Latin races. The
+sentiment of justice and humanity is weakness and Germany is and ought
+to be force. _Wo Preussens Macht in Frage kommt, kenne ich kein Gesetz,_
+said Bismarck--"When the power of Prussia is in question I know no law."
+
+
+*Enemies Most Welcome.*
+
+The German does not ask to be loved. He prefers to be hated provided he
+is feared. _Oderint, dum metuant_. He does not mind being surrounded by
+enemies. He knows with satisfaction that in the very heart of the empire
+certain annexed provinces constantly protest against the violence which
+has been done to them. The ego cannot work without opposition. The
+German needs enemies to keep himself in that state of tension and of
+struggle which is the condition of vigor. He willingly applies to
+himself what the Lord God said of man in general in the prologue of
+Goethe's "Faust":
+
+ Man's activity has only too great a propensity to relax. Left by
+ himself man seeks repose. That is why I give him a devil for a
+ companion. He will excite him and keep him from getting sleepy.
+
+Germany has a certain satisfaction in recognizing in the neighbors whom
+she menaces, in the subjects whom she oppresses, these providential
+devils whose mischief will stimulate her activity and her virtue.
+
+Not that Germany rejects, as regards other nations, every régime except
+that of hostility. Her aim is domination, the only rôle which suits the
+people of God. Now, to attain that, two means are offered to her. The
+first plainly is intimidation which must never flag. The feeble quickly
+become insolent if their feebleness is not recalled to them. Other
+nations must feel themselves constantly threatened with the worst
+catastrophes if they resist Germany. But it being well understood that
+Germany is the strongest, that she will never give up what she
+possesses, however unjustly, then bargains advantageous not only for
+herself but occasionally for the other party, may be the more direct and
+less onerous means than violence to attain her end. So Germany will be,
+by turns, or both at once, threatening and amiable. Amiability itself
+can be effective when it rests on hatred, contempt, and omnipotence.
+
+Now power counts before all. Germany must possess armaments superior to
+those of all other nations. The reason is plain. The German Empire is a
+rock of peace, _der Hort des Friedens_. The force which it accumulates
+is directed toward imposing upon mankind the German peace, the divine
+peace. Since Germany represents peace, whoever opposes Germany intends
+war. Now it is legitimate that Germany should arm to the teeth because
+she is the incarnation of peace, but the adversaries of Germany, who, in
+opposing Germany oppose peace, cannot have the same right. It is the
+duty of Germany to carry her armaments to the maximum; other peoples
+have the right to arm only as Germany may permit.
+
+Germany does not seek war. On the contrary, she tries by inspiring
+terror to render it impossible. But if some nation should profit or be
+capable of profiting by her love of peace to pretend to rights which
+offend her she will consent to punish that nation. She will be pained by
+the violence she has to do to that nation and the severity which she has
+to use toward the guilty. But soldier of God as she is, she cannot fail
+to her mission. Any nation which refuses to do the will of Germany
+proves by that very fact its cultural inferiority and becomes guilty. It
+must be chastised.
+
+The method according to which Germany will make war is determined by
+these premises. War is a return to the state of nature. Germany yields
+to this temporary retrogression because she has to do with people of an
+inferior culture who must be taught a lesson, and must be spoken to in a
+language which they understand. Now a characteristic of a state of
+nature is that force reigns undisputed. In this very trait resides the
+sublime beauty of that state, its grandeur and its fecundity. Don't talk
+of that romantic chivalry which pretends in time of war to temper the
+violence of savage instincts by the intervention of feminine
+sensibility. War is war. _Krieg ist Krieg_. It isn't child's play, it
+isn't sport where it is necessary to blend barbarity and humanity so as
+to conciliate and humanize them. It is barbarity itself let loose as
+widely and fully as possible. This is not perversity. Man as man suffers
+in becoming barbarous, but the man who replaces God suppresses the
+feebleness of the creature. He submits himself to the mysterious and
+sublime law in virtue of which evil is by so much more beneficent as it
+is achieved with resolution and completeness. _Pecca fortiter._
+
+
+*The Nature of War.*
+
+The first article of the code of war is then the suppression of all
+sensibility, pity, humanity. The nature of war is to kill and destroy.
+The more it destroys and kills the sooner it comes to its ideal form.
+Moreover, it is at bottom more humane the more inhuman it is, because
+the very terrors which its excesses inspire shorten it and make it less
+murderous.
+
+In the second place, war necessarily ignores moral laws. Respect for
+laws, treaties, conventions, loyalty, good faith, sentiment and honor,
+scruples, nobility of soul generosity--these are mere fetters. The
+God-people do not recognize them. It will then, without hesitation,
+violate the rights of neutrals if it is to its interest. It will use
+falsehood, perfidy, treachery. It will justify itself by futile pretexts
+in committing the most atrocious acts--bombardment of undefended cities,
+massacre of old men, women and children; barbarous torture, pillage and
+assassination; bestiality to women; organized incendiarism; methodical
+destruction of monuments which, by their history and their antiquity and
+by the admiration of the world, would seem to be inviolable. "I am told:
+I must avenge myself." This reason suffices. We are told that some
+inhabitant of one city or another has been wanting in respect toward one
+of our men. Therefore we must burn the city and show the inhabitants
+what we have. Definitively, our duty is to let loose the elementary
+energies of nature as far as possible to attain the maximum force and
+the maximum of result.
+
+The effect should, moreover, be psychological as well as material.
+Actions which seem horrible to man and which spread terror are
+commendable means, because they break the spirit even if they have no
+value from a military point of view. Moreover, what offends common
+morality is conformed to transcendent morality. The mission of the
+Germans at war is to punish. They work Divine vengeance. They compel
+their enemies to expiate the crime of resisting them. After they have
+taken a city, if the enemy has the insolence to take it back, it is just
+that they shall sack that city if possible, killing its inhabitants and
+burning its finest monuments.
+
+*Barbarity Multiplied by Science.*
+
+Given this problem, how to let loose most widely the powers of evil, it
+is clear that a people of superior culture is better equipped than any
+other to resolve that problem. In fact, science, where it excels, can
+work destruction and evil with the very forces which nature employs only
+to create light, heat, life, and beauty. The God-people therefore unites
+the maximum of science to the maximum of barbarity. The formula of its
+action may be thus written: "Barbarity multiplied by science."
+
+This is the last word of the famous doctrine of Germanism. Now the
+identity of the ultimate consequences of the doctrine and the features
+which the present war presents is evident. The problem which we
+undertook is, therefore, solved. If, contrary to all likelihood,
+barbarity co-exists with culture in the Germans; if in the present war
+it appears to be absolutely bound up in that culture, the reason is that
+German culture differs profoundly from what humanity understands by
+culture and civilization. Human civilization tries to humanize war.
+German culture tends indefinitely to increase its primitive brutality by
+science.
+
+In everything the Germans must be unique--in their women, their God,
+their wine, their loyalty. The war which the Germans wage against us
+strikes the world with horror and terror, because it is in the full
+force of the term "the German way, _die deutsche Art_, the German war."
+
+As the world recognizes this astonishing proposition it asks with
+anxiety, what may be its future relations to Germany? Knowingly and
+systematically, Germany opposes to all Hellenic, Christian, humane
+civilizations the devastating theory of the Huns. True, after the war
+she will claim that she has done nothing but conform, often with pain,
+to the conditions of ideal and divine war, and she will appear willing
+to pardon to her enemies the cruelties she has had to inflict upon them.
+Decidedly, the world will refuse to admire this horrible magnanimity
+which on the first impulse of resistance becomes savagery. Today the
+veil is torn away. German culture is shown to be a scientific barbarity.
+The world, which means in the future to rid itself of all despotism,
+will not compromise with the despotism of barbarity.
+
+But what a disappointment and what a grief! Formerly, Germany was held
+to be a great nation. Its praises were sounded in many a land of solid
+and high culture. The German tradition once held other doctrines than
+those we have now seen devolop under the hands of Prussia. Germanism, as
+the Prussians formulate it, consists essentially in contempt for all
+other nations and in the pretension of domination. But Leibnitz--as
+highly esteemed in the Latin world as in the German--professed a
+philosophy which valued unity only under the form of harmony between
+free and autonomous forces. Leibnitz exalted the multiple, the diverse,
+the spontaneous. Between rival powers he sought to establish relations
+which would reconcile them without changing or diminishing the value or
+independence of any of them. Witness his effort at the reunion of the
+Catholic and Protestant Churches. After Leibnitz came Kant. He certainly
+was very much of a German. He owned, nevertheless, that he had learned
+from Rousseau to honor the common man who, not being a savant, possesses
+moral value far above the savant, who has no merit but science. And,
+starting from the principle that every person, so far as he is capable
+of moral value, is entitled to respect, he urged men to create not a
+universal and despotic monarchy but a republic of nations in which each
+should possess a free and independent personality.
+
+This willingness to put liberty before unity, and respect and honor the
+dignity of other nations while at the same time serving its own, was not
+extinguished in Germany with Leibnitz and Kant. Permit me, my dear
+Director, on this subject to indulge in some personal reminiscences.
+
+
+*Treitschke Versus Bluntschli.*
+
+In January, 1869, I was sent to Heidelberg by the Minister of Public
+Instruction, Victor Duruy, to study the organization of German
+universities. Germany was for me the land of metaphysics, music, and
+poetry. I was greatly astonished to find that outside of the lecture
+courses the only thing discussed was the war which Prussia was about to
+make on France. Invited to a soirée, I heard it whispered behind me,
+_Vielleicht ist er ein französischer Spion_--"Perhaps he is a French
+spy." Such were the words as I caught them. At the beer garden a student
+seated himself near me. He said to me, "We are going to war with you. We
+shall take Alsace and Lorraine." That night I could see from my window,
+looking out on the Neckar, the students clad in their club costumes
+floating down the river on an illuminated raft singing the famous song
+in honor of Blücher, who "taught the Welches the way of the Germans."
+And at the university itself the lectures of Treitschke, attended by
+excited crowds, were heated harangues against the French, inciting to
+hatred and to war. Seeing that nothing was thought of but the
+preparation for war, I came back at the Easter vacation of 1869
+convinced that hostilities would ensue. I returned to Heidelberg some
+time later and became acquainted with other persons, other centres of
+ideas. I understood then that opinion in Germany was divided between two
+opposite doctrines. The general aspiration was for the unity of Germany,
+but there was no agreement as to the way of conceiving and realizing
+this unity. The thesis of Treitschke was, _Freiheit durch Einheit_,
+"liberty through unity," that is to say, unity first, unity before all;
+liberty later, when circumstances should permit. And to realize at once
+this unity, which really was the only thing that mattered, the
+enrollment of all Germany under the command of Prussia for a war against
+France.
+
+Now the formula of Treitschke was opposed by that of Bluntschli,
+_Einheit durch Freiheit_--"Unity through liberty." This doctrine, which
+counted at that time some eminent advocates, aimed first to safeguard
+the independence and unity of the German States and then to establish
+between them on that basis a federated union. And as it contemplated in
+the heart of Germany a union without hegemony, so it conceived of German
+unity as something to be realized without harm to other nations, and
+especially without harm to France. It was to be a free Germany in a free
+world.
+
+Germany at that epoch was at the parting of the ways. Should she follow
+a tendency still living in many and noble minds or should she abandon it
+entirely, to march head down in the ways in which Prussia had entangled
+her? That was the question. The party of war, the party of unity as a
+means of attacking and despoiling France, the Prussian party, gained the
+day. And its success rendered its preponderance definitive. Since then
+those who have undertaken to remain faithful to an ideal of liberty and
+humanity have been annihilated.
+
+Is it still possible that Germany may some day regain the parting of the
+ways where she was before 1870 and this time take the other road, the
+road of the Leibnitzes, the Kants, the Bluntschlis, which leads first to
+the liberty of individuals and of peoples and afterward--- and only
+afterward--a form of harmony where the rights of all are equally
+respected? A word of the Scotch professor, William Knight, comes back to
+my memory at this moment: "The best things have to die and be reborn."
+The Germany which the world respected and admired, the Germany of
+Leibnitz, appears indeed dead. Can it be reborn?
+
+Accept, I beg, my dear Director, the assurance of my cordial devotion.
+
+EMILE BOUTROUX.
+
+
+
+
+*The German Religion of Duty*
+
+*By Gabriele Reuter.*[B]
+
+
+On various occasions in the past I have been reproached by my friends
+for not showing the proper spirit of patriotism.
+
+I have merely smiled at their criticism, for it was my opinion that true
+patriotism does not consist of flowery speeches and assertions, but in
+the effort dutifully to accomplish that for which one is best qualified.
+
+It seemed to me that I was truly showing my love for the Fatherland by
+writing my books to the best of my ability.
+
+But the source of this reproach was very evident to me. The cause could
+be traced to a quality which I share with many of my compatriots. It
+must, in truth, be called a particularly characteristic trait. This is a
+very earnest desire for and love of justice, which is not satisfied
+simply to "recognize," but endeavors thoroughly to understand the
+material and spiritual points of view of the other nations in order to
+show them the proper appreciation.
+
+It is natural to develop affection for that which one earnestly desires
+to understand.
+
+Many Germans have had the experience that they have rather overzealously
+commenced by weighing the good of a foreign people in the balance with
+the good of their own, and with well-nigh fanatic honesty they have
+ended by acknowledging their own shortcomings compared to the merits and
+advantages of the foreign nation. There have been instances when some
+foreigner has drawn our attention to this or that particular weakness
+and immediately innumerable of my countrymen assented, saying,
+"Certainly it is true, the criticism is just, matters are probably even
+worse than they have been represented."
+
+Many of us, and I acknowledge I am one of the many, have developed a
+form of ascetic mania for self-abasement, a desire for truth which knows
+no limits in the dissection of its own condition and the disclosure of
+social and personal shortcomings and disadvantages. This tendency may be
+easily discerned in much of the German literature of the past twenty
+years; also, in my books.
+
+The individual is really always the symbol of the whole, and the
+thoughts and feelings of one person are but the expression of strong
+forces in national life and culture. It was not want of patriotism, but
+an unbounded love for the universality of European culture which drove
+us, drove many thousand people with German souls, to reach out over the
+boundaries of our own Fatherland for intellectual conquests, for
+permeation and coalescence with all the world's riches, goodness, and
+beauty.
+
+We loved the others; and believing ourselves among friends we were
+candid and disclosed our weaknesses.
+
+
+*Germans Trusted Too Well.*
+
+We permitted criticism and criticised ourselves, because we were
+convinced that those others had our welfare at heart, and also because
+we were convinced that only by unsparing self-knowledge can the heights
+be scaled which lead to superior and more refined development. It is
+therefore probable that we ourselves have delivered the weapons into our
+enemies' hands.
+
+Confiding and harmless as children, we were blind to the enigmatical
+hatred which has to an appalling extent developed all around us. This
+hate which has been nourished systematically and with satanic cleverness
+probably originated in a slight feeling of jealousy, and the tendency of
+my countrymen to criticise each other led our enemies to believe that
+they might look for internal discord in the Fatherland and that our
+humiliation could therefore be more easily accomplished.
+
+If we had recognized the danger in time, we might have prevented this
+hatred, to which they at the beginning were hardly prone, from taking
+root in the souls of nations. But only very few among us were aware of
+it and they received little credence from the others. There were times
+when each one of us sensed the antipathy which we encountered beyond the
+boundary lines of our own country. But we never realized how deeply it
+had taken root and how widely it had spread. We loved our enemies! We
+loved this French nation for its high development of etiquette,
+language, and taste; a culture which seemed well adapted to serve as a
+complement to our own. How much misery France might have been spared had
+she but understood this unfortunate love of the German people for the
+"Hereditary Enemy!"
+
+We loved the deep, mystically religious soul of the Russians in their
+anguished struggles for freedom! How many Germans have looked upon
+Tolstoy as a new savior!
+
+Above all, though, the German admired the Englishman, in the rôle of the
+"royal merchant," the far-seeing colonizer, the master of the seas.
+Without envy Germany gave England credit for all these qualities. And
+when during the Boer war voices were raised to warn against the English
+character, even then to most of us our Anglo-Saxon cousin remained the
+"Gentleman beyond reproach."
+
+Then there is the great German love for Holland, Switzerland, and the
+Scandinavian countries; here we may find the Germanic race less
+adulterated than in our own country. Scandinavian poets have become our
+poets and we are as proud of the works of the Swedish artist as we are
+of those of our people.
+
+We gaze with delight upon the proud, blonde grace of the Norse maid; the
+more gentle and pliant manners of the Swedes and Danes arouse our
+admiration; and we dearly love their beautiful fjords and forests of
+beech and birch.
+
+
+*Love Changed to Suspicion.*
+
+Many of us wonder today how much of all this love we, in the days to
+come, will be able to rescue from the debris. "Has the world gone mad
+that it has ceased to believe in our sincerity?" This at present is the
+cry of many, many thousand German men and women. Do we deserve to have
+our love requited with hate? And to find in the countries which declare
+themselves neutral, distrust, reserve, and, in fact, doubt of our honest
+intentions? Sad, dull despair has taken possession of the hearts of our
+best men and women. It is not because they tremble for the fate of the
+loved ones who have been compelled to go to the front and not because
+there is any fear as to the outcome of this war. Not one among us doubts
+the ultimate triumph of Germany. We also know that we must pay a
+terrible toll for this victory with the blood of our sons, fathers and
+husbands.
+
+Equally as much as they mourn the loss of our young manhood many of our
+best citizens deplore the hatred which has spread over the face of the
+globe, hate which has torn asunder what was believed to have been a
+firmly woven net of a common European culture. That which we with ardent
+souls have labored to create is being devastated by ruthless force.
+
+The following story of the non-commissioned German officer is typical or
+symbolical of many. He, while the bullets of the inhabitants of Louvain
+fell around him, rescued the priceless old paintings from the burning
+Church of St. Peter, simply because he was an art-historian and knew and
+loved each of the masterpieces. And well we all understand the feelings
+which mastered him during those moments of horror.
+
+He would probably think and say, "I have but done my duty."
+
+And now we have arrived at the point which gives rise to the greatest
+amount of antipathy. Our opponents declare we are endowed with great
+ability--they say they must acknowledge that. But how can a race of
+stiff, dry, duty-performing beings awaken love? The German must lose all
+claim to individual freedom and independence of thought in consequence
+of the training which he receives. When he is a child he commences it in
+a military subordination in the school, he continues it in the barracks,
+and later, when he enters a vocational life, under the stern leadership
+of his superiors. He becomes, our critics continue, simply a
+disagreeable pedantic tool of the all-powerful "drill." This atmosphere
+of "drill," or in other words this stern hard military spirit, envelops
+him, accompanies him as guardian from the cradle to the grave, and makes
+of him an unbearable companion for all the more refined, gentle, and
+amiable nations. Yes, our opponents often declare that they are waging
+war not only against Germany, but against this pedantic, military,
+tyrannical sense of duty, which they call the "Prussian spirit." It
+shall once and for all, they assert, be eradicated from the world.
+
+
+*A Religious Feeling of Duty.*
+
+Far be it from me to deny that my country people, male and female, do
+indeed possess an unusually strong sense of duty. This is combined with
+a desire for justice which is so often looked upon by outsiders as a
+lack of patriotic pride, and with an honesty which easily makes the
+German appear so clumsy and awkward. These three characteristics belong
+indissolubly together and one is not to be thought of without the other.
+The spirit from which the German sense of duty arises is what the
+foreigner so often misunderstands in us. He generally confuses sense of
+duty with blind obedience. But this sense of duty does not originate
+from a need for submission or from a mental dependence. No, it rests on
+a deep philosophical reason and arises from the mental recognition of
+ethical and national necessity. That is why it can exist side by side
+with the most extreme individualism, which also belongs to the
+peculiarities of the character of our people. The Germans have always
+been a nation of thinkers. Not only the scholar, also the simple worker,
+the laborer, the modest mother take a deep pleasure in forming their
+philosophy of life and the world. Side by side with the loud triumph of
+our industry goes this quieter existence, which has been rather pushed
+into the background in the last decades, but has not, therefore, ceased
+to exist. And the further the belief in miracles stepped into the
+background, the more the belief in duty acquired a warm religious tinge.
+The loud complaints about the vanishing of the sense of duty among the
+young, which has so often been voiced by public opinion, only prove how
+strongly this ethical force was governing people's minds. Every seeming
+diminution of it was felt to be a disastrous endangerment of the
+knowledge of the people. We have perhaps acted childishly and foolishly
+toward other nations by too great confidence. But in the consciousness
+of the entire German Nation the ominous feeling was living and working
+with mighty power, that only if every one of us devotes his entire
+strength to the post assigned to him, and works until the exhaustion of
+his last mental and physical power, only then can we as a national whole
+retain our high level and, surrounded by dangers on all sides, create
+sufficient room for ourselves to breathe and live.
+
+
+*The Military and the Socialists.*
+
+Two mighty organizations exist among us which were opposed to each other
+until recently--the military and the Social Democratic. The world sees
+with amazement the perfection which has been reached by the military
+organization of our army. Its achievements have only become possible
+through the above-mentioned philosophical conception of the sense of
+duty which raises it far above any systematic obedience and lets it
+appear in the light of religious ideal. Duty becomes in these serious
+and energetic minds a voluntary adaptation to a carefully organized
+whole with the knowledge that to serve this whole at the same time
+produces the highest achievement of the individual personality. The
+Social Democratic organization, opposed though it is to the military
+organization, is also composed of Germans and is, therefore, directed by
+the same basic principles as the military organization, although for
+entirely different purposes. For this one reason it was almost a matter
+of course that the Social Democrats offered their services for the war
+at the moment when they recognized that it had become of imperious
+necessity to set aside personal wishes and ideals and to put in the
+foreground only the duty of the defense of their country. The idea of
+our opponents, that they would find a support in the Socialists of our
+country, rested on a complete misunderstanding of the German character.
+
+A foreign woman wrote to me in the days of the mobilization: "I do not
+understand the German enthusiasm for war--how it is possible that one
+can become enthusiastic about murder!" The woman only saw the exterior
+and superficial phase of things.
+
+In its endeavor to unite itself with the world the German soul had
+suddenly come upon the wildest hatred * * * numerous high ideals of
+culture fell to ruin within a few hours. Deeply wounded, it was hurled
+back into its most personal possessions. Here it found itself face to
+face with tasks which far surpassed anything demanded heretofore of it
+as fulfillment of duty. And now there came to pass a wonder which will
+be unforgettable for every one who lived through this period. Everything
+dry, petty, pedantic, connected with German ways, which had often made
+many of us impatient with ourselves, was suddenly swept away by the
+storm of these days.
+
+A gigantic wave of fiery hot feeling passed through our country flaming
+up like a beautiful sacrificial pyre. It was no longer a duty to offer
+one's self and one's life--it was supreme bliss. That might easily sound
+like a hollow phrase. But there is a proof, which is more genuine than
+words, than songs, and cheers. That is the expression in the faces of
+the people, their uncontrolled spontaneous movements. I saw the eyes
+light up of an old woman who had sent four sons into battle and
+exclaimed: "It is glorious to be allowed to give the Fatherland so
+much!" I saw the controlled calm in the features of sorrowing mothers
+who knew that their only sons had fallen. But the expression in the
+faces of many wounded who were already returning home gripped me the
+most. They had lived through the horror of the battle, their feet had
+waded through blood, their young bodies were horribly maimed. I saw this
+strangely serene, quietly friendly expression in the young faces. They
+were men who had sacrificed their ego. They were great patient
+conquerors of selfishness. And with what tenderness, what goodness are
+they surrounded, to lighten their lot, to give them joy. How the general
+sentiment is often expressed in the gesture of a single person--you did
+that for us--how can we sufficiently requite you?
+
+A stream of love is flowing through our Fatherland and is uniting all
+hearts. The unobtrusive mother "duty" gave birth to the genial child
+"feeling." She bestowed on it her strong vitality so that it can defy a
+world of hatred--and conquer it.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[B] Gabriele Reuter is one of the foremost German woman authors.
+
+
+
+
+*A Letter to Gerhart Hauptmann*
+
+*By Romain Rolland.*
+
+
+I am not, Gerhart Hauptmann, of those Frenchmen who call Germany
+barbarian. I recognize the intellectual and moral grandeur of your
+mighty race. I realize all that I owe to the thinkers of old Germany;
+and even at this extreme hour I recall to mind the example and the words
+of our Goethe--for he belongs to all humanity--repudiating national
+hatred and preserving his soul serene in those heights "where one feels
+the joys and sorrows of all peoples as one's own." It has been the labor
+of my life to bring together the minds of our two nations; and the
+atrocities of impious war shall never lead me to soil my heart with
+hatred.
+
+Whatever reason I may have, therefore, to suffer through the deeds of
+your Germany and to judge as criminal the German policy and the German
+methods, I do not hold responsible the people who submit thereto and are
+reduced to mere blind instruments. This does not mean that I regard war
+as a fatality. A Frenchman knows no such word as fatality. Fatality is
+the excuse of souls that lack a will.
+
+No. This war is the fruit of the feebleness of peoples and of their
+stupidity. One can only pity them; one cannot blame them. I do not
+reproach you for our sorrows. Your mourning will not be less than ours.
+If France is ruined, so also will be Germany. I did not even raise my
+voice when I saw your armies violate the neutrality of noble Belgium.
+This forfeit of honor, which compels the contempt of every
+right-thinking mind, is too well within the political tradition of
+Prussian Kings to have surprised me.
+
+But the fury with which you treated that generous land whose one crime
+was to defend, unto despair, its independence and the idea of
+justice--that was too much! The world revolts in wrath at this. Reserve
+for us your violence--for us French, who are your enemies. But to
+trample upon your victims, upon the little Belgian people, unfortunate
+and innocent--that is ignominy!
+
+And not content with assaulting the Belgium that lives, you wage war on
+the dead, on the glory of past centuries. You bombard Malines, you put
+Rubens to flame, Louvain comes from your hands a heap of ashes--Louvain
+with its treasures of art and knowledge, the holy city! Who indeed are
+you and what name do you conjure us to call you, Hauptmann, you who
+reject the title of barbarian?
+
+Are you the children of Goethe or of Attila? Do you wage war against
+armies or against the human spirit? Kill men if you must, but respect
+man's work. For this is the heritage of the human race. And you, like
+us, are its trustees. In making pillage of it as you have done you prove
+yourselves unworthy of this great inheritance, unworthy of holding rank
+in the small European army which is the garde d'honneur of civilization.
+
+It is not to the sense of the rest of the world that I appeal against
+you. It is to yourself, Hauptmann. In the name of our Europe, of which
+up to the present you have been one of the noblest champions--in the
+name of that civilization for which the greatest of men have
+struggled--in the name of the honor even of your German race, Gerhart
+Hauptmann, I adjure you, I command you, you and the intellectual élite
+of Germany, where I have so many friends, to protest with utmost
+vehemence against this crime which leaps back upon yourselves.
+
+If you fail in this, one of two things will be proved--that you
+acquiesce, (and then the opinion of the world will crush you,) or that
+you are powerless to raise your voice against the Huns that now command
+you. And in that case, with what right will you still pretend, as you
+have written, that your cause is that of liberty and human progress?
+
+You will be giving to the world a proof that, incapable of defending the
+liberty of the world, you are helpless even to uphold your own; that the
+élite of Germany lies subservient to the blackest despotism--to a
+tyranny which mutilates masterpieces and assassinates the human spirit.
+
+I await your response, Hauptmann--a response which shall be an act. The
+opinion of Europe awaits it, as do I. Bear this in mind; in a moment
+like this, even silence is an act.
+
+
+
+
+*A Reply to Rolland*
+
+*By Gerhart Hauptmann.*
+
+
+You address me, Herr Rolland, in public words which breathe the pain
+over this war, (forced by England, Russia and France,) pain over the
+endangering of European culture and the destruction of hallowed
+memorials of ancient art. I share in this general sorrow, but that to
+which I cannot consent is to give an answer whose spirit you have
+already prescribed and concerning which you wrongly assert that it is
+awaited by all Europe. I know that you are of German blood. Your
+beautiful novel, "Jean-Christophe," will remain immortal among us
+Germans together with "Wilhelm Meister," and "der grüne Heinrich."
+
+But France became your adopted fatherland; therefore your heart must now
+be torn and your judgment confused. You have labored zealously for the
+reconciliation of both peoples. In spite of all this when the present
+bloody conflict destroys your fair concept of peace, as it has done for
+so many others, you see our nation and our people through French eyes,
+and every attempt to make you see clearly and as a German is absolutely
+sure to be in vain.
+
+Naturally everything which you say of our Government, of our army and
+our people, is distorted, everything is false, so false that in this
+respect your open letter to me appears as an empty black surface.
+
+War is war. You may lament war, but you should not wonder at the things
+that are inseparable from the elementary fact itself. Assuredly it is
+deplorable that in the conflict an irreplaceable Rubens is destroyed,
+but--with all honor to Rubens!--I am among those in whom the shattered
+breast of his fellow-man compels far deeper pain.
+
+And, Herr Rolland, it is not exactly fitting that you should adopt a
+tone implying that the people of your land, the French, are coming out
+to meet us with palm branches, when in reality they are plentifully
+equipped with cannon, with cartridges, yes, even with dumdum bullets. It
+is apparent that you have grown pretty fearful of our brave troops! That
+is to the glory of a power which is invincible through the justice of
+its cause. The German soldier has nothing whatsoever in common with the
+loathsome and puerile were-wolf tales which your lying French press so
+zealously publishes abroad, that press which the French and the Belgian
+people have to thank for their misfortune.
+
+Let the idle Englishmen call us Huns; you may, for all I care,
+characterize the warriors of our splendid Landwehr as sons of Attila; it
+is enough for us if this Landwehr can shatter into a thousand pieces the
+ring of our merciless enemies. Far better that you should call us sons
+of Attila, cross yourselves in fear and remain outside our borders, than
+that you should indict tender inscriptions upon the tomb of our German
+name, calling us the beloved descendants of Goethe. The epithet Huns is
+coined by people who, themselves Huns, are experiencing disappointment
+in their criminal attacks on the life of a sound and valorous race,
+because it knows the trick of parrying a fearful blow with still more
+fearful force. In their impotence, they take refuge in curses.
+
+I say nothing against the Belgian people. The peaceful passage of German
+troops, a question of life for Germany, was refused by Belgium because
+the Government had made itself a tool of England and France. This same
+Government then organized an unparalleled guerrilla warfare in order to
+support a lost cause, and by that act--Herr Rolland, you are a
+musician!--struck the horrible keynote of conflict. If you are at all in
+a position to break your way through the giant's wall of anti-German
+lies, read the message to America, by our Imperial Chancellor, of Sept.
+7; read further the telegram which on Sept. 8 the Kaiser himself
+addressed to President Wilson. You will then discover things which it is
+necessary to know in order to understand the calamity of Louvain.
+
+
+
+
+*Another Reply to Rolland*
+
+*By Karl Wolfskehl.*
+
+
+To you, Rolland, belonging as a chosen one to the more important
+Frenchmen who can rise above their race, the German nature has often
+been revealed. To you, now, we shall make answer, offer frank testimony
+concerning the spirit of the time, concerning that fate, that very fate
+in which you, the Frenchman, do not believe. You do not believe in it;
+what to us is fate, mysterious necessity, to you is fatalité, an
+unavoidable Alp which threatens the individual in his individual
+freedom. This fatalité, we, too, do not believe in it, but we do believe
+in the forces which bring forth the eternal in human will, that these
+both are one, will and forces, one with necessity, with actuality, with
+creative, moral power, of which all great ideas are the children, the
+idea of freedom, the idea of the beautiful, the idea of tragic fidelity,
+and that these, reaching far above being and passing away, are
+nevertheless real, life entire, fact entire. All that which is as dear
+to you as to us, great works and great feelings, resignation and
+self-restraint, all that is necessity, is fate, that became will--all
+that a unity out of choice and compulsion. All that is for us eternal,
+not according to the measure of time, but according to the beginning and
+the power of its working forces, in so far as it is necessary.
+
+Thus has it become fate, destiny, not fatalité, rather like that fate
+which in Beethoven's own words in the first movement of his "Eroica" "is
+the knocking at the gate."
+
+Such a fate is this war. No one wanted it in our Germany, for it was
+forced upon us with terrible arbitrariness, contrary to all right. Do
+you not know of the net that has been spun around us and drawn tight for
+the last half of a generation, to choke us? Do you not know how often
+this most peaceful of peoples has drawn back, how often the strange
+powers in the East and in the West have with contemptuous snarls said,
+"Wilhelm will not make war"? That you ought to know, Rolland, for it is
+known to the whole world.
+
+
+*The War "Came from God."*
+
+But I will betray something to you that you cannot know, because you are
+a stranger; and this will probably show you where we see fate. I will
+betray to you the fact that there is still another Germany behind the
+exterior in which great politics and great finance meet with the
+literary champions of Europe. That Germany tells you in this heavy hour
+of Europe:
+
+This undesired war that has been forced upon us is nevertheless a
+necessity; it had to come to pass for the sake of Germany and the world
+of European humanity, for the sake of the world. We did not want it, but
+it came from God. Our poet knew of it. He saw this war and its necessity
+and its virtues, and heralded it, long before an ugly suspicion of it
+flew through the year--before the leaves began to turn. The "Stern des
+Bundes" ["Star of the Federation"] is this book of prophecy, this book
+of necessity and of triumph.
+
+The present need and the present triumph are quite human and quite
+inexorable. They have a part in all that has taken place, and they are
+unprecedented and new. None of us--do you hear, Rolland?--none of us
+Germans today would hesitate to help destroy every monument of our holy
+German past, if necessity made it a matter of the last ditch, for that
+from which alone all monuments of all times draw their right of
+existence and their worth unless they are empty husks, skeletons, and
+framework; even so, we alone may ask what shall come to pass, not what
+shall cease. Which ruins are ravings, and which are the pains of
+childbirth, we do not presume to decide; but you, too, who are so pained
+by ruins, even as we are pained by them, you, too, do not know it.
+
+Today it is a question of the life or death of the European soul. Do you
+not believe that this soul is more endangered at the hands of the hordes
+of stub-nosed Slavs than of the phalanx of those whom you, Rolland, call
+Huns? Your sense must give you the right to answer. Recall the terrible
+story of Russian incendiarism for the last hundred years, which has torn
+to pieces in ever-increasing lust for murder bodies and souls; recall
+the eternally perjured and law-defying regiment of grave diggers; and
+then blush that you have characterized as a heavy crime a manfully
+confessed act of self-defense on the part of the Germans, the temporary
+occupation of Belgium! Blush that you have forgotten the Russian Moloch
+now loosed upon us, drunk with the blood and tears of alien peoples as
+well as of its own children! That you have forgotten all that, in order
+to lament over buildings which we have been forced in
+self-defense--again in self-defense--to sacrifice! And blush for those
+of your people who have become accomplices of that Moloch! Those who are
+sinning against the Holy Ghost of Europe, in order to attempt belated
+vengeance against Germany! Do you know what the ancients, the very
+Greeks and Romans from whom you have drawn your blood and temperament,
+called that sin? Blood-guiltiness is the name of that horror. And do you
+know how it is atoned for? I shrink to ask further, yea, even to think
+further; for horror falls upon me, and I see the unspeakable.
+
+Today, battling against you allies of the swarms of Muscovites, we
+Europeans are battling also for that France which you are
+threatening--you, not we!
+
+
+*German Intellectuals "All Afire."*
+
+Yes, Romain Rolland, try, Frenchman that you are, to look into the
+mysteries of the time. Ask yourself, marvel, how it comes to pass that
+we, the intellectuals among the Germans, take part without exception in
+this dreadful war; take part with body and soul. None of us ambitious,
+none of us a politician, not one of us who, till this war, busied
+himself about anything except his idea, the Palladium of his life! And
+now we are all afire, with all our hearts, with our whole people, all
+full of determination and prepared for the last. All our youth in the
+field, every man among us thrilled with faith in our God and this battle
+of our God, every man among us conscious of the sacred necessity that
+has driven us, every man among us consecrated for timely death! Are
+these incendiaries? Are these slaves, whom a despot points the way to
+the rolling dead? Every one knows it is our all that is at stake; it is
+a matter of the divine in humanity, a matter of our preservation and
+that of Europe.
+
+And so we stand amid death and ruins under the star--one federation, one
+single union. This I have had to tell you, whether you will listen to
+it, whether Europe has ears to hear it, or not. From now on, may our
+deeds be our words!
+
+
+
+
+*Are We Barbarians?*
+
+*By Gerhart Hauptmann.*
+
+
+The idea of cosmopolitanism has never taken deeper root anywhere than in
+Germany. Let any person reflect about our literary translations and then
+name a nation that has tried so honestly as we to do justice to the
+spirit and the feelings of other races, to understand their inmost soul
+in all good-will.
+
+I must out with it: We had and have no hatred against France: we have
+idolized the fine arts, the sculpture and painting and the literature of
+that country. The worldwide appreciation of Rodin had its origin in
+Germany--we esteem Anatole France, Maupassant, Flaubert, Balzac, as if
+they were German authors. We have a deep affection for the people of
+South France. We find passionate admirers of Mistral in small German
+towns, in alleys, in attics. It was deeply to be regretted that Germany
+and France could not be friends politically. They ought to have been,
+because they were joint trustees of the intellectual treasures of the
+Continent, because they are two of the great cultivated nations of
+Europe. But fate has willed it otherwise.
+
+In the year 1870 the German races fought for the union of the Germans
+and the German Empire. Owing to the success of this struggle Germany has
+enjoyed an era of peace for more than forty years. A time of budding,
+growing, becoming strong, flowering, and bearing fruit, without parallel
+in history. Out of a population, growing more and more numerous, an
+ever-increasing number of individuals have been formed. Individual
+energy and a general tendency to expand led to the great achievements of
+our industry, our commerce, and our trade. I do not think that any
+American, Englishman, Frenchman, or Italian when in a German family, in
+German towns, in German hotels, on German ships, in German concerts, in
+German theatres, at Baireuth, in German libraries, or in German museums,
+ever felt as if he were among "barbarians." We visited other countries
+and kept an open door for every stranger.
+
+
+*English Relations.*
+
+It is with pain and with bitterness that I speak the word England. I am
+one of those barbarians on whom the English University of Oxford
+conferred the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa. I have friends in England
+who stand with one foot on the intellectual soil of Germany. Haldane,
+formerly English Minister of War, and with him countless other
+Englishmen, made regular pilgrimages to the little barbarous town of
+Weimar, where the barbarians Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland, and
+others, have created another world for humanity. We have a poet, whose
+plays, more than those of any other German poet, have become national
+property; his name is Shakespeare. This Shakespeare is, at the same
+time, the prince of English poets. The mother of our Emperor is an
+English woman, the wife of the King of England a German, and yet this
+nation, so closely related by blood and choice, has declared war against
+us. Why? Heaven only knows. This much, however, is certain, that the now
+beginning European concert, saturated with blood, as it is, has an
+English statesman for its impresario and its conductor. It is doubtful,
+however, whether the finale of this terrible music will find the same
+conductor at the stand. "My cousin, you did not mean well either with
+yourselves or with us when your tools threw the fire-brand into our
+dwellings!"
+
+If heaven wills that we should issue regenerated from this terrible
+trial, we shall have the sacred duty of showing ourselves worthy of our
+regeneration. By the complete victory of German arms the independence of
+Europe would be secured. It would be necessary to make it clear to the
+different nations of Europe that this war must be the last between
+themselves. They must see at last that their sanguinary duels only bring
+a shameful advantage to the one who, without taking part in them, is
+their originator. Then they must devote themselves mutually to the work
+of civilization and peace, which will then make misunderstandings
+impossible.
+
+In this direction much had already been done before the war began. The
+dfferent nations had already met in peaceful emulation and were to meet
+again at Berlin for the Olympian games. It is only necessary to recall
+the aeronautic races, the boat races, the horse races, and the
+beneficial international influence of the arts and sciences, and the
+great super-national Nobel Prizes. The barbarian Germany has, as is well
+known, led the way among the other nations with her great institutions
+for social reform. A victory would oblige us to go forward on this path
+and to make the blessings of such institutions general. Our victory
+would, furthermore, secure the future existence of the Teutonic race for
+the welfare of the world. During the last decade, for example, how
+fruitful has the Scandinavian literature been for the German, and vice
+versa, the German for the Scandinavian. How many Swedes, Norwegians, and
+Danes have lately, without feeling conscious of a drop of foreign blood,
+shaken hands with German brothers in Stockholm, Christiania, Copenhagen,
+Munich, Vienna, and Berlin. How much homely good-fellowship has grown up
+around the noble names of Ibsen, Björnsen, and Strindberg.
+
+
+*Faust and Rifles.*
+
+I hear that abroad an enormous number of lying tales are being
+fabricated to the detriment of our honor, our culture, and our strength.
+Well, those who create these idle tales should reflect that the
+momentous hour is not favorable for fiction. On three frontiers our own
+blood bears witness. I myself have sent out two of my sons. All our
+intrepid German soldiers know why they are going to war. There are no
+analphabets to be found among them; all the more, however, of those who,
+besides their rifle, have their Goethe's "Faust," their "Zarathustra," a
+work of Schopenhauer's, the Bible, or their Homer in their knapsacks.
+And even those who have no book in the knapsack know that they are
+fighting for a hearth at which every guest is welcome.
+
+On the frontier stands our blood testimony; the Socialist side by side
+with the bourgeois, the peasant beside the man of learning, the Prince
+beside the workman; and they all fight for German freedom, for German
+domestic life, for German art, German science, German progress; they
+fight with the full, clear consciousness of a noble and rich national
+possession, for internal and external goods, all of which serve for the
+general progress and development of mankind.
+
+
+
+
+*To Americans From a German Friend*
+
+*By Ludwig Fulda.*
+
+ _Like most of the champions of Germany in the literary field,
+ Ludwig Fulda is a Doctor of Philosophy. He is also author of many
+ famous poetical and prose works of fiction._
+
+
+Many things have been revealed to us by this war that even the
+keenest-minded among us would have declared immediately before its
+outbreak to be impossibilities. Nothing, however, has been a greater and
+more painful surprise to Germans than the position taken by a great part
+of the American press. There is nothing that we would have suspected
+less than that within the one neutral nation with which we felt
+ourselves most closely connected, both by common interests and by common
+ideals, voices would be raised that in the hour of our greatest danger
+would deny us their sympathy, yes, even their comprehension of our
+course.
+
+To me, personally--I cannot avoid saying it--this was a very bitter
+disappointment. A year has hardly passed since I was over there the
+second time as a guest and returned strengthened in my admiration for
+that great, upward striving community. In my book, "Amerikanische
+Eindrucke," ("American Impressions,") a new edition of which has just
+appeared in a considerably supplemented form, comprising the fruits of
+that trip, I have made every effort to place before my countrymen in the
+brightest light the advantages and superiorities of Americans, and
+especially to convince them that the so-called land of the dollar was
+not only economically but also mentally and spiritually striding upward
+irresistibly; that also in the longing and effort to obtain education
+and knowledge and in the valuation of all the higher things in life, it
+was not surpassed by any other country in the world. In the entire book
+there is not a page that is not filled with the confidence that for
+these very reasons America and Germany were called upon to march hand in
+hand at the head of cultured humanity. Is this belief now to be
+contradicted? Shall I as a German no longer be permitted to call myself
+a friend of America because over there they think the worst of us for
+the reason that we, attacked in dastardly wise by a world of foes, are
+struggling with unanimous determination for our existence?
+
+
+*Guillotining German Honor.*
+
+Of course I know very well that public opinion over there has largely
+been misled by our opponents and is continuously being misled. Did not
+the English at the very beginning of the war cut our cable, in order to
+be able to guillotine our honor without the least interference? For this
+reason I cannot blame the masses if they took for truth the absurd
+fables dished out to them, when no contradicting voice could reach them.
+Less than that, however, can I understand how educated beings, even men
+who, thanks to their gifts and their standing, play the part of
+responsible leaders, not only accepted believingly these prevarications
+and distortions, but, with them as a basis, immediately rendered a
+verdict against us. For he who publicly judges must be expected to have
+heard first both parties; and whoever is not in a position to do this
+must in decency be expected to postpone his verdict. Yes, even more than
+that, one should think that the sense of justice of every non-partisan
+must be violated if the one party is absolutely muzzled by the other,
+and even for this one reason the cause of the latter must be considered
+as not being free from reason for doubt. Furthermore, one should assume
+that he who once has been unmasked as a liar therewith should have lost
+the blind confidence of the impartial in his future assertions. In spite
+of this, although the first ridiculous news of German defeats and
+internal dissent could not withstand the far-sounding echo of facts,
+there still seems to be no twisting of the truth, no defamation, which
+over there is considered as too thin and too ridiculous by the press and
+as too shameless by the public.
+
+Should the Germans, who, since the time when they fought for and
+attained their national unity, have exclusively devoted themselves to
+works of peace and culture, suddenly have been transformed into an
+adventurous, booty-hungry horde which from mere lust challenged a
+tremendously superior force to do battle? Should they suddenly have
+sacrificed to their so-called militarism all their other efforts in
+commerce, industry, art, and science, in order to risk their very
+existence for the love of this Moloch? Do you believe that, Americans?
+
+
+*Question of Militarism.*
+
+Our militarism! What does this expression, quoted until it is sickening,
+mean in the mouth of enemies who in respect of the energy and extent of
+their armaments were not behind us? Is there no such thing as militarism
+in France and in Russia? Is the English giant fleet an instrument of
+peace? Was the Triple Entente founded in order to bring about the
+millennium on earth? Would the Entente, if we had been foolish enough to
+disarm, have guaranteed our possessions as a reward for being good? Do
+you believe that, Americans?
+
+It certainly may be difficult for the citizens of the Union--happy
+beings they are for it--to put themselves in the place of a nation that
+knows it is surrounded on its open borders by jealous, hateful, and
+greedy neighbors; of a country that for centuries has been the
+battlefield of all European wars, the place of strife of all the
+European peoples. They, the members of a nation which for itself
+occupies a space nearly as large as Europe, almost half of a continent,
+protected on both sides by the ocean and on the other borders not
+seriously threatened for as long a time to come as may be anticipated,
+have no people's army because they do not need any; and yet they
+would--their history proves it--give their blood and that of their sons
+for the cause of their nation just as gladly as we, if the necessity for
+doing so came to them. Will they, therefore, reproach us for loving our
+country not less than they do theirs, only for the reason that we have a
+thousand times more difficulty in protecting it?
+
+Our general military service, which today is being defamed by the word
+"militarism," is born of the iron commandment of self-preservation.
+Without it the German Empire and the German Nation long ago would have
+been struck out of the list of the living. Only lack of knowledge or
+intentional misconception of our character could accuse us of having an
+aggressive motive back of it. On earth there is no more peaceful nation
+than Germany, providing she be left in peace and her room to breathe be
+not lessened. Germany never has had the least thought of assuming for
+herself the European hegemony, much less the rulership of the world. She
+has never greedily eyed colonial possessions of other great powers. On
+the contrary, in the acquisition of her colonies she was satisfied with
+whatever the others had left for her. And least of all did she carry up
+her sleeve a desire of extending the frontiers of the empire. The famous
+word of Bismarck, that Germany was "saturated" with acquired territory,
+is still accepted as fully in force to such an extent that even in case
+of her victory the question as to which parts of the enemies' territory
+we should claim for our own would cause us a great deal of perplexity.
+The German Empire could only lose as the national State she is in
+strength and unity by acquiring new and strange elements.
+
+Otherwise would the empire, from the day of its founding until now, for
+nearly half a century, actually have avoided every war, often enough
+under the most difficult circumstances? Would it have quietly suffered
+the open or hidden challenges, the machinations of its enemies
+constantly appearing more plainly? Yes, would it have tried again and
+again to improve its relations with these very same enemies by the
+greatest advances? As opposed to the ill-concealed hostility of the
+French, would it not have been shaken in its steadfast policy of
+conciliation by the fact that this policy with them only made the
+impression of weakness and fear? Would it have permitted France to
+reconstruct her power which was destroyed in 1870 to a greater extent
+than before, and, in addition, allowed her to conquer a new and gigantic
+colonial empire? Would it have permitted prostrate Russia to recuperate
+undisturbed from the almost annihilating blows of the revolution and the
+Japanese war? Would it, in the countless threatening conflicts of the
+last decades, have on every occasion thrown the entire weight of its
+sword into the scales for the preservation of peace?
+
+
+*The Kaiser's Responsibility.*
+
+Then, too, many Americans emphasize the fact that they are making not
+the German people but the Emperor alone responsible for this war. It is
+hardly conceivable how serious-minded people can lend themselves to the
+spreading of a fable so childish. When William II., 29 years old,
+mounted the throne, the entire world said of him that his aim was the
+acquirement of the laurels of war. In spite of this for twenty-six years
+he has shown that this accusation was absurd and has proved himself to
+be the most honest and most dependable protector of European peace. In
+fact, the very circle of enemies which now dares to call him a military
+despot thirsting for glory, has year in and year out ridiculed him as a
+ruler, whose provocation to the very limit was an amusement absolutely
+fraught with no danger. He who has never been misled by the fiery
+enthusiasm of youth nor by the full strength of ripe manhood to adorn
+his brow with the bloody halo of glory, should he suddenly, when his
+hair is turned gray, have turned into a Caesar, an Attila? Do you
+believe that, Americans?
+
+It is a fact in times of peace there have been certain differences of
+opinion between the Emperor and his people. Although at all times the
+honesty of his intentions was elevated above every doubt, the one or
+other impulsive moves he took to obtain their realization exposed him to
+criticism at home. Today one may safely admit that--today, when of these
+trifling disputes not even a breath, not even a shadow, remains. Never
+before has his whole people, his whole nation, in every grade of
+education, in all classes, in all parties, stood behind him so
+absolutely without reserve as now, when in the last, the very last hour,
+and driven by direst need, he finally drew the sword to ward off an
+attack from three sides, long ago prepared.
+
+Our nation and our Emperor have not wanted this war and are not to be
+blamed for it. Even the "White Book" of the German Government, by the
+very uncontrovertible language of its documents, must convince every
+impartial being of this fact. And day by day the overwhelming evidence
+of the plot systematically hatched and systematically carried out under
+the guidance of England, which put before us the alternative of cutting
+our way through or being annihilated, is increasing.
+
+
+*No Treason to Austria Considered.*
+
+It may be that the catastrophe, so far as we are concerned, might have
+been staved off once more if we would have disregarded the obligation of
+our alliance and would have left Austria in the lurch--the Austria which
+did not want anything else than to put a stop to the nasty work of a
+band of assassins organized by a neighboring State. But it requires an
+extreme degree of political blindness for the assumption that by such
+cowardly treason we should have been able to purchase a change of mind
+or a lasting peace from our enemies. On the contrary, they would soon
+enough have used a suitable opportunity to fall upon Germany, which then
+would have been completely isolated, and the struggle for our national
+existence would have had to be fought under conditions very much more
+favorable to our enemies.
+
+According to a newspaper report, the esteemed President Eliot of Harvard
+has written that the fear of the Muscovites could not explain our
+action, and that an alliance with the Western powers would have offered
+better protection against a Russian attack. Yes; if such a thing had
+been possible! As a matter of fact, however, the Western powers did not
+ally themselves with us against Russia, but with Russia against us; and
+not the fear of the Muscovites, but their mobilization, encouraged and
+aided by the very same Western powers, drove us to war. I wonder what
+President Eliot himself would have done under these circumstances had he
+been the guardian responsible for Germany's fate?
+
+*Belgium's Alleged Neutrality.*
+
+But then the violation of Belgian neutrality! How with the aid of this
+bugaboo the entire neutral world has been stirred up against us, after
+England made it the hypocritical excuse for her declaration of war! We
+knew very well that England and France were determined to violate this
+neutrality; but, then, we ought to have been very good; we ought to have
+waited until they did so. Waited until their armies would break into our
+country across our unprotected Belgian frontier! In other words, we
+ought to have committed national suicide. Whoever, even up until now,
+has doubted the German assertion that Belgium was under one roof with
+England and France, and had herself thrown away her neutrality, must
+have his eyes opened by the latest official developments. The documents
+of the Belgian General Staff which have fallen into our hands contain an
+agreement according to which the march through Belgium of British troops
+in the case of a Franco-German war was provided for in every detail.
+Whosoever in the face of these documents repeats the assertion that we
+have committed a violation of innocent Belgium gives aid to a historical
+forgery.
+
+We have violated the alleged neutrality of Belgium in self-defense. On
+the other hand, the Japanese, egged on and supported by England, have
+violated the real neutrality of China from pure lust for robbery. For
+the three great powers allied against Germany and Austria have not been
+satisfied with their own nominal superiority of 220 millions against 110
+millions! In addition to this they have urged on into war against us a
+Mongolian people, the most dangerous enemy of the white race and its
+culture. They have supplemented their armies by a motley collection of
+all the African negro tribes. They lead into battle against us Indian
+troops, and the Christian Germanic King of England prays to God for the
+victory of the heathen Hindus over his coreligionists and blood
+relatives. Americans, does your racial feeling, at other times so
+sensitive, remain silent in view of this unexampled shame? Do you accord
+to the English and the French, who are attacking us in co-operation with
+the Russians, the Servians, and the Montenegrins, who are dirtying
+themselves with a brotherhood in arms with the yellow skins, the brown
+skins, and the blacks, the right to declare themselves the
+representatives of civilization and us to be barbarians?
+
+In order to drive home such evident absurdities, they were, of course,
+obliged to carry on the poisoning of the spring of information to the
+utmost, they had to suppress the news of the vile deeds of guerrillas
+and "snipers" in Belgium and of the Russian ghouls in East Prussia, that
+were crying to heaven, and to send out into the world instead fables of
+German brutality. Our national army, permeated with ethical seriousness
+and iron discipline, the scientist standing beside the farmer, the
+workman beside the artist, should be guilty of unnecessary severity,
+uncontrollable brutality, brutality against people unable to defend
+themselves? Do you believe that, Americans?
+
+
+*The Charge of Vandalism.*
+
+The climax of absurdity, however, is reached when the Germans, who in
+their love and appreciation of art are not surpassed by any people in
+the world, are accused of having raged as vandals against works of art.
+Even now these accusations, which the French Government itself had the
+pitiful courage to support, have proved totally groundless. The City
+Hall at Louvain stands uninjured; while the populace fired at them, our
+soldiers had, risking their own lives, saved it from the flames. An
+imperial art commission followed at the heels of our victorious troops
+in Belgium, in order to take charge of the guarding and administration
+of the treasures of art. The cathedral at Rheims has received but slight
+damage, and would not have been damaged at all had its tower not been
+misused by the French as an observation station. I should like to see
+the commander of an army who, for the sake of the safety of a historical
+monument, would forget the safety of the troops intrusted into his care!
+
+Enough of it! What I have stated is sufficient to show what low weapons
+our enemies are using behind the battlefield to sully Germany's shield
+of honor. It is enough for those who care to listen at all. But, also,
+wherever the weak voice of one rebounds from ears stubbornly closed, the
+more powerful voice of truth eventually will force a more just verdict.
+
+Justice--that is all that we expect from America. We respect its
+neutrality; we do not ask from it an ideal partisanship for our benefit.
+If it does not have for us the sympathy which we have already extended
+to it and, after a century and a half of unclouded intercourse between
+the two nations, have anticipated there, then we cannot imbue it with
+that spirit by reasoning. Furthermore, in the existence of nations
+sympathy is not the deciding factor, and every nation should be rebuked
+which out of regard for sympathy would in decisive matters act against
+its own interests. But just for that very reason one more question must
+be raised. In the present conflict, which momentarily almost splits the
+entire world into two camps, where do the interests of America lie?
+
+That they are not lying on the side of Russia probably is self-evident.
+No free American can find desirable a further extension of the Russian
+world empire and of Russian despotism at the expense of Germany. But how
+about a country from which once America had to wrest its own liberty in
+bloody battle? How about England? Where, if England should succeed in
+downing Germany, would her eyes next be pointed? Has she not herself
+admitted that she is making war on us principally because she sees in us
+an uncomfortable competitor in trade? And which competitor would be the
+next one after us that would become awkward to the trust on the Thames?
+Yes, have they not already hauled off for the smash against America,
+when Japan is given opportunity to increase her power--the same Japan
+with whom America sooner or later will be bound to have an accounting
+and whose victory over us would make that accounting a great deal more
+difficult for the United States?
+
+Germany's fate certainly does not depend upon the friendly or unfriendly
+feeling of America. It will be decided solely upon the European
+battlefields. But because we are looking out from the night to a future
+dawn, because in the midst of our national need the cause of humanity is
+close to our heart, for these reasons it is not immaterial to us how the
+greatest neutral nation of culture thinks of us. Americans, the cable
+between us has been cut. It is our wish and our hope that the stronger
+band that unites American ideals with German ideals shall not also be
+cut.
+
+
+
+
+*To the Civilized World*
+
+*By Professors of Germany.*
+
+
+As representatives of German science and art, we hereby protest to the
+civilized world against the lies and calumnies with which our enemies
+are endeavoring to stain the honor of Germany in her hard struggle for
+existence--in a struggle which has been forced upon her.
+
+The iron mouth of events has proved the untruth of the fictitious German
+defeats, consequently misrepresentation and calumny are all the more
+eagerly at work. As heralds of truth we raise our voices against these.
+
+_It is not true_ that Germany is guilty of having caused this war.
+Neither the people, the Government, nor the Kaiser wanted war. Germany
+did her utmost to prevent it; for this assertion the world has
+documental proof. Often enough during the twenty-six years of his reign
+has Wilhelm II. shown himself to be the upholder of peace, and often
+enough has this fact been acknowledged by our opponents. Nay, even the
+Kaiser they now dare to call an Attila has been ridiculed by them for
+years, because of his steadfast endeavors to maintain universal peace.
+Not till a numerical superiority which had been lying in wait on the
+frontiers assailed us did the whole nation rise to a man.
+
+_It is not true_ that we trespassed in neutral Belgium. It has been
+proved that France and England had resolved on such a trespass, and it
+has likewise been proved that Belgium had agreed to their doing so. It
+would have been suicide on our part not to have been beforehand.
+
+_It is not true_ that the life and property of a single Belgian citizen
+was injured by our soldiers without the bitterest self-defense having
+made it necessary; for again and again, notwithstanding repeated
+threats, the citizens lay in ambush, shooting at the troops out of the
+houses, mutilating the wounded, and murdering in cold blood the medical
+men while they were doing their Samaritan work. There can be no baser
+abuse than the suppression of these crimes with the view of letting the
+Germans appear to be criminals, only for having justly punished these
+assassins for their wicked deeds.
+
+_It is not true_ that our troops treated Louvain brutally. Furious
+inhabitants having treacherously fallen upon them in their quarters, our
+troops with aching hearts were obliged to fire a part of the town as a
+punishment. The greatest part of Louvain has been preserved. The famous
+Town Hall stands quite intact; for at great self-sacrifice our soldiers
+saved it from destruction by the flames. Every German would of course
+greatly regret if in the course of this terrible war any works of art
+should already have been destroyed or be destroyed at some future time,
+but inasmuch as in our great love for art we cannot be surpassed by any
+other nation, in the same degree we must decidedly refuse to buy a
+German defeat at the cost of saving a work of art.
+
+_It is not true_ that our warfare pays no respect to international laws.
+It knows no indisciplined cruelty. But in the east the earth is
+saturated with the blood of women and children unmercifully butchered by
+the wild Russian troops, and in the west dumdum bullets mutilate the
+breasts of our soldiers. Those who have allied themselves with Russians
+and Servians, and present such a shameful scene to the world as that of
+inciting Mongolians and negroes against the white race, have no right
+whatever to call themselves upholders of civilization.
+
+_It is not true_ that the combat against our so-called militarism is not
+a combat against our civilization, as our enemies hypocritically pretend
+it is. Were it not for German militarism German civilization would long
+since have been extirpated. For its protection it arose in a land which
+for centuries had been plagued by bands of robbers as no other land had
+been. The German Army and the German people are one and today this
+consciousness fraternizes 70,000,000 of Germans, all ranks, positions,
+and parties being one.
+
+We cannot wrest the poisonous weapon--the lie--out of the hands of our
+enemies. All we can do is to proclaim to all the world that our enemies
+are giving false witness against us. You, who know us, who with us have
+protected the most holy possessions of man, we call to you:
+
+Have faith in us! Believe that we shall carry on this war to the end as
+a civilized nation, to whom the legacy of a Goethe, a Beethoven, and a
+Kant is just as sacred as its own hearths and homes.
+
+For this we pledge you our names and our honor:
+
+ADOLF VON BAEYER, Professor of Chemistry, Munich.
+
+Prof. PETER BEHRENS, Berlin.
+
+EMIL VON BEHRING, Professor of Medicine, Marburg.
+
+WILHELM VON BODE, General Director of the Royal Museums, Berlin.
+
+ALOIS BRANDL, Professor, President of the Shakespeare Society, Berlin.
+
+LUJU BRENTANO, Professor of National Economy, Munich.
+
+Prof. JUSTUS BRINKMANN, Museum Director, Hamburg.
+
+JOHANNES CONRAD, Professor of National Economy, Halle.
+
+FRANZ VON DEFREGGER, Munich.
+
+RICHARD DEHMEL, Hamburg.
+
+ADOLF DEITZMANN, Professor of Theology, Berlin.
+
+Prof. WILHELM DOERPFELD, Berlin.
+
+FRIEDRICH VON DUHN, Professor of Archaeology, Heidelberg.
+
+Prof. PAUL EHRLICH, Frankfort on the Main.
+
+ALBERT EHRHARD, Professor of Roman Catholic Theology, Strassburg.
+
+KARL ENGLER, Professor of Chemistry, Karlsruhe.
+
+GERHARD ESSER, Professor of Roman Catholic Theology, Bonn.
+
+RUDOLF EUCKEN, Professor of Philosophy, Jena.
+
+HERBERT EULENBERG, Kaiserswerth.
+
+HEINRICH FINKE, Professor of History, Freiburg.
+
+EMIL FISCHER, Professor of Chemistry, Berlin.
+
+WILHELM FOERSTER, Professor of Astronomy, Berlin.
+
+LUDWIG FULDA, Berlin.
+
+EDUARD VON GEBHARDT, Dusseldorf.
+
+J.J. DE GROOT, Professor of Ethnography, Berlin.
+
+FRITZ HABER, Professor of Chemistry, Berlin.
+
+ERNST HAECKEL, Professor of Zoology, Jena.
+
+MAX HALBE, Munich.
+
+Prof. ADOLF VON HARNACK, General Director of the Royal Library, Berlin.
+
+GERHART HAUPTMANN, Agnetendorf.
+
+KARL, HAUPTMANN, Schreiberhau.
+
+GUSTAV HELLMANN, Professor of Meteorology, Berlin.
+
+WILHELM HERRMANN, Professor of Protestant Theology, Marburg.
+
+ANDREAS HEUSLER, Professor of Northern Philology, Berlin.
+
+ADOLF VON HILDEBRAND, Munich.
+
+LUDWIG HOFFMANN, City Architect. Berlin.
+
+ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK, Berlin.
+
+LEOPOLD GRAF KALCKREUTH, President of the German Confederation of
+Artists, Eddelsen.
+
+ARTHUR KAMPF, Berlin.
+
+FRITZ AUG. VON KAULBACH, Munich.
+
+THEODOR KIPP, Professor of Jurisprudence, Berlin.
+
+FELIX KLEIN, Professor of Mathematics, Goettingen.
+
+MAX KLINGER, Leipsic.
+
+ALOIS KNOEPFLER, Professor of History of Art, Munich.
+
+ANTON KOCH, Professor of Roman Catholic Theology, Münster.
+
+PAUL LABAND, Professor of Jurisprudence, Strassburg.
+
+KARL LEMPRECHT, Professor of History, Leipsic.
+
+PHILIPP LENARD, Professor of Physics, Heidelberg.
+
+MAX LENZ, Professor of History, Hamburg.
+
+MAX LIEBERMANN, Berlin.
+
+FRANZ VON LISZT, Professor of Jurisprudence, Berlin.
+
+LUDWIG MANZEL, President of the Academy of Arts, Berlin.
+
+JOSEF MAUSBACH, Professor of Roman Catholic Theology, Münster.
+
+GEORG VON MAYR, Professor of Political Sciences, Munich.
+
+SEBASTIAN MERKLE, Professor of Roman Catholic Theology, Wurzburg.
+
+EDUARD MEYER, Professor of History, Berlin.
+
+HEINRICH MORF, Professor of Roman Philology, Berlin.
+
+FRIEDRICH NAUMANN, Berlin.
+
+ALBERT NEISSER, Professor of Medicine, Breslau.
+
+WALTER NERNST, Professor of Physics, Berlin.
+
+WILHELM OSTWALD, Professor of Chemistry, Leipsic.
+
+BRUNO PAUL, Director of School for Applied Arts, Berlin.
+
+MAX PLANCK, Professor of Physics, Berlin.
+
+ALBERT PLEHN, Professor of Medicine, Berlin.
+
+GEORG REICKE, Berlin.
+
+Prof. MAX REINHARDT, Director of the German Theatre, Berlin.
+
+ALOIS RIEHL, Professor of Philosophy, Berlin.
+
+KARL ROBERT, Professor of Archaeology, Halle.
+
+WILHELM ROENTGEN, Professor of Physics, Munich.
+
+MAX RUBNER, Professor of Medicine, Berlin.
+
+FRITZ SCHAPER, Berlin.
+
+ADOLF VON SCHLATTER, Professor of Protestant Theology, Tubingen.
+
+AUGUST SCHMIDLIN, Professor of Sacred History, Münster.
+
+GUSTAV VON SCHMOLLER, Professor of National Economy, Berlin.
+
+FRANZ VON STUCK, Munich.
+
+REINHOLD SEEBERG, Professor of Protestant Theology, Berlin.
+
+MARTIN SPAHN, Professor of History, Strassburg.
+
+HERMANN SUDERMANN, Berlin.
+
+HANS THOMA, Karlsruhe.
+
+WILHELM TRUEBNER, Karlsruhe.
+
+KARL VOLLMOELLER, Stuttgart.
+
+RICHARD VOTZ, Berchtesgaden.
+
+KARL VOTZLER, Professor of Roman Philology, Munich.
+
+SIEGFRIED WAGNER, Baireuth.
+
+WILHELM WALDEYER, Professor of Anatomy, Berlin.
+
+AUGUST VON WASSERMANN, Professor of Medicine, Berlin.
+
+FELIX VON WEINGARTNER.
+
+THEODOR WIEGAND, Museum Director, Berlin.
+
+WILHELM WIEN, Professor of Physics, Wurzburg.
+
+ULRICH VON WILAMOWITZ-MOELLEN-DORFF, Professor of Philology, Berlin.
+
+RICHARD WILLSTAETTER, Professor of Chemistry, Berlin.
+
+WILHELM WINDELBAND, Professor of Philosophy, Heidelberg.
+
+WILHELM WUNDT, Professor of Philosophy, Leipsic,
+
+
+
+
+*Appeal of the German Universities*
+
+
+The campaign of systematic lies and slander which has been carried on
+against the German people and empire for years has since the outbreak of
+the war surpassed everything with which one might have credited even the
+most unscrupulous press. To repudiate any charges raised against our
+Kaiser and his Government rests with the authorities in question. They
+have done so, and their defense is substantiated by striking proofs. He
+who wants to know the truth can learn it, and we trust that truth will
+prevail. But if we are to look on, when our enemies, guided by envy and
+malice, are shameless enough to charge our army and with it our whole
+nation with barbarous atrocities and senseless vandalism, and when their
+statements appear to be believed, to a certain extent, among neutrals
+and in places which, at other times, were well disposed toward us; if we
+are quietly to look on when all this happens, we, the appointed trustees
+of culture and education in our Fatherland, feel in duty bound to break
+the reserve which our calling and position impose on us with a strong
+expression of protest. Hence we now appeal to the learned bodies with
+whom we hitherto worked in common in the interests of the highest ideals
+of the human race and with whom, even at this time, when hatred and
+passion rule the world and confuse the minds of men, we hope to remain
+of the same mind, in the same service of truth. We appeal to them in the
+confident belief that our voice will find hearing, and that the
+expression of our honest indignation will meet with credence. Moreover,
+we appeal to the love of truth and to the sense of justice of the many
+thousands all over the world who, being welcome guests in our
+educational institutions, have taken part in the inheritance of German
+culture, and who thus have had an opportunity of watching and
+appreciating the German people in peaceful labor, their industry and
+uprightness, their sense of order and discipline, their reverence for
+intellectual work of every kind, and their profound love for sciences
+and arts. All of you who know that our army is no mercenary host but
+embraces the entire nation from first to last, that it is led by the
+country's best sons, and that, at this very hour, thousands from our
+midst, teachers as well as students, are shedding their life's blood as
+officers and soldiers on the battlefields of Russia and France; you who
+have seen and heard for yourselves in what spirit and with what success
+our youths are treated and taught, and that nothing is stamped upon
+their minds more deeply than reverence and admiration for artistic,
+scientific and technical creations of the human mind, no matter what
+country and nation brought them forth; we call upon you who know all
+this as witnesses, whether it can be true what our enemies report that
+the German Army is a horde of barbarians and a band of incendiaries who
+take pleasure in leveling defenseless cities to the ground and in
+destroying venerable monuments of history and art. If you wish to pay
+honor to the cause of truth you will be as firmly convinced as we are
+that German troops, wherever they had to do destructive work, could only
+have done so in the bitterness of defensive warfare. But we appeal to
+all those whom the slanderous reports of our enemies reach and who are
+not yet altogether blinded by passion, in the name of truth and justice,
+to shut their ears to such insults to the German people, and not allow
+themselves to be prejudiced by those who prove ever anew that they hope
+to be victorious by the instrumentality of lies. Now, if in this fearful
+war, in which our nation is compelled to fight not only for its power,
+but for its very existence and its entire civilization, the work of
+destruction should be greater than in former wars, and if many a
+precious achievement of culture falls to ruin, the responsibility for
+all this entirely rests with those who were not content with letting
+loose this ruthless war, nay, who did not even shrink from pressing
+murderous weapons upon a peaceful population for them to fall
+surreptitiously upon our troops who trusted in the observance of the
+military usages of all civilized peoples. They alone are the guilty
+authors of everything which happens here. Upon their heads the verdict
+of history will fall for the lasting injury which culture suffers.
+
+September, 1914.
+
+
+UNIVERSITIES.
+
+Tuebingen, Berlin, Bonn, Breslau, Erlangen, Frankfurt, Freiburg,
+Giessen, Goettingen, Greifswald, Halle, Heidelberg, Jena, Kiel,
+Königsberg, Leipzig, Marburg, Muenchen, Münster, Rostock, Strassburg,
+Wuerzburg.
+
+
+
+
+*Reply to the German Professors*
+
+*By British Scholars.*
+
+
+We see with regret the names of many German professors and men of
+science, whom we regard with respect and, in some cases, with personal
+friendship, appended to a denunciation of Great Britain so utterly
+baseless that we can hardly believe that it expresses their spontaneous
+or considered opinion. We do not question for a moment their personal
+sincerity when they express their horror of war and their zeal for "the
+achievements of culture." Yet we are bound to point out that a very
+different view of war, and of national aggrandizement based on the
+threat of war, has been advocated by such influential writers as
+Nietzsche, von Treitschke, von Bülow, and von Bernhardi, and has
+received widespread support from the press and from public opinion in
+Germany. This has not occurred, and in our judgment would scarcely be
+possible, in any other civilized country. We must also remark that it is
+German armies alone which have, at the present time, deliberately
+destroyed or bombarded such monuments of human culture as the Library at
+Louvain and the Cathedrals at Rheims and Malines.
+
+
+*The Diplomatic Papers.*
+
+No doubt it is hard for human beings to weigh justly their country's
+quarrels; perhaps particularly hard for Germans, who have been reared in
+an atmosphere of devotion to their Kaiser and his army; who are feeling
+acutely at the present hour, and who live under a Government which, we
+believe, does not allow them to know the truth. Yet it is the duty of
+learned men to make sure of their facts. The German "White Book"
+contains only some scanty and carefully explained selections from the
+diplomatic correspondence which preceded this war. And we venture to
+hope that our German colleagues will sooner or later do their best to
+get access to the full correspondence, and will form therefrom an
+independent judgment.
+
+They will then see that, from the issue of the Austrian note to Servia
+onward, Great Britain, whom they accuse of causing this war, strove
+incessantly for peace, Her successive proposals were supported by
+France, Russia, and Italy, but, unfortunately, not by the one power
+which could by a single word at Vienna have made peace certain. Germany,
+in her own official defense--incomplete as that document is--does not
+pretend that she strove for peace; she only strove for "the localization
+of the conflict." She claimed that Austria should be left free to
+"chastise" Servia in whatever way she chose. At most she proposed that
+Austria should not annex a portion of Servian territory--a futile
+provision, since the execution of Austria's demand would have made the
+whole of Servia subject to her will.
+
+Great Britain, like the rest of Europe, recognized that, whatever just
+grounds of complaint Austria may have had, the unprecedented terms of
+her note to Servia constituted a challenge to Russia and a provocation
+to war. The Austrian Emperor in his proclamation admitted that war was
+likely to ensue. The German "White Book" states in so many words: "We
+were perfectly aware that a possible warlike attitude of Austria-Hungary
+against Servia might bring Russia upon the field and therefore involve
+us in war. * * * We could not, however, * * * advise our ally to take a
+yielding attitude not compatible with his dignity." The German
+Government admits having known the tenor of the Austrian note
+beforehand, when it was concealed from all the other powers; admits
+backing it up after it was issued; admits that it knew the note was
+likely to precipitate war; and admits that, whatever professions it made
+to the other powers, in private it did not advise Austria to abate one
+jot of her demands. This, to our minds, is tantamount to admitting that
+Germany has, together with her unfortunate ally, deliberately provoked
+the present war.
+
+One point we freely admit. Germany would very likely have preferred not
+to fight Great Britain at this moment. She would have preferred to
+weaken and humiliate Russia; to make Servia a dependent of Austria; to
+render France innocuous and Belgium subservient; and then, having
+established an overwhelming advantage, to settle accounts with Great
+Britain. Her grievance against us is that we did not allow her to do
+this.
+
+
+*Britain's Love of Peace.*
+
+So deeply rooted is Great Britain's love of peace, so influential among
+us are those who have labored through many difficult years to promote
+good feeling between this country and Germany, that, in spite of our
+ties of friendship with France, in spite of the manifest danger
+threatening ourselves, there was still, up to the last moment, a strong
+desire to preserve British neutrality, if it could be preserved without
+dishonor. But Germany herself made this impossible.
+
+Great Britain, together with France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, had
+solemnly guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium. In the preservation of
+this neutrality our deepest sentiments and our most vital interests are
+alike involved. Its violation would not only shatter the independence of
+Belgium itself: it would undermine the whole basis which renders
+possible the neutrality of any State and the very existence of such
+States as are much weaker than their neighbors. We acted in 1914 just as
+we acted in 1870. We sought from both France and Germany assurances that
+they would respect Belgian neutrality. In 1870 both powers assured us of
+their good intentions, and both kept their promises. In 1914 France gave
+immediately, on July 31, the required assurance; Germany refused to
+answer. When, after this sinister silence, Germany proceeded to break
+under our eyes the treaty which we and she had both signed, evidently
+expecting Great Britain to be her timid accomplice, then even to the
+most peace-loving Englishman hesitation became impossible. Belgium had
+appealed to Great Britain to keep her word, and she kept it.
+
+The German professors appear to think that Germany has in this matter
+some considerable body of sympathizers in the universities of Great
+Britain. They are gravely mistaken. Never within our lifetime has this
+country been so united on any great political issue. We ourselves have a
+real and deep admiration for German scholarship and science. We have
+many ties with Germany, ties of comradeship, of respect, and of
+affection. We grieve profoundly that, under the baleful influence of a
+military system and its lawless dreams of conquest, she whom we once
+honored now stands revealed as the common enemy of Europe and of all
+peoples which respect the law of nations. We must carry on the war on
+which we have entered. For us, as for Belgium, it is a war of defense,
+waged for liberty and peace.
+
+
+Sir CLIFFORD ALLBUTT, Regius Professor of Physics, Cambridge.
+
+T.W. ALLEN, Reader in Greek, Oxford.
+
+E. ARMSTRONG, Pro-Provost of Queen's College, Oxford.
+
+E.V. ARNOLD, Professor of Latin, University College of North Wales.
+
+Sir C.B. BALL, Regius Professor of Surgery, Dublin.
+
+Sir THOMAS BARLOW, President of the Royal College of Physicians, London.
+
+BERNARD BOSANQUET, formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy, St. Andrews.
+
+A.C. BRADLEY, formerly Professor of Poetry, Oxford.
+
+W.H. BRAGG, Cavendish Professor of Physics, Leeds.
+
+Sir THOMAS BROCK, Membre d'honneur de la Société des Artistes Francais.
+
+A.J. BROWN, Professor of Biology and Chemistry of Fermentation,
+University of Birmingham.
+
+JOHN BURNET, Professor of Greek, St. Andrews.
+
+J.B. BURY, Regius Professor of Modern History, Cambridge.
+
+Sir W.W. CHEYNE, Professor of Clinical Surgery, King's College, London,
+President of the Royal College of Surgeons.
+
+J. NORMAN COLLIE, Professor of Organic Chemistry and Director of the
+Chemical Laboratories, University College, London.
+
+F.C. CONYBEARE, Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford.
+
+Sir HENRY CRAIK, M.P. for Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities.
+
+Sir JAMES CRICHTON-BROWNE, Vice President and Treasurer, Royal
+Institution.
+
+Sir WILLIAM CROOKES, President of the Royal Society.
+
+Sir FOSTER CUNLIFFE, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
+
+Sir FRANCIS DARWIN, late Reader in Botany, Cambridge.
+
+A.V. DICEY, Fellow of All Souls College and formerly Vinerian Professor
+of English Law, Oxford.
+
+Sir S. DILL, Hon. Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
+
+Sir JAMES DONALDSON, Vice Chancellor and Principal of the University of
+St. Andrews.
+
+F.W. DYSON, Astronomer Royal.
+
+Sir EDWARD ELGAR.
+
+Sir ARTHUR EVANS, Extraordinary Professor of Prehistoric Archæology,
+Oxford.
+
+L.R. FARNELL, Rector of Exeter College, Oxford.
+
+C.H. FIRTH, Regius Professor of Modern History, Oxford.
+
+H.A.L. FISHER, Vice Chancellor of Sheffield University.
+
+J.A. FLEMING, Professor of Electrical Engineering in the University of
+London.
+
+H.S. FOXWELL, Professor of Political Economy in the University of
+London.
+
+Sir EDWARD FRY, Ambassador Extraordinary and First British
+Plenipotentiary to The Hague Peace Conference in 1907.
+
+Sir ARCHIBALD GEIKIE, Past President of the Royal Society.
+
+W.M. GELDART, Fellow of All Souls and Vinerian Professor of English Law,
+Oxford.
+
+Sir RICKMAN GODLEE, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Surgery, University
+College, London.
+
+B.P. GRENFELL, late Professor of Papyrology, Oxford.
+
+E.H. GRIFFITHS, Principal of the University College of South Wales and
+Monmouthshire.
+
+W.H. HADOW, Principal of Armstrong College, Newcastle.
+
+J.S. HALDANE, late Reader in Physiology, Oxford.
+
+MARCUS HARTOG, Professor of Zoology in University College, Cork.
+
+F.J. HAVERFIELD, Camden Professor of Ancient History, Oxford.
+
+W.A. HERDMAN, Professor of Zoology at Liverpool, General Secretary of
+the British Association.
+
+Sir W.P. HERRINGHAM, Vice Chancellor of the University of London.
+
+E.W. HOBSON, Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics, Cambridge.
+
+D.G. HOGARTH, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
+
+Sir ALFRED HOPKINSON, late Vice Chancellor of Manchester University.
+
+A.S. HUNT, Professor of Papyrology, Oxford.
+
+HENRY JACKSON, Regius Professor of Greek, Cambridge.
+
+Sir THOMAS G. JACKSON, R.A.
+
+F.B. JEVONS, Professor of Philosophy, Durham.
+
+H.H. JOACHIM, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.
+
+J. JOLLY, Professor of Geology and Mineralogy, University of Dublin.
+
+COURTNEY KENNY, Downing Professor of the Laws of England, Cambridge.
+
+Sir F.G. KENYON, Director and Principal Librarian, British Museum.
+
+HORACE LAMB, Professor of Mathematics, Manchester University.
+
+J.N. LANGLEY, Professor of Physiology, Cambridge.
+
+WALTER LEAF, Fellow of London University, President of the Hellenic
+Society.
+
+Sir SIDNEY LEE, Editor of the Dictionary of National Biography,
+Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of
+London.
+
+Sir OLIVER LODGE, Principal of Birmingham University.
+
+Sir DONALD MACALISTER, Principal and Vice Chancellor, Glasgow.
+
+R.W. MACAN, Master of University College, Oxford.
+
+Sir WILLIAM MACEWEN, Professor of Surgery, Glasgow.
+
+J.W. MACKAIL, formerly Professor of Poetry, Oxford.
+
+Sir PATRICK MANSON.
+
+R.R. MARETT, Reader in Social Anthropology, Oxford.
+
+D.S. MARGOLIOUTH, Laudian Professor of Arabic, Oxford.
+
+Sir H.A. MIERS, Principal of the University of London.
+
+FREDERICK W. MOTT, Fullerian Professor of Physiology, Royal Institution.
+
+LORD MOULTON OF BANK, Lord of Appeal in Ordinary.
+
+J.E.H. MURPHY, Professor of Irish, Dublin.
+
+GILBERT MURRAY, Regius Professor of Greek, Oxford.
+
+J.L. MYRES, Wykeham Professor of Ancient History, Oxford.
+
+G.H.F. NUTTALL, Quick Professor of Biology, Cambridge.
+
+Sir W. OSLER, Regius Professor of Medicine, Oxford.
+
+Sir ISAMBARD OWEN, Vice Chancellor of the University of Bristol.
+
+Sir WALTER PARRATT, Professor of Music, Oxford.
+
+Sir HUBERT PARRY, Director of Royal College of Music.
+
+W.H. PERKIN, Waynflete Professor of Chemistry, Oxford.
+
+W.M. FLINDERS PETRIE EDWARDS, Professor of Egyptology, University
+College, London.
+
+A.F. POLLARD, Professor of English History, London.
+
+Sir F. POLLOCK, formerly Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence, Oxford.
+
+EDWARD B. POULTON, Hope Professor of Zoology, Oxford.
+
+Sir E.J. POYNTER, President of the Royal Academy of Arts.
+
+Sir A. QUILLER-COUCH, King Edward VII. Professor of English Literature,
+Cambridge.
+
+Sir WALTER RALEIGH, Professor of English Literature, Oxford.
+
+Sir W. RAMSAY, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, London.
+
+Lord RAYLEIGH, Past President Royal Society, Nobel Laureate, Chancellor
+of Cambridge University.
+
+Lord REAY, First President British Academy.
+
+JAMES REID, Professor of Ancient History, Cambridge.
+
+WILLIAM RIDGEWAY, Disney Professor of Archaeology, Cambridge.
+
+T.F. ROBERTS, Principal of the University College of Wales, Aberystwith.
+
+J. HOLLAND ROSE, Reader in Modern History, Cambridge.
+
+Sir RONALD ROSS, formerly Professor of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool,
+Nobel Laureate.
+
+M.E. SADLER, Vice Chancellor of Leeds.
+
+W. SANDAY, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Oxford.
+
+Sir J.E. SANDYS, Public Orator, Cambridge.
+
+Sir ERNEST SATOW, Second British Delegate to The Hague Peace Conference
+in 1907.
+
+A.H. SAYCE, Professor of Assyriology, Oxford.
+
+ARTHUR SCHUSTER, late Professor of Physics, Manchester.
+
+D.H. SCOTT, Foreign Secretary, Royal Society.
+
+C.S. SHERRINGTON, Waynflete Professor of Physiology, Oxford.
+
+GEORGE ADAM SMITH, Principal and Vice Chancellor, Aberdeen.
+
+G.C. MOORE SMITH, Professor of English Language and Literature,
+Sheffield.
+
+E.A. SONNENSCHEIN, Professor of Latin and Greek, Birmingham.
+
+W.R. SORLEY, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Cambridge.
+
+Sir C.V. STANFORD, Profesor of Music, Cambridge.
+
+V.H. STANTON, Ely Professor of Divinity, Cambridge.
+
+J. ARTHUR THOMSON, Regius Professor of Natural History, Aberdeen.
+
+Sir J.J. THOMSON, Professor of Experimental Physics, Cambridge.
+
+T.F. TOUT, Professor of Mediæval and Modern History, Manchester.
+
+Sir W. TURNER, Principal and Vice Chancellor, Edinburgh.
+
+Sir C. WALDSTEIN, late Reader in Classical Archæology and Slade
+Professor of Fine Art, Cambridge.
+
+Sir J. WOLFE-BARRY.
+
+Sir ALMROTH WRIGHT, formerly Professor of Pathology, Netley.
+
+C.T. HAGBERG WRIGHT, Librarian, London Library.
+
+JOSEPH WRIGHT, Professor of Comparative Philology, Oxford.
+
+*Concerning the German Professors*
+
+*By Frederic Harrison.*
+
+
+_To the Editor of the London Morning Post_:
+
+Sir: I was not invited to join the reply of our distinguished scholars
+and professors, perhaps because it is so many years since I was the
+colleague of James Bryce as Professor of Jurisprudence to the Inns of
+Court. And, indeed, I do not care to bandy recriminations with these
+German defenders of the attack on civilization by the whole imperial,
+military, and bureaucratic order. It seems to me waste of time and loss
+of self-respect to notice these pedants.
+
+The whole German press and the entire academic class seem to be banded
+together as an official bureau in order to spread mendacious insults and
+spiteful slanders. Not a word comes from them to excuse or deny the
+defiance of public law and the mockery of public faith by the German
+Emperor, his Ministers, and his armies. These professors seem to exult
+in serving the new Attila--rather let us say the new Caligula, for
+Attila at least was an open soldier and did not skulk under the Red
+Cross behind barbed wire fences.
+
+We have long known that all German academic and scholastic officials are
+the creatures of the Government, as obedient to orders as any Drill
+Sergeant. They seem to have sold their consciences for place. Not a word
+comes from them even of regret for the massacre of civilians on false
+charges, for the wanton murder of children, for the wholesale rape of
+women, the showering of bombs upon sleeping towns in sheer cruelty of
+destruction. The intellectual energies of Kultur seem concentrated on
+distorting the meaning of our dispatches and the speeches of our
+statesmen, and in manufacturing for their people and neutrals venomous
+falsehoods. German Geist today is a huge machine to cram lies upon their
+own people, and to insinuate lies to the world around. Their system of
+war is based upon lying at home and abroad, on treachery and terrorism.
+They think that murdering a few civilians would terrify France into
+surrender, and will drive England to betray the Allies. Their poor
+conscripts are told that we kill and torture prisoners; their monuments
+at home are bedizened with mock laurels; and neutrals are poisoned with
+wild inventions.
+
+For years past their public men, have
+
+[Illustration: ADOLF VON HARNACK.
+
+_See Page_ 198]
+
+[Illustration: THEODORE NIEMEYER.
+
+_See Page_ 206]
+
+been tricking our politicians, journalists, and professors to accept
+them as peaceful leaders of a higher civilization--- while all the while
+their soldiers, diplomats, and spies (the three are really but one
+class) were secretly courting our own royalties and society, studying
+our naval and military defenses, filling our homes with tens of
+thousands of reservists having secret orders to spy, to destroy our
+arsenals and roads, and even planting out bogus industries and laying
+concrete bases for cannon, to bombard the open towns of friendly
+nations. We have been living unsuspectingly with a nation of assassins
+plotting to destroy us. Did these professors of Kultur not know of this
+elaborate conspiracy of Kaisertum, which unites the stealthy treachery
+of a Mohawk or a thug to the miracles of modern science? For years past
+the ideal of Kultur has been to lay down secret mines to destroy their
+peaceful neighbors. Did these professors of the Fatheland not know this?
+Then they are unable to grasp the most obvious facts--the life work of
+their own masters under their own eyes. And, if they did know it, and
+must at least know it now, and yet approve and glory in it, they must be
+beneath contempt. Why argue with such hypocrites?
+
+Not a few of us have known and watched this conspiracy for years. I have
+preached this ever since the advent of Bismarckism and the new Europe
+that was formed forty years ago. Not a few of us have foretold not only
+the tremendous attack on the British Empire designed by German sea power
+but the precise steps of the war upon France, through Belgium, and to be
+executed by an overwhelming force of sudden shock in the midst of peace.
+For my part, nothing in this war since July 30 has at all surprised me,
+unless it be the foul cruelty with which Belgian civilians have been
+treated. Indeed, in January, 1913, I wrote a warning which reads now
+like a summary of events that have since happened. I was denounced as a
+senile alarmist by some who are now the loudest in calling to arms.
+Alas! too late is their repentance.
+
+May I ask why our eminent academicians and scholars who still profess
+"friendship and admiration" for their German confrères never even
+suspected the huge conspiracy of which civilization has been the victim?
+Why did they accept the stars and crosses of Caligula-Attila? Why
+hob-nob with the docile creatures of his chancery, and spread at home
+and abroad the worship of Geist and Kultur? Are they fit to instruct us
+about politics, public law, and international relations, when they were
+so egregiously mistaken, so blind, so befooled, with regard to the most
+portentous catastrophe in the memory of living men? I am glad that they
+see their blindness now--but why this sentimental friendliness for those
+who hoodwinked them?
+
+Surely this should open their eyes to the mountains of pretentious
+clouds on which the claims of Kultur rest. I am myself a student of
+German learning, and quite aware of the enormous industry, subtlety, and
+ingenuity of German scholarship. We owe deep gratitude to the older race
+of the Savignys, Rankes, Mommsens. Since 1851 I have been five times in
+Germany on different occasions down to 1900. I read and speak the
+language, and twice I lived in Germany for months together, even in the
+house of a distinguished man of science. I study their theology, their
+sociology, economics, history, and their classics. I am quite aware of
+the supremacy of German scholars in ancient literature, in many branches
+of science, in the record of the past in art, manners, and civilization.
+But to have edited a Greek play or to have discovered a new explosive, a
+new comet, another microbe, does not qualify a savant to dogmatize on
+international morals and the hegemony of the world. Sixty years ago in
+Leipzig the editor of a famous journal undertook to prove to me that
+Shakespeare was a German. Our poet, he said, was the grandest output of
+the Teutonic mind; nine-tenths of the Teutonic mind was German-argal,
+Shakespeare was a German, Q.E.D.
+
+With the vast accumulation of solid knowledge of provable facts there is
+too often in the German mind a sudden bounding up into a cloudland of
+crude and unproved guesswork. In the logic of Kultur there seems to be a
+huge gap in the reasoning of the middle terms. A savant unearths a
+manuscript in Syria, which he deciphers with marvelous industry,
+learning, and ingenuity. Straightway he cries, "Eureka, behold the
+original Gospel--the true Gospel!" and he proceeds to turn Christianity
+upside down. He may have experimented on cultures of microbes for a
+generation; and then he calls on earth and heaven to acknowledge the
+mystery of the self-creation of the universe. We hear much of Treitschke
+today--no doubt a man of genius with a gift for research--but what
+ferocious pyrotechnics were poured forth by this apostle of mendacious
+swagger. And as to Nietzsche, he was anticipated by Shakespeare in
+Timon--a diseased cynic--
+
+ henceforth hated be
+ Of Timon, man and all humanity.
+
+They seem to think that to have put the critics right about a few lines
+in Sophocles, or to have discovered a new chemical dye, dispenses the
+German Superman from being bound to humanity, truthfulness, and honor.
+Charge them with the mutilation of little girls and the violation of
+nuns in Belgium, and they reply: Yes! but think of Kant and Hegel! It is
+treason to philosophy, they say, that a man who has translated
+Schopenhauer should condemn Germans for burning Malines and making
+captive women a screen for troops in battle. Kultur, it seems, has its
+own "higher law," which its professors expound to the decadent nations
+of Europe.
+
+Let us hold no parley with these arrogant sophists. Let all intellectual
+commerce be suspended until these official professors have unlearned the
+infernal code of "military necessity" and "world policy" which, to the
+indignation of the civilized world, they are ordered by the Vicegerent
+of God at Potsdam to teach to the great Teutonic Super-race. Yours, &c.,
+
+FREDERIC HARRISON.
+
+Bath, Oct. 29.
+
+
+
+
+*The Reply From France*
+
+
+*By M. Yves Guyot and Prof. Bellet.*
+
+ _The following is the text of an open lettert addressed by M. Yves
+ Guyot, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal des Economistes, and M.
+ Bellet, Professor at the Schools of Political Science and
+ Commercial Studies, to Prof. Brentano of the University of Munich,
+ the communication being a reply to the recent German Appeal to
+ Civilized Nations on the subject of the war_:
+
+
+PARIS, Oct. 15, 1914.
+
+_To Prof. Brentano of the University of Munich_:
+
+Very Learned Professor and Colleague: On reading the Appeal to Civilized
+Nations, (among which France is evidently not included,) which has just
+been sent forth by ninety-three persons declaring themselves to be
+representatives of German science and art, we were not surprised to find
+Prof. Schmoller's signature. He had already shown his hatred for France
+by refusing to assist at the gatherings organized, a little more than
+two years ago, to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Paris
+Society of Political Economy, (gatherings at which we were happy to
+enjoy your presence and that of your colleague, Mr. Lotz.) In his
+Rector's speech at the Berlin University, in 1897, he declared that
+German science had no other object than to celebrate the imperial
+messages of 1880 and 1890; and he pointed out that every disciple of
+Adam Smith who was not willing to make it a servant of that policy
+"should resign his seat." But we felt painful surprise when, at the foot
+of the said factum, we found your name side by side with his.
+
+You and the other representatives of German science and art accuse
+France, Great Britain, Belgium, and Russia of falsehood. Would you have
+submitted, on the part of one of your pupils, to so grave an imputation,
+so lightly bandied? Admitting you to be in absolute ignorance of the
+documents published since the war declaration, you have certainly been
+acquainted with the ultimatum pronounced by Austria to Servia. It must
+have struck you with surprise; for it stands as a unique diplomatic
+document in all history. Did you not ask yourselves whether the demands
+of Austria did not go beyond all bounds, seeing that they insisted on
+the abdication of an independent State? You learned that, in spite of
+Servia's humble reply, because it contained a reservation, immediately,
+without discussion, the Ambassador of Austria-Hungary left Belgrade, and
+that the following day Austria declared war. You do not ignore the steps
+taken by Great Britain and France, the demand for delay made by Russia,
+and the reply of the German Chancellor "that none should intervene
+between Austria and Servia." He elegantly qualified the attitude thus
+adopted as "localizing the conflict."
+
+Is there a single member among those who signed the document of
+Intellectuals who has been able to believe--have you been able to
+believe, Mr. Brentano, with your quick and perspicacious mind?--that
+this reply from Berlin did not imply war as a fatal consequence; for any
+nation accepting it was certain to be treated in future, by Germany, as
+the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy treated Servia? How, then, knowing the
+initial pretext of the war, are you able to realize that there was no
+other relation between this cause and the effect produced than the will
+of those who made use of it to provoke either a dishonoring humiliation
+for the countries accepting such a situation, or a general
+conflagration? How, then, do you, and the signatories of your appeal,
+dare to state: "It is not true that Germany provoked the war"? You dare
+to speak of proofs taken from authentic documents. Those published by
+Great Britain, Russia, and Belgium are known. All agree; and they give
+clear proof that the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum was pronounced with full
+complicity of the Berlin Chancellery. They prove, moreover, that the
+German Ambassador at Petrograd, fearing a withdrawal on the part of
+Hungary, precipitated events while your Emperor kept himself out of the
+way. Meanwhile, your General Staff had, in underhanded manner, mobilized
+a portion of its troops, by individual call, while in France we waited,
+unable to imagine that the German Government had resolved to engage in
+European war without motives. In the pocketbooks of your reservists have
+been found forms calling them to the army long before the end of July.
+Our friend and colleague, Courcelle-Seneuil, has seen the military book
+of a German living in Switzerland, at Bex, containing this call.
+
+
+*Bismarckian Loyalty.*
+
+Correspondence of official nature has been stopped at the Cape, which
+should have reached in full time officers of the German Navy, warning
+them to prepare for mid-July. Such advance taken by your troops has
+rendered the task the more difficult for ours. We were very simple, for
+we believed in the affirmations of your statesmen. You state that these
+are loyal war methods; so be it. That belongs to the diplomatic rules of
+loyalty bequeathed by Bismarck to his successors. But to attempt to
+carry on this falsehood, you have no longer the excuse of its utility.
+It is clear to all, except, it seems, the representatives of science and
+art in Germany, who are sufficiently devoid of perspicacity to ignore
+it.
+
+They affirm, moreover, that Germany has not violated the neutrality of
+Belgium; she merely contented herself with "taking the first step."
+Beyond the authentic proofs which have been published, we would draw
+your attention to an undeniable fact. Trusting in the treaty which
+guaranteed Belgium neutrality--and at the foot of which figured
+Germany's signature--in the promise made a short while ago to the King
+of the Belgians by your Emperor, we unfortunately left our northern
+frontier unguarded. You must be aware, professor, that the English did
+not move until Belgian soil had been effectively violated. It is true
+that we knew the plan of campaign set forth by Gen. Bernhardi, but we
+naïvely believed that, whatever might be the opinion of a General, the
+Chancellor of the Empire would consider a treaty bearing the imperial
+signature as something more than a mere "bit of paper." Germany has also
+been untrue to her signature by violating the treaty of neutrality of
+Luxembourg. You forgot to state that there also you only "took the first
+step." Your appeal echoes the German papers, which declare that it was
+the Belgians, and particularly the women, who "began against your
+troops." An American paper replied by stating that if it was the Belgian
+women who attacked German soldiers on Belgian soil, what were the
+soldiers doing there? The truth is that your troops, obeying their
+officers, as is proved by papers which have been seized and which you
+would find quoted in the report presented by the Belgian Commission to
+President Wilson, have executed orders which seem inspired by the
+ferocious inscriptions of Assyrian Kings, no doubt exhumed on the Bagdad
+railway line; and you think it quite natural that massacre and arson
+should have been perpetrated at Louvain because the civil population
+fired on your soldiers; but an inquiry made together with the
+representatives of the United States (whom you deign to consider
+sufficiently to ask them to represent your defenses) proved that the
+civil population was unarmed. If you today approve of the burning of the
+Louvain Library, have you until now approved of the destruction of the
+library at Alexandria? It is true there was no Deutsch Kultur there. The
+result of German culture as regards military matters is to place your
+soldiers on a stratum of civilization anterior to that of the Vandals,
+who, when taking Hippone, spared the library.
+
+In Paris, if one of us passing, on Friday, Oct. 9, in the Rue
+d'Edimbourg, to an office of the Societe d'Economie Politique, situated
+at No. 14, had passed near to that address, he might have been murdered
+by a bomb thrown from one of your Taubes on the civil population of a
+town whose bombarding had not been notified. Another Taube caused,
+through the throwing of a bomb, a fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
+You cannot, to excuse such an assault, invoke the pretext put forward to
+excuse the destruction of the Cathedral of Rheims. No observer could
+have caught sight of a German soldier from the top of the towers.
+
+
+*Barbarian Soldiery.*
+
+Your co-signatories and you express indignation because the civilized
+world describes your soldiers as barbarians. Do you therefore consider
+such deeds as those specified to be a high expression of civilization?
+And here is the dilemma: either you are in ignorance of these deeds,
+then you are indeed very careless, or you approve of them, in which case
+you must make the defense of them enter into your works on right and
+ethics. In doing so you would only be following the theories of your
+military authors who have insisted on the necessity of striking terror
+into the hearts of the civil population, in order that it may weigh on
+its Government and its army so strongly that they may be forced to ask
+for peace. But those of your colleagues who profess psychology must, if
+they have approved such a theory, confess today that they made a great
+mistake; for such deeds, far from forcing the people to cowardly action,
+awaken indignation in all hearts and fire the courage of our soldiers.
+Nevertheless, your military authors have not stated that theft was a
+means of assuring victory. And yet the Crown Prince, your Emperor of
+tomorrow, gathered together at the castle of the Count of Baye articles
+in precious metals, belonging to a collection, which he had carefully
+packed up and sent off. Some of your officers' trunks have been found
+stuffed with goods which would constitute the stock of a second-hand
+clothes seller. Do you and your co-signatories include in German science
+and art the science and art of housebreaking? Are the law professors and
+the economists willing to defend such a manner of acquiring property?
+And, if so, what becomes of your penal code?
+
+You and your co-signatories affirm that the present struggle is directed
+against "German culture." If such culture teaches that the rights of men
+include contempt of treaties, contempt of private property, contempt of
+the lives of non-combatants, you cannot be surprised that the other
+nations show no desire to preserve it for your benefit and their
+detriment.
+
+It is not by arms but by arguments and facts that economists like us,
+faithful to the teachings of the physiocrats and of Adam Smith, have
+sought to protect ourselves against it. On the eve of the war, at the
+inauguration of Turgot's Monument, we set forth his ideas of liberty and
+humanity in opposition to the German realpolitik. We hope that the
+present events will cure those among our professors whom it had
+contaminated, and that they will cease to constitute themselves
+accomplices of that, form of Pan-Germanism which they introduced to
+public opinion and to our legislation. The acts of your diplomatists and
+of your Generals, and the approbation given them by you and other
+representatives of German science, are a terrible demonstration, but
+conclusive, of the dangers and vanity of German culture. You are its
+true destroyers.
+
+
+*Militarism and Civilization.*
+
+"Without our miltarism," say you, "our civilization would have been
+annihilated long ago." And you invoke the inheritance of Goethe,
+Beethoven, Kant. But Goethe, born in the free city of Frankfort, lived
+at the Court of Charles Augustus, which was a liberal and artistic
+centre ever threatened by Prussia. But Beethoven was of Flemish origin,
+and lived in Holland until the age of twenty-four, spending the rest of
+his life in Vienna, and he has nothing in common with Prussian
+militarism, so redoubtable for Austria. But Kant, if he was born and
+lived at Könisberg, the true capital of the Prussian Kingdom, welcomed
+the French Revolution, and when he died in 1804 it was not Prussian
+militarism which had recommended his writings to the world.
+
+But the solidarity which you establish between German militarism and
+German culture, of which you and your colleagues claim to be the
+representatives, is a proof of the confusion of German conceptions.
+
+To present Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant to the world you surround them
+with bayonets. In the same manner every tradesman and every merchant
+throughout Germany has got into the habit of saying: "I have four
+million bayonets behind me!" Your Emperor said to some tradesmen who
+complained of bad business: "I must travel!" And he went to
+Constantinople; he went to Tangier, after the speech at Bremen. In every
+one of his words, in each of his gestures, he affirmed the subordination
+of economic civilization to military civilization. He considered that it
+was his duty to open up markets and assert the value of German products
+with cannon and sword. Hence his formidable armaments, his perpetual
+threats which held all nations in a constant state of anxiety.
+
+There is the deep and true cause of the war. And it is due entirely to
+your Emperor and his environment. We readily understand that the greater
+number of "representatives of German science and art" who signed the
+appeal are incapable of fathoming this fact; but this is not your case,
+you who denounced the abuses and consequences of German protectionism,
+and we remember that at the Antwerp Congress you agreed with us in
+recognizing its aggressive nature.
+
+In conclusion, we beg to express the deep consideration which we feel
+for your science, hitherto so unerring.
+
+
+
+
+*To Americans In Germany*
+
+*By Prof. Adolf von Harnack.*
+
+
+Citizens of the United States, ladies and gentlemen: It is my pleasure
+and my privilege to address to you today a few words.
+
+Let me begin with a personal recollection. Ten years ago I was in the
+United States and I came away with some unforgettable memories. What
+impression was the strongest? Not the thundering fall of Niagara, not
+the wonderful entrance into New York Harbor with its skyscrapers, not
+the tremendous World's Fair of St. Louis in all its proud grandeur, not
+the splendid universities of Harvard and Columbia or the Congressional
+Library in Washington--these are all works of technique or of nature and
+cannot arouse our deepest admiration and make the deepest impression.
+What was the deepest impression? It was two-fold: first, the great work
+of the American Nation, and next, American hospitality.
+
+The great work of the American Nation, that is, the nation itself! From
+the smallest beginning the American Nation has in 200 years developed
+itself to a world power of more than 100,000,000 souls, and has not only
+settled but civilized the whole section of the world from the Atlantic
+to the Pacific, from the great lakes to the West Indies. And not only
+civilized: everything which has drifted to it has been welded together
+by this nation with an indescribable power, welded together to the unity
+of a great, noble nation of educated men--such a thing as has never
+before happened in all history. After two or at the most, three
+generations, all are welded together in the American body and the
+American spirit, and this without petty rules, without political
+pressure. In the definite frame of this people every individual
+character fits in without coercion, becomes American and yet retains its
+own quality. The world has never witnessed such a spectacle but it is
+witnessing it continually now. On the one side it hears and sees the
+fact that every alien after a short time announces, "America is now my
+Fatherland!" and on the other hand the old country still continues
+undisturbed the bond between them. Yes, here is at once a national
+strength and freedom which another could not copy from you very easily.
+
+
+*The Spirit of America.*
+
+But, further: Among those who have wandered to your shores are millions
+of Germans--several millions! For more than two years--where shall I
+begin to relate--since the days of Steuben and of Carl Schurz--but how
+can I name names?--they have been all received as brothers, bringing
+their best; and their best was not lost. More I cannot say.
+
+Furthermore, what sort was the spirit which received them? Upon each
+one, without and within, that spirit has imprinted its seal. Concerning
+this spirit I shall speak later, but for the present I will only say, it
+is the spirit of common courage and common freedom! And from this unity
+I saw had developed a tremendous contribution as the work of this
+nation, a contribution to agriculture, to technology, and, as we of the
+German universities have known for several decades, an extraordinary
+contribution to science. And this contribution has been derived from a
+combination such as we in Europe cannot effect, of the good old
+traditional wisdom which has been brought down out of the history of
+Europe and a youthful courage, I might almost say, a childlike spirit.
+These two combined, this circumspection and at the same time this
+courage of youth, which I met everywhere and which has stamped itself
+upon all American work, is what I have admired.
+
+And the second was the American hospitality!
+
+Like a warm breeze, this hospitality surrounded me and my friends.
+Wherever we went we breathed the air of this friendship, indeed, it
+almost took away our powers of will, so thoroughly did it anticipate
+every plan and every need. Like parcels of friendship, we were sent from
+place to place, always the feeling that we had all known each other
+forever. That was an experience for which all of us--for who of us
+Germans who have come over here has not experienced it?--will be
+perpetually thankful. That will never be forgotten.
+
+
+*Friendship for Germany.*
+
+But beautiful and noble as that was, your nation has furnished ours with
+something still more unforgettable. In those horrible days of 1870, when
+a great number of Germans were shut up in unfortunate Paris, the
+American Ambassador assumed the care of them, and what America did at
+that time she is again doing for all of our country--men who, surprised
+in the enemy's country by the war, have been detained there. They are
+intrusted to the special care of the American Ambassador, and we know
+with as much certainty as though it were an actual fact already that
+that care will be the best and the most loyal. That, my friends, is true
+service of friendship, which is not mere convention but such as it is in
+the Catechism: "Give us our daily bread and good friends." They belong
+together.
+
+But to answer the question why you are our good friends we must reflect
+a little for the answer which we might have given a few days ago--"You
+are our good friends as our blood relations"--alas! that answer no
+longer holds. That is over! God grant that in later days we may again be
+able to say it, but by a circumstance which has torn our very
+heartstrings it has been proved that blood is not thicker than water.
+But where then is the deep-lying reason for this friendship? Does it
+rest in the fact that we have so many Germans over there; that they have
+been received so cordially; that they have done so much for the building
+up of America, soul and body, or that we find friends in so many
+Americans on this side of the water? This is an important consideration,
+but it is not the ultimate cause we are seeking.
+
+My friends, when it is a powerful relationship, imbedded in rock as it
+were, which is under consideration, then the matter is more than
+superficial, and that which is at the bottom of this deeper fact,
+history is at this very moment showing us as she writes in characters of
+bronze before our eyes; because we have a common spirit which springs
+from the very depths of our hearts, for that reason are we friends!
+
+And what is that spirit? It is the spirit of the deep religious and
+moral culture which has possessed us through a succession of centuries
+and out of which this powerful American offshoot has sprung. To this
+culture belong three things, or, rather, it rests upon three pillars.
+The first pillar is the recognition of the eternal value of every human
+soul, consequently the recognition of personality and individuality.
+These are respected, nourished, striven for. Second is the recognition
+of the duty at any time to risk this human soul, which is to each one of
+us so dear, for that great ideal--"God, freedom, and the Fatherland."
+The dearer that human soul, that life, is prized by us, Germans and
+Americans, the more surely do we give it up willingly and joyously when
+a high cause demands it. And the third pillar is respect for law and
+therewith the capability for powerful organization in all lines and in
+all manner of communities.
+
+
+*A Different Culture.*
+
+But now before my eyes I see rising up against the culture which rests
+upon these three pillars--personality, duty to sacrifice all for ideals,
+law and organization--another culture, a culture of the horde whose
+Government is patriarchal, a civilization of the mob which is brought
+together and held together by despots, the Byzantine--I must extend it
+further--Mongolian-Muscovite culture.
+
+My friends, this was once a true culture, but it is no longer. This
+culture was not able to bear the light of the eighteenth century, still
+less that of the nineteenth, and now, in this twentieth century, it
+breaks out and threatens us--this unorganized mob, this mob of Asia;
+like the sands of the desert it would sweep down over our harvest
+fields. That we already know; we are already experiencing it. That, too,
+the Americans know, for every one who has stood upon the ground of our
+civilization and who with a keen glance regards the present situation
+knows that the word must be: "Peoples of Europe, save your most hallowed
+possessions!"
+
+
+*"I Cover My Head!"*
+
+This, our culture, the chief treasure of mankind, was in large part,
+yes, almost wholly, intrusted to three peoples: to us, to the Americans,
+and--to the English. I will say no more! I cover my head! Two still
+remain, and must stand all the more firmly together where this culture
+is menaced. It is a question of our spiritual existence, and Americans
+will realize that it is also their existence. We have a common culture,
+and a common duty to protect it!
+
+To you, American citizens, we give the holy pledge that we shall offer
+our last drop of blood in the cause of this culture. May I in addition
+say to you, since I have made this pledge, that we shall as a matter of
+course protect those of you here in our land and care for you and do
+everything for you? If we have made the greater pledge, surely we can
+manage these trifles.
+
+But you, my dear fellow-countrymen, we are all thinking with one mind on
+what is now going on about us. It is a very grave but a splendid time.
+Whatever in the last analysis we shall go through, at present there is
+no longer any one of us who any longer regards life in the rôle of a
+blasé or critical spectator, but each one of us stands in the very midst
+of life, and, indeed, in the very midst of a higher life. God has of a
+sudden brought us out of the wretchedness of the day to a high place to
+which we have never before spiritually attained. But always where life
+emerges, a higher life or merely life itself, wherever there is a thirst
+for life, there is it set close around by death, as at every birth when
+something new comes to the light of day, and so if the most precious
+thing is to be gained, then death will stand close by life. But this we
+also know, that when death and life intertwine in this fashion, the fear
+of death vanishes away; in the intertwining, life only appears and full
+of life man goes through death and into death. It brings to my mind an
+old song, the powerful song of victory of our fathers:
+
+ It was a famous battle,
+ Fought 'twixt Life and Death;
+ Life came out the victor,
+ Triumphant over Death;
+ Already it was written
+ How one Death killed the other,
+ So making mock of Death!
+
+Death which is willingly met kills the great death and secures the
+higher life. Death makes us free. Thus spake Luther.
+
+Let me say a few words in closing. Before all of us there stands in time
+of crisis an image under which are the plain words: "He was faithful
+unto death, yea, even to death on the cross." Now the time for great
+faithfulness has come for us, for this obedience for which our neighbors
+in former times have ridiculed us, saying: "See, these are the faithful
+Germans, the men who do all on command and are so obedient!" Now they
+shall see that this great obedience was not mere discipline, but a
+matter of will. It was and still is discipline, but it is also will.
+They shall see that this great obedience is not pettiness and death, but
+power and life.
+
+From the east--I say it once more--the desert sands are sweeping down
+upon us; on the west we are opposed by old enemies and treacherous
+friends. When will the German be able to pray again, confessing:
+
+ God is the Orient,
+ God is the Occident;
+ Northernmost and Southern lands
+ Rest in peace beneath His hands.
+
+We shall hope that God may give us strength to make this true, not only
+for us but for all Europe.
+
+Until then, since we see the very springs of our higher life and our
+existence threatened, we shout: "Father, protect our springs of life and
+save us from the Huns."
+
+
+
+
+*A Reply to Prof. Harnack*
+
+*By Some British Theologians.*
+
+
+Prof. Harnack.
+
+Honored Sir: We, the undersigned, a group of theologians who owe more
+than we can express to you personally and to the great host of German
+teachers and leaders of thought, have noticed with pain a report of a
+speech recently delivered by you, in which you are said to have
+described the conduct of Great Britain in the present war as that of a
+traitor to civilization.
+
+We are quite sure that you could never have been betrayed into such a
+statement if you had been acquainted with the real motives which actuate
+the British Nation in the present crisis.
+
+Permit us, in the interests of a better understanding now and
+subsequently, to state to you the grounds on which we, whose obligations
+to Germany, personal and professional, are simply incalculable, have
+felt it our duty to support the British Government in its declaration of
+war against the land and people we love so well.
+
+We are not actuated by any preference for France over Germany--still
+less by any preference for Russia over Germany. The preference lies
+entirely the other way. Next to the peoples that speak the English
+tongue, there is no people in the world that stands so high in our
+affection and admiration as the people of Germany. Several of us have
+studied in German universities. Many of us have enjoyed warm personal
+friendship with your fellow-countrymen. All of us owe an immeasurable
+debt to German theology, philosophy, and literature. Our sympathies are
+in matters of the spirit so largely German that nothing but the very
+strongest reasons could ever lead us to contemplate the possibility of
+hostile relations between Great Britain and Germany.
+
+Nor have we the remotest sympathy with any desire to isolate Germany, or
+to restrict her legitimate expansion, commercial and colonial. We have
+borne resolute witness against the endeavor made by foes of Germany to
+foment anti-German suspicion and ill-will in the minds of our
+fellow-countrymen.
+
+
+*The Sanctity of Treaties.*
+
+But we recognize that all hopes of settled peace between the nations,
+and indeed of any civilized relations between the nations, rest on the
+maintenance inviolate of the sanctity of treaty obligations. We can
+never hope to put law for war if solemn international compacts can be
+torn up at the will of any power involved. These obligations are felt by
+us to be the more stringently binding in the case of guaranteed
+neutrality. For the steady extension of neutralization appears to us to
+be one of the surest ways of the progressive elimination of war from the
+face of the earth. All these considerations take on a more imperative
+cogency when the treaty rights of a small people are threatened by a
+great world power. We therefore believe that when Germany refused to
+respect the neutrality of Belgium, which she herself had guaranteed,
+Great Britain had no option, either in international law or in Christian
+ethics, but to defend the people of Belgium. The Imperial Chancellor of
+Germany has himself admitted, on Aug. 4, that the protest of the
+Luxembourg and Belgian Governments was "just," and that Germany was
+doing "wrong" and acting "contrary to the dictates of international
+law." His only excuse was "necessity"--which recalls our Milton's
+phrase, "necessity, the tyrant's plea." It has cost us all the deepest
+pain to find the Germany which we love so intensely committing this act
+of lawless aggression on a weak people, and a Christian nation becoming
+a mere army with army ethics. We loathe war of any kind. A war with
+Germany cuts us to the very quick. But we sincerely believe that Great
+Britain in this conflict is fighting for conscience, justice, Europe,
+humanity, and lasting peace.
+
+
+*Dictated Terms.*
+
+This conviction is deepened by the antecedents of the present unhappy
+war. In allowing her ally Austria to dictate terms to Servia which were
+quite incompatible with the independence of that little State, Germany
+gave proof of her disregard for the rights of smaller States. A similar
+disregard for the sovereign rights of greater States was shown in the
+demand that Russia should demobilize her forces. It was quite open to
+Germany to have answered Russia's mobilization with a
+counter-mobilization without resorting to war. Many other nations have
+mobilized to defend their frontiers without declaring war. Alike
+indirectly in regard to Servia and directly in regard to Russia, Germany
+was indisputably the aggressor. And this policy of lawless aggression
+became more nakedly manifest in the invasion of Belgium. Great Britain
+is not bound by any treaty rights to defend either Servia or Russia. But
+she is bound by the most sacred obligations to defend Belgium,
+obligations which France undertook to observe. We have been grieved to
+the heart to see in the successive acts of German policy a disregard of
+the liberties of States, small or great, which is the very negation of
+civilization. It is not our country that has incurred the odium of being
+a traitor to civilization or to the conscience of humanity.
+
+Doubtless you read the facts of the situation quite differently. You may
+think us entirely mistaken. But we desire to assure you, as
+fellow-Christians and fellow-theologians, that our motives are not open
+to the charge which has been made.
+
+We have been moved to approach you on this matter by our deep reverence
+for you and our high appreciation of the great services you have
+rendered to Christendom in general. We trust that you will receive what
+we have said in the spirit in which it was sent.
+
+We have the honor to be,
+
+Yours very sincerely,
+
+
+P.J. FORSYTH, M.A., D.D., Aberdeen University. Principal of Hackney
+College (Divinity School: University of London).
+
+HERBERT T. ANDREWS, B.A. Oxon. Professor of New Testament, Exegesis,
+Introduction and Criticism. New College, London (Divinity School:
+University of London).
+
+J. HERBERT DARLOW, M.A. Cambridge. Literary Superintendent of the
+British and Foreign Bible Society.
+
+JAMES R. GILLIES, M.A. Edinburgh, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church
+of England. Pastor of Hampstead Presbyterian Church, London.
+
+R. MACLEOD, Pastor of Frognal Presbyterian Church, London.
+
+W.M. MACPHAIL, M.A. Glasgow. General Secretary of the Presbyterian
+Church of England.
+
+RICHARD ROBERTS, Pastor of Crouch Hill Presbyterian Church, London.
+
+H.H. SCULLARD, M.A. Cambridge, M.A., D.D. London. Professor of
+Ecclesiastical History, Christian Ethics, and the History of Religions
+in New College (Divinity School: University of London).
+
+ALEX RAMSAY, M.A., B.D. Pastor of the Highgate Presbyterian Church,
+London.
+
+W.B. SELBIE, M.A., D.D. Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. Chairman
+of the Congregational Union of England and Wales.
+
+J. HERBERT STEAD, M.A. Glasgow. Warden of the Robert Browning
+Settlement, London.
+
+
+
+
+*Prof. Harnack in Rebuttal*
+
+
+BERLIN, Sept. 10, 1914.
+
+Gentlemen: The words, "The conduct of Great Britain is that of a traitor
+to civilization," were not used by me, but you have expressed my general
+judgment of this conduct correctly. The sentence in question in my
+speech reads: "This, our culture, the chief treasure of mankind, was in
+large part, yes, almost wholly, intrusted to three peoples: To us, to
+the Americans, and--to the English, I will say no more. I cover my
+head." To my deep sorrow I must, even after your communication, maintain
+this judgment.
+
+You claim that England has drawn and must draw the sword purely for the
+protection of the small nations of Servia and Belgium and for the sake
+of an international treaty. In this claim I see at the very least a
+fearful self-delusion.
+
+It is an actual fact that what Servia desired was that her Government
+should in no wise be mixed up with the shameful crime of Serajevo, and
+it is also an established fact that for years Servia, with the support
+of Russia, has attempted by the most despicable means to incite to
+rebellion the Austrian South Slavs. When Austria finally issued to her a
+decided ultimatum without making any actual attack on her territory, it
+was the duty of every civilized land--England as well--to keep hands
+off, for Austria's royal house, Austria's honor, and Austria's existence
+were attacked. Austria's yielding to Servia would mean the sovereignty
+of Russia in the eastern half of the Balkans, for Servia is nothing more
+than a Russian satrapy, and the Balkan federation brought about by
+Russia had for its ultimate purpose opposition to Austria. This is as
+well known in England as in Germany. If, gentlemen, in spite of this,
+you can presume to judge that in this circumstance it was purely a case
+of protecting the right of a small nation against a large one, I shall
+find great difficulty in believing in your good faith.
+
+
+*Against Pan-Slavism.*
+
+It was not a question of little Servia but of Austria's battle for life
+and the struggle of Western culture against Pan-Slavism. Servia is,
+after all, only an outpost of Russia and as opposed to this nation,
+Servia's "sovereignty" is less than a mere shadow; in fact it can hardly
+be protected by England, for in reality it does not exist. For in
+addition Servia, through the most dastardly murder known to history,
+struck her name from the list of the nations with which one does
+business as equals. What would England have done had the Prince of Wales
+been assassinated by the emissary of a little nation which had
+continually been inciting the Irish to revolt? Would it have issued a
+milder ultimatum than Austria's? But of all this you say not a word in
+your communication, but instead persist on seeing in the situation into
+which Servia and Russia have brought Austria, only the necessity of an
+oppressed little country to whose help haste must be made! Thus to judge
+would be more than blindness, indeed, it would be a crime that cries
+unto heaven, were it not known that the life problems of other great
+powers do not exist for Great Britain, because she is only concerned
+about her own life problems and those of little nations whose support
+can be useful to her.
+
+At bottom Servia is of as little consequence to you as to us. Austria,
+too, is of no consequence to you; and you realize that Austria had the
+right to punish Servia. But because Germany, who stands behind Austria,
+is to be struck; therefore Servia is the guiltless little State which
+must be spared! What is the result? Great Britain sides with Russia
+against Germany. What does that mean? That means that Great Britain has
+torn down the dike which has protected West Europe and its culture from
+the desert sands of the Asiatic barbarism of Russia and of Pan-Slavism.
+Now we Germans are forced to stop up the breach with our bodies. We
+shall do it amid streams of blood, and we shall hold out there. We must
+hold out, for we are protecting the labor of thousands of years for all
+of Europe, and for Great Britain! But that day when Great Britain tore
+down the dam will never be forgotten in the history of the world, and
+history's judgment shall read: On that day when Russian-Asiatic power
+rushed down upon the culture of Europe Great Britain declared that she
+must side with Russia because "the sovereignty of the murderer-nation
+Servia had been violated!"
+
+
+*As to Neutrality.*
+
+But no, the maintenance of Servians sovereignty is not according to your
+communication the first, but only the second reason for Great Britain's
+declaration of war against us. The first reason is our violation of
+Belgian neutrality; "Germany broke a treaty which she herself had
+guaranteed." Shall I remind you how Great Britain has disported herself
+in the matter of treaties and pleasant promises? How about Egypt for
+example? But I do not need to go into these flagrant and repeated
+violations of treaty rights, for a still more serious violation of the
+rights of a people stands today on your books against you; it has been
+proved that your army is making use of dumdum bullets and thereby
+turning a decent war into the most bloody butchery. In this Great
+Britain has severed herself from every right to complain about the
+violation of the rights of a people.
+
+But aside from that--in your communication you have again emphasized the
+main point. We did not declare war against Belgium, but we declared that
+since Russia and France compelled us to wage a war with two fronts
+(190,000,000 against 68,000,000) we had then to suffer defeat if we
+could not march through Belgium; that we should do that but that we
+should carefully keep from harming Belgium in any way and would
+indemnify all damage incurred--our hand upon it! Would Great Britain,
+had she been in our position, have hesitated a moment to do likewise?
+And would Great Britain have drawn the sword for us if France had
+violated the neutrality of Belgium by marching through it? You know well
+enough that both these questions must be answered in the negative.
+
+Our Imperial Chancellor has with his characteristic conscientiousness
+declared that we have on our side committed a certain wrong. I cannot
+agree with him in this judgment, and I cannot even recognize the
+commission of a formal wrong, for we were in a situation where
+formalities no longer obtain, and where moral duties only prevail. When
+David, in the extremity of his need, took the show-bread from the Table
+of the Lord, he was in every sense of the word justified, for the letter
+of the law ceased at that moment to exist. It is as well known to you as
+to me that there is a law of necessity which breaks iron asunder, to say
+nothing of treaties.
+
+Appreciate our position! Prove to me that Germany has flippantly
+constructed a law of necessity; prove it to me in this hour, when your
+country has gone over to our enemies, and we have half the world to
+fight. You cannot do that; you could not do it on the 4th of August, and
+consequently you have assumed the most miserable of pretexts, because
+you wished to destroy us. From your letter, gentlemen, I must believe
+that you are far from holding this view; but do you believe, and would
+you really try to make me believe, that your statesmen would have
+declared war against us only because we were determined to march through
+Belgium? You could not consider them so foolish and so flippant.
+
+
+*An Earlier Treachery.*
+
+But I am not yet at an end. It is not we who have first violated the
+neutrality of Belgium. Belgium, as we feared and as we now, informed by
+the actual facts, see still more clearly, was for a long time in
+alliance with France and--with you. France's airmen were flying over
+Belgium before we marched in; negotiations with France had already taken
+place, and in Maubeuge there was found an arsenal full of English
+munitions which had been stationed there before the declaration of war.
+This arsenal--you know where Maubeuge is situated!--points to agreements
+which Great Britain had made with France, and to which Belgium was also
+party. These agreements are before the whole world today, for the chain
+of evidence is complete and the treacherous plot of Great Britain is
+revealed. She has encouraged and pledged the Belgians against us, and
+therefore it is she who must answer for all the misery which has been
+visited upon that poor country. Had it been our responsibility, not a
+single hair of a Belgian's head should have been harmed. If, then, the
+Belgian wrongs like those of Servia are only the flimsiest pretexts for
+Great Britain's declaration of war against us, there remains,
+unfortunately, no other reason for this declaration of war save the
+intention of your statesmen either to destroy us or so to weaken us that
+Great Britain will rule supreme on the seas and in all distant parts of
+the world. This intention you personally deny and thus far I must take
+your word for it. But do you deny it also for your Government? That you
+cannot do, for the facts have been brought to light; when Great Britain
+determined to join the coalition of Russia with France, which is ruled
+by Russia, when it put aside all the differences that stood between her
+and Russia, when it set upon us not only the hordes of Russia but the
+scrupulous Japanese, "the yellow peril," and called upon all Europe,
+when it also sunk in the ocean its duties to European culture--for all
+of that there is but one explanation: England believes that the hour for
+our destruction has struck. Why does she wish to destroy us? Because she
+will not endure our power, our zeal, our perfection of growth! There is
+no other explanation!
+
+
+*Lifting Humanity.*
+
+We and Great Britain in alliance with America were able in peaceful
+co-operation to lift humanity to a higher plane, and to lead the world
+in peace, allowing to each his rights. We Germans, now know no, and have
+never known any, higher ideal than this. In order to realize this ideal
+the German Kaiser and the German people have made many sacrifices in the
+past 43 years. In proportion to the development of our strength, we
+should be able to lay claim to more territory than we now possess in the
+world. But we have never attempted to force this claim. We held that the
+strength of our nation should be in its zeal and in the peaceful fruits
+of that zeal. Great Britain has begrudged us that; she has been jealous
+of our powers, jealous of our fleet, jealous of our industries and our
+commerce, and jealousy is the root of all evil. Jealousy it is which has
+driven Great Britain into the most fearful war which history knows and
+the end of which is unforseen.
+
+What course is open to you, gentlemen, once you are enlightened as to
+the policy of your country? In the name of our Christian culture, which
+your Government has frivolously placed in jeopardy, I can offer you but
+one counsel: To burden your consciences no longer with Servia and
+Belgium, which you must protect, but to face about and stop your
+Government in its headlong course; it may not be too late. As far as we
+Germans are concerned, our way is clearly indicated, though not so our
+fate. Should we fall, which God and our strong arm prevent, then there
+sinks with us to its grave all the higher culture of our part of the
+world, whose defenders we were called to be; for neither with Russia nor
+against Russia will Great Britain be able longer to maintain that
+culture in Europe. Should we conquer--and victory is for us something
+more than mere hope--then shall we feel ourselves responsible, as
+formerly, for this culture, for the learning and the peace of Europe,
+and shall put from us any idea of setting up a hegemony in Europe. We
+shall stand by the one who, together in fraternal union with us, will
+create and maintain such a peaceful Europe.
+
+For the continuation of your cordial attitude toward me I am personally
+grateful. I would not unnecessarily sever the bond which holds me to the
+upright Christians and the learning of your country, but at the present
+moment this bond has no value for me.
+
+PROF. VON HARNACK.
+
+
+P.S.--It is in your power now to wage a battle which would be of honor
+to you. As a fourth great power arrayed against Germany, the lying
+international press has raised itself up, flooded the world with lies
+about our splendid and upright army, and slandered everything that is
+German. We have been almost entirely cut off from any possibility of
+protecting ourselves against this "beast of the pit." Do not believe the
+lies, and spread abroad the truth about us. We are today no different
+than Carlyle pictured us to you. HARNACK.
+
+
+
+
+*The Causes of the War*
+
+*By Theodore Niemeyer*
+
+ _Theodore Niemeyer, Kaiser Wilhelm Exchange Professor at Columbia
+ University for 1914-15, and well-known Professor of Kiel
+ University, has addressed the following letter to the editor of The
+ New Yorker Staats-Zeitung._
+
+
+KIEL, 14th August, 1914.
+
+_To the Editor of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung_:
+
+Dear Sir: English papers publish a telegram from Mr. Andrew Carnegie, in
+which the view is expressed that the German Emperor, "in declining to
+take part In the peace conference proposed by Sir Edward Grey, an
+advocate of peace," proved unfaithful to that love of peace which he has
+shown during the past twenty-five years--that he, on the contrary, has
+taken up the rôle of a disturber of the peace of Europe.
+
+To the best of my knowledge, the German press has only referred to this
+telegram with the simple remark that intelligence of the real state of
+affairs has evidently not yet reached the ears of the sender of the
+telegram.
+
+This attitude of the German press is in conformity with its firm
+consciousness of the justice of its cause and its confidence in the
+ultimate triumph of truth. Both in this consciousness and in this
+confidence I will not be surpassed by any one, but to observe silence in
+the face of such accusations is beyond my power. To allow such a
+misconstruction to pass unchallenged through the world seems to me (and
+doubtless to many thousands besides me) unbearable.
+
+The misunderstanding about the Peace Conference is easily put right. Sir
+Edward Grey did not propose any peace conference at all, but a
+conference of the Ambassadors of those four powers which were at that
+time not directly concerned, namely Germany, England, France, and Italy.
+These powers were to attempt to exert their influence on Austria-Hungary
+and Russia in the same way as the Ambassador's Conference (or rather
+Ambassadorial Reunion) in London had done, in 1912 and 1913, on the
+Balkan States and Turkey. What the united six powers at that time
+undertook toward the Balkan States was now to be done by
+four--discordant--powers upon two others who are in a state of highest
+political tension. To this proposal Germany replied that the apparatus
+of an Ambassadorial Conference does not work quickly or effectually
+enough for the emergency of the moment, or to be able to ease the tense
+political situation.
+
+
+*The Kaiser's Efforts.*
+
+In place of this, however, the German Emperor undertook to negotiate in
+person with the Russian and Austrian monarch and was overwhelmed with
+grief when the leaders of Muscovite policy frustrated all his exertions
+by completely ignoring his efforts for peace, (made at the express
+desire of the Czar,) and then in real earnest amassing Russian forces on
+the German frontier, evidently resolved to force on a war under any
+circumstances--even against the will of the Czar.
+
+It is here that the clue to all the terrible events of the present day
+is to be found.
+
+The incessant intriguing of the Russian military party for many years
+past has at last succeeded in drawing first France and then England to
+their cause, by turning the mistrust, the dread of competition, the
+hopes of revenge, and the ever-increasing armaments to their use with
+incomparable skill. The task was facilitated by Germany's industrial
+up-growth, which--in willful misconstruction of the truths of the laws
+of international communities--has been represented as a calamity for
+other States.
+
+
+*England's Growing Friendship.*
+
+In quite recent times people in England began to recognize this
+misconstruction of facts as such. They began to understand that
+friendship with Germany might be a blessing and that in this way peace
+would be possible. This, however, meant the possibility of the Muscovite
+policy being completely frustrated. An Anglo-German understanding seemed
+already to be shaking the very foundations of the Triple Entente. Russia
+had been obliged during the two Balkan wars (the London Ambassadorial
+Conference was in fact the clearing house for this) to make important
+concessions to the detriment of her protégés, Servia and Montenegro, in
+order to retain the friendship of England, which ardently strove for
+peace. Now, however, it was highest time for Russia to pocket her gains;
+for the English people were slowly beginning to realize that in St.
+Petersburg they were trying to engage England in the cause of
+Pan-Slavism. The unnatural alliance was becoming more and more unpopular
+from day to day. How long would it be before Russia lost England's help
+forever?
+
+Before this took place Russia must bring about a European war. The iron,
+which had been prepared with the help of the English military party, had
+to be forged, for never again would there be a moment so favorable for
+the complete destruction of Austria and the humiliation of Germany.
+Servia was thrust to the front. Russia's Ambassador managed that
+wonderfully. The fire was set in so skillful a manner that the
+incendiaries knew in advance there was no possibility of extinguishing
+it. The conflagration must spread and soon blaze in all corners of
+Europe.
+
+What was the use of a Peace Conference in such circumstances? Conscious
+of the irresistible consequences of their action the real rulers of
+Russia sent forward their armies; it was now or never, if the work was
+to be done with the help of England. And without England perhaps even
+France would not consent to join.
+
+Thus it came about, and thus we have seen the peaceful policy of the
+German Emperor, which he has upheld for twenty-five years, completely
+wrecked.
+
+We are now fighting not only for our Fatherland, but also for the
+emancipation of our culture from a menace that has become insupportable.
+
+Yours faithfully,
+
+TH. NIEMEYER,
+
+Kaiser Wilhelm Professor, Columbia University.
+
+
+
+
+*Comment by Dr. Max Walter*
+
+
+To the letter addressed by Prof. Th. Niemeyer to the editor of The New
+Yorker Staats-Zeitung (see No. 237, 3, 2, of Frankfurter Zeitung) I
+should like to add the following remarks: During my activity as
+Professor of the Methodics of Foreign Language Teaching at Teachers
+College, Columbia University, New York, (January-June, 1911,) I was
+introduced to Mr. Andrew Carnegie, with whom I had a long interview. He
+expressed his views upon the peace question and arbitration, and spoke
+for a long time about the German Emperor who had repeatedly received him
+during his visits to Germany. He expressed his great appreciation of the
+important services rendered by our Emperor for the maintenance of peace,
+and declared that he, above all others, deserved the title of the
+Peace-loving Monarch, (Friedensfürst.) To him it was chiefly due that,
+during the various crises which had repeatedly brought Europe to the
+brink of war, the disaster had again and again been averted. The German
+Emperor, he considered, looked upon it as his chief pride that no war
+should take place during his reign, that Germany should develop and
+prosper in peaceful emulation with other countries, and his greatest
+desire was that other nations should recognize ungrudgingly that all
+Germany did to raise the moral and ethical standard of mankind was for
+the benefit of all.
+
+If now Carnegie has really declared, as this letter maintains, that he
+considers the German Emperor the "Disturber of Peace," it shows clearly
+how baleful the influence of the English press has been--that it could
+shake such a firm conviction in our Emperor's love of peace. Let us hope
+that this letter of Prof. Niemeyer's and other explanations to the same
+effect will induce him to recognize the horrible misrepresentations of
+English papers and to return to his former conviction.
+
+It was on this occasion, too, that Andrew Carnegie indorsed Prof.
+Burgess's view, that the three nations--America, Germany, and
+England--should unite, and then they would be able to keep the peace of
+the world. When I expressed my doubts in the real friendship of England,
+he replied, then America and Germany, at least, must hold together to
+secure universal peace. Hitherto I have refrained from publishing this
+interview, but now I consider it my duty to make known the views that
+Carnegie once held, and to which, if he has really changed them, we may
+hope he, who has done so much in his noble striving after peace, will
+return right away.
+
+If there should remain the least doubt in Mr. Andrew Carnegie's mind, he
+has only to read the telegrams exchanged between the Emperor William and
+the Czar on the one hand, and King George and the Emperor on the other.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of New York Times, Current History, Vol
+1, Issue 1, by Various
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13635 ***
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