SOME ASPECTS O • i\m WAR v/-irv S.PEREZ TRIAN./^ GIFT OF JANE KcSATHER SOME ASPECTS OF THE WAR SOME ASPECTS OF THE WAR BY S. p6rez TRIANA FORMERLY OF THE PERMANENT COURT OF ARBITRATION AT THE HAGUE T. FISHER UNWIN LTD. ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON First Published in 1915 V; J'r.T/j er «■ ^ »\"'* ,, '■ "«■ AU rights reserved ^ CONTENTS I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. THE NAME OF GOD AND THE WAR . THE WAR AND AMERICA .... THE "scrap of paper" INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE . SOWING THISTLES AND GATHERING THORNS THE LAWS OF WAR .... THE LAW OF NECESSITY .... VISIONS OF HATRED .... LYING LIPS AND MURDEROUS HANDS MOLTEN LEAD VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAR . THE INVASION OF CANADA SONGS OF WAR WHY A SPANISH-AMERICAN SHOULD NOT BE PRO-GERMAN THE " PLACE IN THE SUN "... GERMANISM IN AMERICA. THE SETTLEMENT OF PEACE HOW TO ENFORCE THE LAWS OF WAR FA OK 7 16 22 34 45 57 78 89 96 108 122 133 146 155 166 187 197 207 216 4% <~> MM ^ \ «^ tfA Some Aspects of the War THE NAME OF GOD AND THE WAR On the 15th of August of this tragic year of 1914, his Majesty the Kaiser telegraphed to the General in command of the troops that had been fighting at Miilhausen : " I thank God Almighty who was with us. I thank you and your gallant soldiers for this our first victory." In his address to the German people at the very beginning of the war, the Kaiser ex- claimed in accents thrilling with patriotism : *' Since the foundation of the Empire it has been for forty- three years the object of the efforts of myself and my ancestors to preserve the peace of the world and 7 THE NAME OF GOD to advance by peaceful means our vigor- ous development. But our adversaries were jealous of the successes of our w^ork. There has been latent hostility on the east and on the west and beyond the sea. It was borne by us till now, as we were aware of our responsibility and power. Now, however, these adversaries wish to humiliate us, asking that we should look on with crossed arms and watch our enemies preparing themselves for a coming attack. They will not suffer that we maintain resolute fidelity to our ally who is fighting for its position as a Great Power, and with whose humiliation our power and honour would equally be lost. So the sword must decide. "In the midst of perfect peace the enemy surprises us. Therefore to arms ! Any dallying, any temporising would be to betray the Fatherland. To be or not to be is the question for the Empire which our fathers founded. To be or not to be German power and German exist- ence. We shall resist to the last breath of man and horse, and shall fight out the struggle even against a world of enemies. Never has Germany been subdued when 8 AND THE WAR it was united. Forward with God, who will be with us as He was with our an- cestors I WiLHELM. ''Berlin, Aug. 6." His Majesty the Tsar, when calling his people to arms, said that "The God of the Russians is a great God and He shall give us victory." The French Presidential Manifesto on the 10th of August calls the people to the defence of France, "eternal, peaceful, resolute, the Fatherland united, watchful and serenely dig- nified." There is no mention of the Almighty in that document. None is made in the British announcement of the war issued by the Foreign Office, and which reads as follows : " Owing to the summary rejection by the German Government of the request made by his Majesty's Government for assurances that the neutrality of Belgium will be respected, his Majesty's Am- bassador at Berlin has received his pass- ports and his Majesty's Government have declared to the German Government that 9 THE NAME OF GOD a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11 p.m. on August 4th." The method adopted in France and in Great Britain would seem to be the most de- corous one. It is one thing to implore the Divine mercy. To declare that a given cause is the cause of God, and to do so at the precise moment when every notion of pity and of justice is suppressed, when cruelty is established as the supreme law of life, and when iniquity and infamy are consecrated as patriotism, provided they do harm to the enemy, is something quite different. The practice of associating God with our miser- able follies, seeking to turn Him into an accomplice of our acts when those acts reach their maximum degree of atrocity, may be an inveterate one, but it is no less objectionable on that account. The God of Israel may have been called the "God of Battles," it may have been maintained that He fought for the ** chosen people," it may be that "the Russian God will fight for His people." Not- withstanding all that, to associate God with the fury of man in the performance of acts which are fundamentally criminal, such as 10 AND THE WAR killing, pillaging, and the destruction of pro- perty (all of which are allowed within the practices of honest men by a pitiable conven- tion, and even then only in accordance with an honesty that is itself conventional), has never been, and never can be, aught else than the most audacious and glaring form of blasphemy. Doubtless the Imperial invocations of the Almighty as an ally are sincere utterances; to be sincere is not to possess the truth, but to believe that one possesses the truth. The cause of God for the Kaiser signifies his own absolute rule over Germany, culminating and manifest in the Imperial crown ; it signifies relentless military discipline throughout the Empire, inside and outside the barracks; it signifies Socialism trodden under the iron heel of Junkerdom ; it means the workman and labourer groaning under the yoke of taxation and yielding the sweat of their brow for the Empire in time of peace, and the blood of their veins to defend the Empire in war time ; it means a France subjugated and despoiled of her colonies ; it means a humiliated Eng- land, thrust back into the arms of reaction, and a universe trembling with terror at the slightest thrill of anger of the reigning 11 THE NAME OF GOD Hohenzollem. Such is the cause of God as seen from Potsdam with the Bismarckian telescope. The cause of God for the Tsar signifies the possession of Siberia, the tetrical Uving tomb of all those who dare to dream of liberty ; it means the mujik, prolific and kept in ignor- ance and blind fanaticism so as to be a useful instrument of extermination ; it means an auto- cracy, deaf and frigid as the winter in the steppes ; it means the knout, the pogrom ; it means the greased rope with the clusters of human beings, hanging from the collective gallows, at the break of dawn in the frightened cities or in the open fields surrounding them ; it signifies the dismemberment of Persia, and Finland trampled under foot; it means the dream of Peter the Great : the conquest of Constantinople, the mosque of Saint Sophia turned into a cathedral of the Orthodox Church, and a free road to the Ganges, to Delhi, to Benares, to Bombay, to Calcutta, and even to remote Ceylon, leaving behind the footprint of Alexander, like the dust of a weary caravan in the distant plains of the bygone centuries; it means the fulfilment of the traditional ambition of the Romanoffs, unbending as a dagger, instead of the law of 12 AND THE WAR justice ; it means the hand that strangles the ideal in the consciences of men and throttles the song in their throat. That, and much more than that, is what the cause of God means for the White Tsar, the unappealable lord and master of all the Russias past, present, and future. The autonomy offered to Poland and the promise of civil rights to the Jews, that have supervened at the hour of danger, cannot obliterate the past ; yet, in them may lie the hope of the future. There is not, amongst the aggressors, in this dark hour of struggle, any one nation whose cause is the embodiment of absolute justice. There is, amongst those aggressors, no nation that can maintain that her cause is the cause of immaculate justice and thereby the cause of God Almighty. In the essence the struggle is between reaction and liberty, between privilege and democracy. Our human fallibility makes us the un- avoidable companions of error. We are guided by the uncertain light of a vacillating reason and an imperfect experience ; we must implore the divine protection in all our en- deavours; but when we venture to declare 18 THE NAME OF GOD that those endeavours are divine, we involve ourselves in a superlative farce ; yet, the crowned comedians of our day may rely on the ignorance of mankind, which still kneels at the altar of convention. Whenever war becomes inevitable, it is but right and proper to appeal to God in all humility, as Lincoln did in his second inaugural address : " With malice towards none ; with charity for all ; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in ; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan ; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." Lincoln bowed in reverence to the Supreme Being. " With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." There are others now, who, in the arrogance of their military madness, dare to order God Almighty to form in the ranks with their other servants and to march to the fight for their ambitions 14 AND THE WAR and their privileges. The Imperial attitude would be laughable were it not for the infinite sorrow that it begets and for the sea of blood and tears in which the hopes of the world are sinking. 15 II THE WAR AND AMERICA The Smaller Nations The condition of America, meaning thereby the continent in its entirety, with the excep- tion of the colonies of European beUigerents in the present war, is one of neutrahty, known in International Law as an " attitude of im- partiahty." War in Europe has necessitated the immediate suppression of the institutional foundations of civil and muncipal life which have been superseded by martial law. The word "law," as expressing a concrete and well-defined scope of concepts and possibili- ties, is a misnomer in this instance. Martial law, in the essence, signifies the establishment of the unappealable criterion of the soldier for the government and guidance of the State. The normal evolution of collective and individual energies, based on the conventions and assumptions which, in their turn, have 16 THE WAR AND AMERICA been the result of human endeavour since the race began to breathe, and which are styled "civilisation," has come to an end. The soldier must primarily and exclusively consult the exigencies of war; the slightest neglect thereof would be the betrayal of a supreme trust. The exigencies of war are necessarily arbitrary and harsh ; without actual perversity they may become ruthless, and they may also degenerate into crime of the most dastardly and infamous nature, as proved by the agon- ising events which have been enacted in hapless Belgium. The law of war is the law of violence, and that is the supreme law in Europe at the present moment. Thus Europe is under the hegemony of barbarism. The potentialities of martial law, whether proclaimed by the home Government or by the enemy on occu- pied territory, are identical in that the criterion of the soldier is supreme and the exigencies of war are paramount. Fortunately for the future of humanity, at this dark hour of destiny, civilisation, that is to say, the endeavour after justice and liberty, finds a refuge in the continent of America. Impartiality does not mean indifference : the American nations could not, if they would, B 17 THE WAR AND AMERICA be indifferent. Their industrial and economic life and their future development are inti- mately and indissolubly identified with the economic and industrial life of Europe. All the countries of America, not excepting the United States, lean heavily upon European capital. From Mexico to Patagonia, European capital, principally English, has financed prac- tically whatever economic and industrial de- velopment has been attained. The outlay thereby incurred certainly does not fall short of one thousand million sterling. At home and abroad the war has paralysed all credit. Neutrality cannot achieve economic immunity. Notwithstanding the very large amount spent thus far, the Latin- American continent is in the infancy of its industrial develop- ment. It is estimated that the present war entails an outlay of £11,000,000 per day; one hun- dred days would mean £1,100,000,000. Europe weakened, impoverished, disheartened, will have no capital for foreign lands. Thus this war, irrespective of victory or defeat for the cause of justice or for the cause of militarism, will unavoidably paralyse the economic and 18 THE WAR AND AMERICA industrial development of Latin- America for an incalculable period of time. The political aspect of the situation requires a brief restatement of well-known facts in order to be accurately appreciated. The system of the balance of power, which has culminated in the hideous catastrophe of the present war, never succeeded in its aims beyond the maintenance of a precarious and vacillating armed peace in Europe; it begot tiie progressive competition of armaments ; the co-relative increase of taxation, and it fostered the spread of that blind and brutal spirit of militarism which, at this very hour, and acting from its principal stronghold, is throttling Europe to death. Peace — such as it was — only existed within the charmed circle of the Great Powers grouped in the System and their satellites and neighbours. Wars of conquest and op- pression were constantly waged now by one, now by another Power, the others looking on complacently, at times expectantly; and in this connexion the more liberal and en- lightened members of the System utterly disregarded the most elementary principles of justice and humanity by condoning iniquity or participating in the spoils. 19 THE WAR AND AMERICA Those wars were circumscribed within the Eastern Hemisphere. Eventually all the territory available for predatory purposes was appropriated and labelled. Those petty belli- cose sports were seldom fraught with more danger than a big-game hunt in the tropical jungle. They served, however, a multitude of purposes. They eased the tension of the idle and chafing fighting institutions; they supplied new opportunities for concessions, chartered companies and the like ; they justi- fied new contracts for arms and ships; they furnished editors with opportunities to ring the changes on *' patriotism," **the white man's burden," and to re-roast all the vener- able chestnuts of Jingoism. They also justi- fied the System evolved by the wisdom of the Powers which fostered and maintained the fraternity of the strong, founded on the robbery and oppression of the weak. Outstretched hands and longing eyes were constantly turned towards America ; there on that continent lay, waste and desert, terri- tories twice, three times as large as Europe ; there forest, river, mountain and valley in infinite variety teemed with natural wealth and untold possibilities of development. And that potential hearth of a cluster of mighty 20 THE WAR AND AMERICA imperial nations lay under the political sway of a few millions of degenerates who could be either eliminated if they resisted, or penned like sheep in some corner of the Pampas or the Amazon Valley if they submitted. Thus the Imperialistic dream. Those lands, however, are part of the continent of America, and they come under the following declaration made on the 2nd of December 1823 to the Congress of the United States by President Monroe : ** We owe it therefore to candour and to the ami- cable relations existing between the United States and those Powers (the European Powers) to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their System to any portion of this Hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety." Whilst the United States have not on all occasions carried this doctrine to its complete logical conclusion, the exclusion of the Euro- pean System has been successfully accom- plished. Democracy has a home unassailable by the militarism of Continental Europe. The small nations of America need not fear a fate like that of Belgium under the Prussian invasion. 21 Ill THE "SCRAP OF PAPER" For a human collectivity to be a nation ac- cording to international law, it must possess a territorial home of its own, permanent and defined by recognised boundaries. It must have a Government, that is to say, one or more persons representing the people and administering the affairs of the people accord- ing to the law of the nation, and it must have a sovereign composed of one or more in- dividuals in whom the supreme authority is vested. All these things together constitute a nation, the status of which is not affected by the size of the territory or the numbers of the population. War between nations entails not only the transient calamities of violence, the de- struction of life and property, and the con- sequent ruin and misery, but also loss of territory and even total dismemberment, which means the extinction of the nation. 22 THE "SCRAP OF PAPER" Such was the case of Poland, whose territory was parcelled out between Prussia, Austria, and Russia in 1772. Losses of territory generally take place after the conclusion of every war, as, in modern times, in Austria after Solferino, or in France after Sedan. The dangers of loss of territory or of loss of nationality through dismemberment are inherent in war; and war in its turn, as a possibility, lies in the very nature of things. The will of the victor becomes the sole and unappealable law after victory. All other previous conventions disappear, like smoke from the battlefields. Nations, weak or strong, are all subject to these unavoidable contingencies. When a nation is plunged into war, either through its own seeking or through the imposition of other nations, all these terrible possibilities supervene and loom on the horizon, as does the possibility of death for all combatants in the field. The nineteenth century, so fruitful in dis- coveries and combinations, often called inven- tions, brought forward, for the first time in history, an artifice to place a given and selected nation beyond war, and so beyond its dreadful dangers and contingencies. This wonderful makeshift arose from the jealousies 23 THE ''SCRAP OF PAPER" and rivalries of the strong, each of them moved by the fear that, in time of war, cir- cumstances might arise where the wilful or forced action of the selected nation might precipitate adverse results, which it was wise to forestall. The method consisted in the neutralisation of the territory in question under the guarantee of other nations. In this way the neutralised nation was placed beyond the possibility of war; the integrity of its territory and its political sovereignty were guaranteed, so that the nation itself could devote all its energies to the arts of peace and to the welfare of its citizens. Thus pro- tected, the neutralised nation could contem- plate war from afar, as a blast of malediction, powerless to do harm against the shield of a convention guaranteed by the honour of all the belligerents. Indeed, a most admirable state of affairs ! According to the solemn enactment of Euro- pean treaties at present in force, there are three neutralised nations: Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxemburg. The various treaties were signed in 1815, 1831, and 1867 respectively. The neutrality of Belgium was established and guaranteed in the document which recognised its independence, signed on the 15th of 24 THE "SCRAP OF PAPER" November 1831 by Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, and by Belgium herself, in witness of her acceptance of the duties and conditions of neutralisation. Neu- tralisation does not impair the rights of sovereignty ; the guarantee, however, ceases if the neutralised country carries out acts of war other than those of defence, or accepts undertakings that may lead to acts of war. Thus, the jocund land of Flanders became a gymnasium of the mind, worthy of the glorious traditions of its soil, so frequently drenched with blood, during past centuries, in the struggles for civil liberty and liberty of the human conscience. Thus also, without preconceived intention on their part, the signatory Powers, whilst serving their own ends, created a serene asylum for human thought and human endeavour, placing it beyond the menace of war. The German General Staff had planned the invasion of France through Luxemburg and Belgium. In matters of war Germany never hesitates; her troops invaded Luxem- burg in the first days of August ; on the 3rd of that month the German Minister in Belgium asked the Belgian Government, demanding a reply within twenty-four hours, to maintain 25 THE "SCRAP OF PAPER" a friendly neutrality and to allow the passage of the German troops through Belgian terri- tory. A refusal would mean war. Belgium chose the latter course, which perhaps was least in accordance with her own convenience, but which was decidedly the only one com- patible with honour. Battles, sieges, bombard- ments, and all the sanguinary turmoil of war supervened; and in their train came the un- necessary cruelties, the sacrifice of innocent civilians, the destruction of villages and cities, carried out as a manoeuvre in cold blood, as part of a plan for sowing terror in the minds of the people. The object was achieved. Horror has invaded the conscience of humanity, and the invaders have assured for themselves and for their arms a harvest of ignominy that nothing will efface. Whilst Germany and Austria wage war upon Bel- gium, England, France, and Russia, the other signatories of the treaty of neutralisation, defend her. The British intervention has fairly stupefied the Germans ; for faith in England's neutrality — as later developments have shown — was an integral part of the German military plans. Such a belief on the part of the Kaiser and his advisers reveals in them, under the circumstances, a diseased 26 THE "SCRAP OF PAPER" mentality, fraught with ominous potentialities for the peace of the world. The Note of the EngHsh Ambassador in Berlin, giving an account of the last inter- views which he had with the Foreign Minister and with the Chancellor of the German Empire, throws a glaring light on the tortuous idiosyncrasies of Prussian militarism and of the methods which it employs to extend to the world at large its system of blood and iron under which the German people, its first victim, has been kept for the last decades. The Ambassador says : " London, August 8, 1914. " In accordance with the instructions con- tained in your telegram of the 4th instant, I called upon the Secretary of State that afternoon and enquired, in the name of his Majesty's Government, whether the Imperial Government would refrain from violating Belgian neutrality. Herr von Jagow at once replied that he was sorry to say that his answer must be * No,' as, in consequence of the German troops having crossed the frontier that morning, Belgian neutrality had been already vio- lated. Herr von Jagow again went into the reasons why the Imperial Govern- 27 THE "SCRAP OF PAPER" merit had been obliged to take this step, namely, that they had to advance into France by the quickest and easiest way, so as to be able to get well ahead with their operations and endeavour to strike some decisive blow as early as possible. It was a matter of life and death for them, as if they had gone by the more southern route, they could not have hoped, in view of the paucity of roads and the strength of the fortresses, to have got through without formidable opposi- tion, entailing great loss of time. This loss of time would have meant time gained by the Russians for bringing up their troops to the German frontier. Rapidity of action was the great German asset, while that of Russia was an in- exhaustible supply of troops. . . . " During the afternoon I received your further telegram of the same date, and in compliance with the instructions therein contained, I again proceeded to the Imperial Foreign Office and informed the Secretary of State that unless the Imperial Government could give the assurance by 12 o'clock that night that they would proceed no further with their violation 28 THE "SCRAP OF PAPER" of the Belgian frontier and stop their advance, I had been instructed to demand my passports and inform the Imperial Government that his Majesty's Govern- ment would have to take all steps in their power to uphold the neutrality of Belgium and the observance of a treaty to which Germany was as much a party as themselves. ** Herr von Jagow replied that to his great regret he could give no other answer than that which he had given me earlier in the day, namely, that the safety of the Empire rendered it absolutely neces- sary that the Imperial troops should advance through Belgium. . . . " I then said that I should like to go and see the Chancellor, as it might be, per- haps, the last time I should have an op- portunity of seeing him. He begged me to do so. I found the Chancellor very agitated. His Excellency at once began a harangue, which lasted for about twenty minutes. He said that the step taken by his Majesty's Government was terrible to a degree ; just for a word — ' neutrality,' a word which, in war time, had so often been disregarded — just for a scrap of 29 THE "SCRAP OF PAPER" paper Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than to be friends with her. . . ." That '' scrap of paper " represented the peace and happiness of milUons of human beings, sheltered behind the honour of the signatory Powers. The symbol was destroyed, the doc- trine was outraged, honour disappeared, and there ensued the tempest of human fury, seek- ing to drown its own shame in the blood of its victims. In a memorial to King George V the Belgian Minister of Justice says : " Belgium, forced into a war of defence to save her institutions and the homes of her citizens, sought by every means in her power to maintain her resistance, respecting the restrictions that all civil- ised nations have accepted as the rules of conduct in time of war, and to observe strictly all the international conventions and to respect the conscience of humanity. Our enemy, after invading our territory, has sacrificed our population, has mur- dered our women and our children, has carried away into captivity many of our harmless citizens, has mutilated our 80 THE "SCRAP OF PAPER" wounded, destroyed defenceless cities, burnt churches and destroyed historical monuments, amongst them primarily the renowned library of the University of Louvain. All this stands on record in authentic and undeniable documents." It is useless to labour the point. It would be like blackening darkness. Belgium's tragedy, noble and glorious, has been imposed by the will of men as a punishment for her loyalty to the pledged word; it is luminous and fruitful as a martyrdom. The tragedy of the German people culminates in indelible ignominy. The " scraps of paper " are the protecting fortresses of right ; and right in its turn is the supreme haven of the weak. Were right to fail, what would become of the small nations that have neither armies where a million of soldiers forms the unit, nor navies where Dreadnoughts are counted by the score ? There is no room for illusion as to the causes of the present conflict and the inten- tions of those who prepared it and thrust it upon the world, like a hurricane of thunder- bolts. For the German and for the Austrian empires an oath stands only so long as it is 31 THE "SCRAP OF PAPER'* advantageous. For both empires their peoples are mere instruments to smite with, when and where the circumstances may require. And these circumstances are those of a tradition looking backward upon life and tottering under the weight of abuse, pitiless and blind and gasping for breath in the atmosphere of modern life. The immediate cause of the war, both in Vienna and in Berlin, is the fear of the Russian avalanche. "It is a matter of life and death to us," as Minister Jagow confessed. Surely neither the Kaiser nor his Ministers destroy international treaties for sport, out of mere perversity ! The alleged supreme law of necessity is no justification. If truth is to stand only so long as the lie is unprofitable, what is all this farce of honour amongst men ? Or is it that the lie amongst individuals be- comes truth and justice as between nations? Under these principles cities are sacked and burned to ashes, defenceless citizens are murdered, treason and deceit become the law of life ; everything is done in the name of the nation, and the golden gates of history are thrown open to the victor, advancing with the laurel wreath of triumphant patriotism on his brow. 32 THE "SCRAP OF PAPER" Belgium, France, Russia, and England may succumb, the victorious Kaiser may once again from Versailles, like a new Roi Soleil, dismember Europe, scattering the light of his favour amongst the subjugated peoples at his will ; the egregious professors of the German Universities may bend their servile necks to the ground ; the German Socialists may be- tray their principles, and history itself, written in blood, may sing the mendacious hymn of might as the supreme law of a defenceless and degenerate humanity; all this may happen, yet it will remain true that the respect for the "scraps of paper" will ever give the true measure of civilisation amongst men. In their stead there can only arise the law of the jungle, the claw or the tooth. Such is the goal heralded for humanity by the Kaiser and the Emperor. 88 IV INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE Uncle Toms Cabin was the prophetic book that preceded the Civil War of 1860 in the United States; it was a cry of anguish and of pity. The struggle between North and South was complex in its causes and its tendencies; in the tissue of its endeavours there were motives, some noble and some dastardly, as well as economic, social, and poli- tical reasons ; yet, it all culminated in the abolition of slavery. The life work of that generation, whose memory shall live grate- fully in the heart of humanity, crystallises in that redemption. The war which is now devastating Europe was also heralded by a book, sordid and cruel as the spirit which set it aflame. Mrs. Beecher Stowe voiced the feelings of the abolitionists, for whom the toleration of slavery in the land was tantamount to complicity in the crime; Bernhardi is the apostle and the prophet of 34 INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE Prussian militarism, condensed in the doctrine that might is right, which is as old as tyranny, renovated and strengthened in word and in deed by the Chancellor of " blood and iron," and by his predecessors, from the day of the first Elector of Brandenburg to the reigning Kaiser. The title of Bernhardi's book is Germany and the Next War, As literature it is worth- less : his reasoning is pliant to the object that he may have in view ; his information is super- ficial ; he neither argues nor proves, but dog- matises. The author doubtless had in mind The Prince ; between Bernhardi and Machia- velli, however, there exists a fundamental difference. The Florentine was not merely a man of genius, he was one of the greatest geniuses that the world has ever seen; the generations since his day have vainly sought to solve the riddle of his perverse and dis- concerting pages. Bernhardi is merely a gar- rulous drill-sergeant from the barrack heap of Prussian militarism ; he has gathered, as one would take water in a jug from the run- ning stream, the dominant tendencies of his people, by which the directing castes exploit and oppress the dumb and disciplined masses. On its appearance in 1911, Bernhardi's book 35 INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE awakened a certain degree of mild curiosity abroad. People were inclined to see in it an extravagant presentation of the old creed of might. As a rule, it was thought impossible that its shameless and cynical maxims should be the rules of national conduct for the best informed and most studious nation in the world. The book stood, therefore, as an in- dividual utterance, possibly sincere, wilfully exaggerated in search of notoriety, and not dis- interested, for under the shadow of militarism flourish promotion, decorations, and pensions, and the untold profitable and remunerated distinctions of the service. All these circum- stances were greatly enhanced by the fact that there stood on the steps of the throne, ready, when the time should come, to take upon his hallowed shoulders the sacred burden of the divine right of kings, the most foohsh and hare-brained prince that Europe has seen looming as a menace on the near horizon for countless centuries of history. The war has demonstrated that Bernhardi revealed the fundamental principles of Prussian officialdom. Thus his book becomes the Prussian gospel, and that gospel is the gospel of brigandage, harmless whilst it was the effusion of an obscure, pushful soldier, but 86 INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE ominous for mankind the moment it becomes the law of evolution of a system supported by- millions of bayonets, alive and directed with skill, with relentless tenacity, and with all the resources of modern science. A few quotations from the book suffice to show what may be the fate of humanity should Prussia be victorious. Defending the sanctity of war as an ele- ment of life for humanity, and defining his infamous conception that weakness or the condition of inferiority is a crime in the eyes of justice, he says: " If we sum up our arguments, we shall see that, from the most opposite aspects, the efforts directed towards the abolition of war must not only be termed foolish but absolutely immoral, and must be stigmatised as unworthy of the human race. To what does the whole question amount ? It is proposed to deprive men of the right and the possibility to sacrifice their highest material possessions, their physical life, for ideals, and thus to realise the highest moral unselfishness. It is proposed to obviate the great quarrels be- tween nations and States by Courts of 37 INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE Arbitration — that is, by arrangements. A one-sided, restricted, formal law is to be established in the place of the decisions of history. The weak nation is to have the same right to live as the powerful and vigorous nation. The whole idea represents a presumptuous encroachment on the natural laws of development, which can only lead to the most disastrous consequences for humanity generally." His conception of the motives that guide men individually and collectively, and of the value and scope of right, is thus expressed : "There can be no doubt on this point. The nation is made up of individuals, the State of communities. The motive which influences each member is prominent in the whole body. It is a persistent struggle for possessions, power, and sovereignty, which primarily governs the relations of one nation to another, and right is re- spected so far only as it is compatible with advantage." This doctrine, that right should only be respected as long as it is compatible with advantage, has become the fundamental law of the German Empire; it has been conse- 88 INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE crated by the violation of Belgian neutrality, by the destroyed cities, by the torture of an innocent population, and by a sea of blood throughout Flanders. Bernhardi looms on the horizon in the lurid light of Belgian devastation as the prophet of iniquity now developed into a system of government. Bernhardi continues : " Strong, healthy, and flourishing nations increase in numbers. From a given moment they require a continual ex- pansion of their frontiers, they require new territory for the accommodation of their surplus population. Since almost every part of the globe is inhabited, new territory must, as a rule, be obtained at the cost of its possessors — that is to say, by conquest, which thus becomes a law of necessity." "... Lastly, in all times the right of conquest by war has been admitted. It may be that a growing people cannot win colonies from uncivilised races, and yet the State wishes to retain the surplus population which the mother- country can no longer feed. Then the only course left is to acquire the necessary territory 39 INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE by war. Thus the instinct of self-pre- servation leads inevitably to war and the conquest of foreign soil. It is not the possessor, but the victor, who then has the right. In such cases might gives the right to occupy or to conquer. Might is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war. War gives a bio- logically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things." "... But the acts of the State cannot be judged by the standard of individual morality. If the State wished to conform to this standard it would often find itself at variance with its own particular duties. The morality of the State must be de- veloped out of its own peculiar essence, just as individual morality is rooted in the personality of the man and his duties toward society. The morality of the State must be judged by the nature and raison detre of the State and not of the individual citizen. But the end-all and be-all of a State is power, and * he who is not man enough to look this truth in the face should not meddle in politics,' says Treitschke. 40 INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE "... In the face of these claims the German nation, from the standpoint of its importance to civilisation, is fully entitled not only to demand a place in the sun, as Prince Biilow used modestly to express it, but to aspire to an adequate share in the sovereignty of the world far beyond the limits of its present sphere of influence. But we can only reach this goal by so amply securing our position in Europe that it can never again be questioned. Then only we need no longer fear that we shall be opposed by stronger opponents whenever we take part in international politics. We shall then be able to exercise our forces freely in fair rivalry with the other World Powers, and secure to German nationality and German spirit throughout the globe that high esteem which is due to them. Such an expansion of power, befitting our importance, is not merely a fanciful scheme — it will soon appear as a political necessity." "... We shall very soon see ourselves compelled to find for our growing popu- lation means of life other than industrial employment. It is out of the question 41 INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE that this latter can keep pace permanently with the increase of population. Agri- culture will employ a small part of this increase, and home settlements may afford some relief. But no remunerative occu- pation will ever be found within the borders of the existing German Empire for the whole population, however favour- able our international relations. We shall soon, therefore, be faced by the question whether we wish to surrender the coming generations to foreign countries, as formerly in the hour of our decline, or whether we wish to take steps to find them a home in our own German colonies, and so retain them for the Fatherland. There is no possible doubt how this question must be answered. If the unfortunate course of our history has hitherto pre- vented us from building a colonial Empire, it is our duty to make up for lost time, and at once to construct a fleet which, in defiance of all hostile Powers, may keep our sea communications open." "... Our people must learn to see that the maintenance of peace never can or may he the goal of a policy, . . . The inevi- tableness, the idealism, and the blessing 42 INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasised." It is unnecessary to insist further ; the whole development of the present war proves that Bernhardi's theories are the guiding principles of the German Empire. Such theories cannot be justified by alleged bio- logical laws ; man's superiority over the beast lies precisely in his capacity for improvement, which consists primarily in man's power to educate and to control his instincts towards co-operation, outside and beyond the struggle of extermination which is the law of the lower organisms. The biological necessity of war implies the negation of all conception of civilisation, which fundamentally imposes limitations on the voracity of appetites. Germany's longing for political conquest can only be satisfied on the American continent. Germany knows that her children are welcome colonists in all the nations of America, but Germany does not only want homes for the overflow of her population; she wants to keep her emigrants under the shadow of her flag. She does not want them to strengthen the sinews of another nation, a possible rival, 43 INTERNATIONAL BRIGANDAGE as in the case of the United States, where there are millions of German descent who to-day neither pay taxes towards the cost of past wars in Germany, nor fight Germany's battles at the present hour. All the nations of America should bear in mind what a menace lies for them in a victory for Prussia. Their integrity would be threatened with a very brief delay. Berlin would not rest upon her laurels . . . that is to say, if she manages to get any. 44 SOWING THISTLES AND GATHERING THORNS Bismarck, Moltke, and von Roon, the real organisers of the victory of 1870-71, were not of one mind when the time came for dictating the conditions of peace. The first did not wish to mutilate France, and sought compen- sation for the war and the reward of victory in a heavy pecuniary indemnity, bleeding France white, as calves are bled to produce veal. Moltke, on military grounds, demanded the retention of the fortresses of Metz and Strassburg and the extension of the German frontier to the Vosges, thus completing the strategic formation of the Empire. The Emperor, who had recently been proclaimed in Versailles, supported Moltke, and France was mutilated. The victorious trio, weary now of war, wished to secure peace, and German hegemony in Europe, on the basis of a system of " blood and iron," inside and out- 45 SOWING THISTLES AND side the Fatherland. They forgot, however, the human element, which refuses to tolerate barrack discipline as a rule of life ; they forgot that territorial spoliation leaves behind it a burning hatred, which the years fan into a fiercer flame, and that men's minds and feel- ings are not shaped and set towards affection by the gentle persuasion of the drill-sergeant. Those far-seeing strategists and tacticians, those unerring organisers of violence, proved short-sighted in their appreciation of a nation's soul, which broods and dreams and remembers. They had before their eyes Poland, untamed after a hundred years of dismemberment, and they created a Western Poland in Alsace and Lorraine. Instead of peace, they established an armed peace; they produced a latent war, destined to break out into open war, as inevitably as a dam is bound to overflow, towards which the surrounding waters pour their unceasing tribute. They imposed on Europe a com- petition in armaments, which in its turn brought about a rise in taxation, economic oppression, social discontent, the resentment of the proletariat, crushed between poverty and compulsory military service, the obstruc- tion of all attempts to reform social injustices, 46 GATHERING THORNS and the steering of a course towards the abyss — either of internal revolution, through the desperation of the masses, or of foreign war, as a safety-valve for the intolerable pressure. To this latter things have unavoid- ably come. The three Germans, in whom the victory of forty-three years ago was em- bodied, cast into the blood-soaked furrow the seed of error; to-day Europe is reaping the catastrophe. A few weeks of this new war, which is the inevitable corollary of the former, have sufficed utterly to falsify the axiomatic calculations of the militarists. The German General Staff rejects or ignores two factors : personal dignity and the individual and collective sense of liberty. German officers go to the length of lashing their men with their whips, and the soldiers, one and all, humiliate and outrage civilians whenever and however they please, all as part of the system of ** blood and iron," which, like charity in the proverb, begins at home. Blind faith in this system, as a standard of judgment in all human activities, has already yielded its harvest of disillusionment for the astonished Kaiser and for his people, in whom, even in those who dreamt of liberty, the tradition of forty years of militarist oppression 47 SOWING THISTLES AND has bred a servile spirit, which, hke second nature, rises supreme in critical situations. It was thought : the hour is propitious. We must so crush Russia that never again shall she be able to threaten our development. If necessary, Japan will once more attack her enemy of yesterday. France, both because of her definite alliance and because her own existence is at stake, will make war on us. We shall be able to overcome both our enemies, one after the other. We shall invade France on the North, marching our troops through Luxemburg and Belgium ; and, avoiding the network of fortresses near the Rhin eland, which would hold us up for weeks, perhaps for months, we shall fall on Paris like a thunderbolt. Our artillery will reduce the fortress in a day. It will be sufficient to show that the only alternative is the razing of the city to the ground : Notre Dame in ruins, the Louvre in flames, will be more eloquent than any word from human lips. Paris — faithful to her courtezan spirit — will surrender. The rest — the submission of France and her dis- armament — will follow without delay. We shall leave her under an army of occupation, and terrorised by a few examples of salutary " frightfulness " which, although they " make 48 GATHERING THORNS our hearts bleed," shall teach her with blood and tears — which is the way to train the conquered — th^^t the mere attempt at rebellion means death. We shall thus be able to turn upon Russia — a Russia already weakened by the troops of our ally, Austria. Our triumphant soldiers will sweep across the steppes in a hurricane of victory, and we shall dictate peace in St. Petersburg, as we shall have already dictated it in Paris. We shall have to take into account the obstacles in our path. Belgium and Luxem- burg are neutral countries by virtue of a treaty to which we are signatories, which guarantees the inviolability of their territory. Treaties, however, are mere scraps of paper which can be torn up whenever convenient. Luxem- burg will not be able to offer any resistance. Belgium is hardly in a position to make the attempt ; and if she does, we will sweep her aside, as we would kick a dog from our path. Austria will do the same with Serbia, which has supplied the spark of pretext for the already prepared European conflagration. Italy, our ally, will join us. We shall quieten her scruples concerning the letter of the treaty — which only binds her to come D 49 SOWING THISTLES AND to our assistance if we are the attacked, and not the attackers — with the vision of territorial expansion in Africa. All this will follow as surely as the Rhine flows into the North Sea. What will Great Britain do ? Her leaders tell us that their hands are free : the entente is not an alliance. Great Britain will not join in the war. She has too many problems to deal with in her overseas Empire, as well as in her own house. In Ireland the political parties are organised into armed forces, equipped with the weapons which have been shipped from our shores, thanks to a timely tolerance on our part, and they keep the country on the brink of civil war. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will eagerly seize the first opportunity to shake off the mother-country's yoke. In India a smouldering rancour, embittered by the refusal of the right of entry into British Columbia to the Hindoos, will break out into the open rebellion of a people which has never forgotten the horrors of the Sepoy war. East and West and South and North, Great Britain weighs on the world like a curse, and the races which she calls inferior, and the colonies of her own race which now have their own aspira- tions, will find in this conflict the hour of their deliverance. 50 GATHERING THORNS There remain, too, the Boers in South Africa, vanquished, deprived of their sove- reignty, and reduced to the condition of a colony. There the rebellion will be immediate. It was but yesterday that England needed 250,000 men and three years in order to overcome this people, which all told — men, women, and children — scarcely numbered half a million souls. If Great Britain declares war on Germany, Germany's most effective ally will be the Boers, who will recover their independence and found under German hegemony the Empire of South Africa, which will include the old Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, as well as Cape Colony, Natal, and Rhodesia, and which will be able to spread without let or hindrance over the whole of the Dark Continent. So dreamt the Kaiser, and with him his whole people — masters and men, merchants and bankers, peers and commoners, reaction- aries and liberals, and the very elect of intellectual Germany, the thinkers and philo- sophers. Educated in a materialistic faith and servile discipline, even the wisest explorers of nature's mazes, even the revealers of the secret of the intangible atom, even the demon- 51 SOWING THISTLES AND strators of the innermost mysteries of organic life, thought it possible to rule the world with no other element than force, and thus to control the course of history, as surely and effectively as they crush the will of the soldier or fix the trajectory of a projectile. And the hour of disillusionment has come with overwhelming rapidity. Japan fights on the side of Russia, and the siege-guns which Krupp sold her to use against Russia she makes over to Russia herself; nor do we hear of these, as we do of those sold by Krupp to Belgium, that they were made purposely defective, to prepare the way for the Prussian triumph. In declaring war on Germany, Japan repeats with reminiscent irony the very phrases Germany had used twenty years before in despoiling her of the territory of Kaio Chau, from which Japan now ousts out Germany. Italy has not come in to fight for her allies of yesterday. The wall of paper in Belgium has proved to be a wall of granite, which has materially obstructed the course of invasion and completely upset the plan of campaign. Serbia, from being invaded, has become the invader. Russia advances like an avalanche in Prussia and in Austria. The latter, in the words of Mr. Gardiner, the editor 52 GATHERING THORNS of the Daily News, possesses " the genius of defeat." And — the crowning disaster — Great Britain has east her sword and her treasure into the scale of war. The colonies have made common cause with the Motherland. From Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and India come men in tens of thousands, and money by the million, to fight for the Empire. The war has united and quickened the British Empire as an electric current galvanises a wire. In defence of their conqueror of yesterday, the Boers take up again the arms they laid down at the end of the late war, and the German guns which were knowingly supplied to the Irish parties will, with the union of these parties, be used against the German troops. All this is incomprehensible to the German mind, which regards a colony as a dependency governed with the sole object of exploitation for the benefit of the mother-country, and which sees in the vanquished merely fit sub- jects for enslavement. Such are Germany's colonies, and such have been her vanquished in the provinces wrested from France. In her poetry and literature. Freedom (Freiheit) is a tutelary deity; but she has never come down to dwell among her people. 53 SOWING THISTLES AND So long as there exists what the Germans call Majestdtsbeleidigung {Use majeste), so long as incidents like that of Zabern are logical and normal, to speak of Freedom is a mere abuse of the term, which betrays a rash con- fidence in the foolish credulity of mankind. And it is this freedom, or the genuine striving after it, that constitutes the essence of the mystery which the Kaiser fails to understand, and which has brought him such a bitter harvest of surprise and disillusion- ment. Forty-three years after their conquest and annexation, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine are as far removed from the German Empire in spirit and in aspirations, as suspicious and as aggrieved, as at the moment of their annexation. Twelve years after the loss of their independence, following on as cruel and bloody a war as ever was fought, the conquered Boers sally forth to fight for England under the command of Botha him- self — the last to surrender his sword in the late conflict. For Great Britain victory did not consti- tute a right to oppress. Before long the vanquished were granted complete autonomy under the aegis of the Empire. The Kaiser counted on their disaffection because, looking 54 GATHERING THORNS at home, he imagined the vanquished as sub- ject to oppression and outrage organised into a system of government. Freedom and equaUty before the law never entered into his calculations, for he knows nothing of these things. The very words have no meaning for him. General Beyers, the Commander-in-Chief of the South African forces, sent in his resig- nation in order not to assist England. He declared that he forgave, but could not forget ; that he bore in mind the horrors of the war in which his people had been subdued. In accepting his resignation, General Smuts, the Minister of Finance and Defence in the Union of South Africa, wrote to him : " You forget to mention that since the South African War the British people gave South Africa her entire freedom under a Constitution which makes it possible for us to realise our national ideals along our own lines, and which, for instance, allows you to write with impunity a letter for which you would without doubt be liable in the German Empire to the ex- treme penalty." In Germany, whoever refuses to join the colours is shot, as many Socialists have been, and as Samain was for the crime of refusing 55 SOWING THISTLES to take up arms against the Fatherland dear to his heart. Prussian miUtarism slays who- ever is not with it, men or nations; hence the world is up in arms against it, in self- defence. 56 VI THE LAWS OF WAR Up to a comparatively recent period, war re- cognised no difference between combatants and non-combatants. Each individual member of one nation went to war with each and every member of the other. Killing was per- missible under all circumstances, without regard to condition, age, or sex ; the right of private property disappeared, and confiscation knew no other bounds than the power or the pleasure of the enemy. There was no refuge nor protection for the vanquished : men har- boured no sense of pity in their hearts. It was true, remorselessly true, that the only salvation for the conquered was to expect none from the conqueror. Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem. Perhaps the oldest law of war, stated in precise and concrete terms, is contained in Samuel's exhortation or command to Saul. Possibly in Nineveh too, in Babylon, in 57 THE LAWS OF WAR Egypt, or in India, rules of war were framed at an earlier period than Samuel's. It is part of human nature to clothe iniquity in the garb of precept. With a precedent thus established, the sense of responsibihty dis- appears : crime is no longer crime, but obedi- ence to the law. If Samuel's commands — edifying and illuminating in their way — are not the oldest of their kind, they are the best known among Christians — the Old Testament, as well as the New, being part of Holy Writ. The Scripture says (1 Samuel xv. 1-3) : " Samuel also said unto Saul, The Lord sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the Lord. "Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I re- member that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way when he came up from Egypt. ** Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not ; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." It is impossible to be clearer or more pre- 58 THE LAWS OF WAR cise. Without doubt the High Priest was conscious of the prophetic breath while utter- ing these injunctions, and foresaw that they must not apply simply and solely to the matter in hand — the extermination of Amalek, " who laid wait for Israel in the way, when he came up from Egypt'' — for that would have been to limit the application of his words to a passing act of punishment or vengeance. One is not a High Priest for nothing ; it was a ques- tion of legislating for the ages — which Samuel did, and with marvellous efficacy. To-day, in the twentieth century of the Christian era, Samuel's commands flourish anew, as com- prehensive and as inflexible as though the Crucified had never died on Golgotha to redeem mankind from hatred and error. ** Spare them not." Samuel — High Priest as he was — knew how to crystallise his teach- ing, and this in its turn was not a seed that fell on stony or on barren ground. It was carried out by David, king of kings, and servant of the Lord, with exemplary conscientiousness. (2 Samuel xii. 29-31) : *' And David gathered all the people to- gether, and went to Rabbah, and fought against it, and took it. 59 THE LAWS OF WAR " And he took their king's crown from off his head, the weight whereof was a talent of gold with the precious stones: and it was set on David's head. And he brought forth the spoil of the city in great abundance. " And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln : and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. So David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem." Samuel comprised in his words the very essence of the law of war. Nothing was omitted. Why should Amalek be extermi- nated ? Because he laid wait for Israel in the way. That was enough. The mere lying in wait was the crime. We are not told why Israel "came up," or whether he did so rightly or wrongly, or whether in so doing he injured Amalek or not, or whether Amalek was justified in lying in wait. Samuel accepts no excuses: Amalek lay in wait, therefore let Amalek perish. This — and remember that it was a question of fixing the law for succeed- 60 THE LAWS OF WAR ing generations throughout the ages (for Samuel must have known what he was about) — this is beautifully clear and simple. It excludes all argument and settles and defines what constitutes right and justice with — a woman's reason. Samuel did not confine himself to the mere exposition of his doctrine in the form of a peremptory command. Albeit he was High Priest, Samuel was mortal, which might have lowered the credit of his word. Samuel found a formula to make his voice ring from century to century in the minds of men, continually accumulating authority from tradition, just as, in a cavern, the rolling of the thunder re- doubles with the reverberating echoes. In reality it was a question of vengeance, carried to the very extreme of blind and brutal savagery. What did Samuel do to lend dignity and unimpeachable authority to this act ? He had recourse to the Almighty, and fixed on Him the tremendous and shameful responsibility. " Thus saith the Lord of hosts." So Samuel became the founder of a school of blasphemy. And let it not be argued that no estimate of a moral code can be acceptable which does not include, as an essential feature, the 61 THE LAWS OF WAR scrupulous consideration of the current ideas constituting the moral atmosphere of the period in question ; and that it is not legiti- mate to apply the moral standards of our day, when mercy is on the lips of all and in the hearts of some, to a stage of human de- velopment in which the lex talionis exacted an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Let it not be argued thus; for Jehovah is one and unchangeable, in whose hands eternity is less thaa a grain of sand upon the seashore. Another explanation is possible : that Samuel fashioned a Jehovah to serve the hates and passions of Samuel. And this latter is the true explanation. For the rest, now as always, the negation of pity is the negation of God. From Samuel onwards, in the course of the centuries, there has been no bold, blood- thirsty ruffian who, wittingly or unwittingly, has not followed Samuel's precedent. Men and women have been vilified, humiliated, tortured, sacrificed and enslaved, in the name of God, by all the villains in history. All of them, we may say, at all times and on all occasions, have blazoned the name of God on their infamous banners ; and from the great criminals the practice has spread to those of 62 THE LAWS OF WAR lesser degree. The political highwaymen in the revolutionary countries of America, among others, usurp the name of God to cloak robbery and murder. The system has been perfected. Religion is confined to a fac- tion; God in His turn is part of religion. Those who, in temporal affairs, oppose the faction — as Amalek opposed Israel — are ipso facto enemies of God, and — ** spare them not." But the abuse of the system by gentry of little repute would end by bringing it into discredit. The danger of this increased in direct proportion to the progressive develop- ment of the baleful spirit of analysis and perverse curiosity of our time. P^ortunately for the system, if not for humanity, the crowned lords of Potsdam and Vienna now come forth, sword in hand, to defend it, among others, and they say to terror-stricken humanity, " None shall be spared who oppose us." From the commands of Samuel to the doctrines of Bernhardi, from Saul to the Kaiser — to the latter's people at least — we pass without break in continuity. The spirit of mercy, based on the teaching of Christ, was slowly working towards miti- gating the horrors of war — seeing that in the 63 THE LAWS OF WAR present condition of mankind it is impossible to abolish them, which would mean the abolition of war itself. And so, certain humani- tarian practices were springing up for sup- pressing unnecessary cruelty and the useless destruction of wealth, for ameliorating the lot of the wounded and the prisoners, and for protecting the life and property of non- combatants; all this without weakening the supreme law of war, which admits of every- thing short of the most flagrant cruelty and infamy to secure victory, or, as the phrase is, to fulfil the exigencies of military law, which is the law of triumph. It is to the United States of America that the honour belongs of having made the first attempt to codify the laws of war in a spirit of watchful altruism. This attempt took the form of '' Instructions for the government of armies in the field," issued in 1863 by Mr. Seward, the Secretary for War. The following clauses illustrate the standard adopted : ** Military necessity, as understood by modern civilised nations, consists in the necessity of those measures which are indispensable for securing the ends of the 64 THE LAWS OF WAR war, and which are lawful according to the modern law and usages of war. " Military necessity admits of all direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies, and of other persons whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of the war ; it allows of the capturing of every armed enemy, and every enemy of importance to the hostile government, or of peculiar danger to the captor ; it allows of all destruction of property, and obstruction of the ways and channels of traffic, travel, or com- munication, and of all withholding of sustenance or means of life from the enemy ; of the appropriation of whatever an enemy's country affords necessary for the subsistence and safety of the army, and of such deception as does not involve the breaking of good faith either posi- tively pledged, regarding agreements entered into during the war, or supposed by the modern law of war to exist. Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God. " Military necessity does not admit of E 65 THE LAWS OF WAR cruelty — that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or of revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions. It does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor of the wanton devasta- tion of a district. It admits of deception, but disclaims acts of perfidy; and, in general, military necessity does not in- clude any acts of hostility which make the return of peace unnecessarily difficult." In 1864 the principal European Powers signed the Geneva Convention for the ameli- oration of the condition of the sick and wounded of armies in the field ; to-day almost every civilised nation has adhered to this convention. It was due to the initiative of M. Jean Henri Dunant, a citizen of Geneva, who was moved by infinite pity for the fate of thousands of wounded men, whom he had seen dying, helpless and in agony, on the field of Solferino after the battle. In 1868 the Powers signed at St. Petersburg (now Petrograd) an agreement prohibiting the use of explosive projectiles below certain dimensions. In 1899 the First Peace Confer- ence met at The Hague, and adopted a " con- 66 THE LAWS OF WAR vention with respect to the laws and customs of war on land," following very closely the spirit of the instructions issued by the United States. This convention was ratified, and its scope extended, at the Second Peace Confer- ence in 1907. It is supplemented by further conventions signed at this Second Conference, " respecting the limitation of the employment of force for the recovery of contractual debts," "relative to the opening of hostilities," "re- specting the rights and duties of neutral powers and persons in case of war on land," and "relative to the laying of automatic submarine contact mines." The nations signatory to the Convention regulating war on land expressly laid it down in the preamble to this solemn instrument that " the cases not provided for should not, for want of a written provision, be left to the arbitrary judgment of the military com- manders," and that " in cases not included in the Regulations adopted by them, populations and belligerents should remain under the pro- tection and empire of the principles of inter- national law, as they result from the usages established between civilised nations, from the laws of humanity, and the requirements of the public conscience." 67 THE LAWS OF WAR All this is contrary to Samuel's simple law : "destroy all that they have and spare them not." The distance between this simple formula and the complex regulations of the Hague Conferences, which is only a first step, represents a slow and painful process of gesta- tion in the human mind, an irrepressible impulse of love and compassion for the wounded, the helpless, and the unprotected, as human beings, without distinction of nationality or race. Small as are the re- sults obtained, they are nevertheless a germ of consolation, and whoever transgresses them commits a double crime against the human race : the violation of a covenant of mercy and the annihilation of all hopes of emancipation from arbitrary and ruthless violence as a law of life among men. Writing in 1889, the Enghsh jurist, W. E. Hall, in the introduction to his book on Inter- national Law, says : "And it would be idle also to pretend that Europe is not now in great likeli- hood moving towards a time at which the strength of international law will be too hardly tried. Probably in the next great war the questions which have ac- 68 i THE LAWS OF WAR cumulated during the last half century and more, will all be given their answers at once. Some hates moreover will crave for satisfaction; much envy and greed will be at work; but above all, and at the bottom of all, there will be the hard sense of necessity. Whole nations will be in the field; the com- merce of the world may be on the sea to win or lose ; national existence will be at stake ; men will be tempted to do anything which will shorten hostilities and tend to a decisive issue. Conduct in the next great war will certainly be hard ; it is very doubtful if it will be scrupulous, whether on the part of belli- gerents or neutrals ; and most likely the next war will be great. But there can be very little doubt that if the next war is unscrupulously waged, it also will be followed by a reaction towards increased stringency of law." This prophecy has been fulfilled within twenty-five years of its utterance. The mutterings of the storm which to-day agi- tates the universal conscience, are mutterings of accusation, and the Prussian armies are 69 THE LAWS OF WAR the accused. In every war accusations of atrocities by one belligerent against the other supervene, which afterwards either do not materialise, or turn out to have been magni- fied beyond all recognition. But Louvain, Dinant, Termonde, and Rheims admit of no excuse or palliation; they corroborate, by inference, the accusations which are heard on all sides of the shooting of unarmed civilians, regardless of condition or sex, and they estab- lish the historic fact that the God of the Kaiser is the fierce and vindictive Jehovah, and not the God who preached the law of love and forgiveness by the mouth of the Crucified. Why was Amalek exterminated ? Because he laid wait for Israel in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Why do the Prussians ravage Belgium? Why do they slaughter her innocent inhabitants ? Why do they burn her towns and villages and lay waste her fields ? Because she resisted Prussia, when Prussia broke her pledged word and ** came up " against France. The nation which claims to wield the sceptre of cul- ture goes back thousands of years into the twilight of history for precedents of violence. This is a reversion to barbarism pure and simple. 70 THE LAWS OF WAR In order to instil terror, precept goes in the van of practice. The written word will live long after the present turmoil of grief and rage, of grasping ambition and heroic en- deavour, has been blotted out in the merciful gloom of oblivion, and only the funda- mental outlines of history stand out against the dark background. This written word will be a lasting memorial of shame. In a decree issued in the name of the German authorities at Rheims, it is stated, among other things, that : ** With the object of providing an ade- quate guarantee for the safety of the troops and of inducing a spirit of calm in the city, the persons indicated below have been seized and retained as host- ages by the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces. These hostages will be hanged on the slightest attempt at dis- order. Further, the city will be wholly or partly burned, and its inhabitants hanged, for any violation whatever of these orders." The following proclamation was issued by the Commander of the German forces at Grivegnee, near Liege : 71 THE LAWS OF WAR "Important Notice. "Township of Grivegnee. "Major Dieckmann warns the inhabitants that: *' 1. Before 4 o'clock in the afternoon of the 6th September 1914, all arms, am- munition, explosives and fireworks still in the possession of the inhabitants must be deposited at the Chateau des Bruyeres. Whoever disobeys this order will be liable to be shot. He will be shot on the spot or else executed, unless he can prove that he is not at fault. "2. All the inhabitants of occupied houses in the localities of Beyne-Heusay, Grivegnee, Bois-de-Breux and Fleron, must return to their houses at nightfall (which is now at 7 p.m. German time). The aforementioned houses are to be lighted as long as anyone is up. The outer doors must be closed. Anyone who does not obey these directions renders himself liable to be severely punished. Any resistance to orders will be punished by death. " 3. The Commandant must not meet 72 THE LAWS OF WAR with any hindrance during his domiciliary- visits. People are requested to show all the rooms of the house without being ordered to. Anyone who opposes this will be severely punished. " 4. After 9 a.m. on the 7th September, I will permit the houses in Beyne-Heusay, Grivegnee, and Bois-de-Breux to be in- habited by the persons who lived in them formerly, as long as these persons are not forbidden to frequent these localities by official prohibition. "5. In order that the above-mentioned permit may not be abused, the Burgo- masters of Beyne-Heusay and Grivegnee must immediately prepare lists of persons who will be held as hostages for 24 hours each at Fort Fleron. The first list must be ready to cover the period from the 6th September 1914, at 6 p.m., till the 7th September at midday. The life of these hostages depends on the population of the above-mentioned Communes remain- ing quiet in any circumstances. During the night it is strictly forbidden to show any luminous signs. Bicycles are only permitted between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. German time. 73 74 THE LAWS OF WAR " 6. From the list which is submitted to me I will designate persons who shall be hostages from midday till the follow- ing midday. If the substitute is not there at the correct time, the hostage must remain another 24 hours at the fort. After these 24 hours the hostage will incur the penalty of death, if the substitute has not presented himself. ** 7. Priests, Burgomasters, and Mem- bers of the Administration are to be taken first as hostages. " 8. I insist that all the civilians who move in my district, particularly those of Beyne-Heusay,Fl^ron, Bois-de-Breux and Grivegn^e, show their respect to the German officers by taking off their hats, or lifting their hands to their heads in military salute. In case of doubt, every German soldier must be saluted. Anyone who disregards this must ex- pect the military to make themselves re- spected by every means. " 9. The German soldiers are permitted to inspect all vehicles, parcels, etc., of all inhabitants of the neighbourhood. In this connexion all resistance will be severely punished. THE LAWS OF WAR " 10. Whoever knows that quantities greater than 100 litres of petroleum, benzine, benzol, or any similar liquid is to be found at a given place in the above- mentioned Communes, and who does not inform the military Commandant there, when there is no doubt as to the place or the quantity, incurs death. Quantities of 100 litres only are referred to. "11. Anyone who does not obey the order * hands up ' renders himself liable to be shot. " 12. Entrance to the Chateau des Bruyeres, and also of the drives in the park, is forbidden under penalty of death between dusk and dawn, between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. (German time), to all persons who are not soldiers of the German army. ** 13. During the daytime entrance is only permitted by the North- West gate, where the guard is, to persons holding permits. In the interests of the popula- tion, persons are not permitted to assemble in the proximity of the guard. ** 14. Whoever spreads false news, liable to lower the moral of the German troops, and whoever makes any plans directed 75 THE LAWS OF WAR against the German army, will be a sus- pect, and runs the risk of being shot on the spot. "15. While, by the above regulations, the inhabitants of the district of Fortress Illb. are threatened with severe punish- ments if they infringe these regulations in any way, these same people, if they show themselves peaceable, can count on the most benevolent protection and help on every occasion when harm is or might be done to them. " 16. Demands for the giving of a fixed quantity of cattle are made daily, from 10 to 12 in the morning and from 2 to 3 in the afternoon, at the Chateau des Bruyeres by the Cattle Commission. "17. Whoever injures or attempts to injure the German army by taking ad- vantage of the Red Cross flag, and is discovered, will be hanged. " (Signed) Dieckmann, " Commandant' Major, " Copy certified correct : " The Burgomaster : Victor Hodeige. "Grivegnee, 8/^ September 1914." And yet Prussia had covenanted that the appreciation of the circumstances should not 76 THE LAWS OF WAR be left to the arbitrary judgment of military commanders, and that the populations should remain under the protection of international law. It is true, on the other hand, we must admit, that the gallant Commander-in- Chief assures the above-mentioned inhabitants " the most benevolent protection and help on every occasion when harm is or might be done to them." So circumstances alter cases. After all, how can one dare to ask for more ? 77 VII THE LAW OF NECESSITY Necessity knows no law. So runs the Latin proverb: Necessitas caret lege. To-day this law — which is no law — is invoked anew to justify the violation, actual or potential, of every established law. So we go back from the precise to the vague, from the logical to the arbitrary. Truly, it is not a sign of pro- gress, still less of culture, without which there is no progress. The civilised nations form a community which we call the Family of Nations. In ancient times this did not exist: the great empires were the only nations. In the Middle Ages the conditions changed but little; the break-up of the Roman Empire, the growth of the feudal system, the consolidation of the royal power, were steps leading up to the more precise formation of nationalities, effected in its fundamental outlines by the Renaissance, and perfected in our own times. 78 THE LAAV OF NECESSITY The members of this Family of Nations, like the human beings composing each one of them, live subject to certain usages, customs, and traditions, and to written laws which, for greater solemnity, at times take the form of treaties ; these are only arrived at by pro- tracted bargaining and laborious analysis until a formula is found adequate to the case in contemplation. The nations which compose this Family are for the most part Christian, as is clear from the ostensible aim of their actions. They are bound to one another, in varying degrees of closeness, according to the special circumstances, by the exigencies of trade and industry; international commerce was, and is, the cement that binds together the universal structure on which present-day civilisation is based. Besides a common re- ligious tendency, there is community — which is not to say identity — of standards in morality and art, in poetic conception, and in historic attitude towards the phenomena of life. Science is common property — a field of labour in which the furrow yields its fruit for the benefit of all and to the defrauding of none. The scanty measure of truth wrung from nature and from life since man came into the world, constitutes the most precious treasure 79 THE LAW OF NECESSITY of the human race ; and the moral ideas which restrain the voracious appetite and create a harmony of effort, producing co-operation in- stead of a struggle of extermination, are the very quintessence of this acquired truth. These moral ideas become modified in the course of centuries ; their tendency towards the truth is, however, their lasting and valu- able feature. Bring in a universal cataclysm, levelling all the fabric of man's hand, whether cathedrals or cottages, with the dust, and destroying all the products of the ages over the face of the whole earth, and on this leave man, crushed by the catastrophe, naked and defenceless beneath an inclement and vindictive sky ; but leave him the memory of this acquired truth and his moral ideas, and soon cities will spring up over the plains, the ruined industries will rise again vigorous and flourishing, and civilisa- tion, strengthened and purified by the disaster, will emerge once more victorious. On the other hand, spare all the creations of man, and all the elements which to-day make up the complex system of his restless and feverish existence ; do not remove a ship from the sea, nor an aeroplane from the air, nor a shuttle from the loom, nor a retort from 80 THE LAW OF NECESSITY the laboratory ; but cast the shadow of oblivion over his mind, take away his conception of justice, thus restoring the empire of appetite unchecked, and you will have created the pretended law of necessity. And so the night of barbarism will fall on a crushed and con- temptible humanity. The law of necessity, in international poli- tics, is a euphemism which serves to cloak abuse, threatened in its endeavour to turn aside the currents which are stifling it. The militarism which oppresses Europe felt the ground failing beneath its feet. The wave of revolt grew more menacing every day. The starving peoples demanded their share in the good things of life. Oppression and abuse, multiform and omnipresent, culminated and found a common goal in armaments a outi^ance, Prussia resisted all attempts to reduce these armaments, and drove Europe on a headlong career towards the abyss to which she has now arrived. Behind Prussian militarism there shelter the tyrannical and medieval traditions of im- perialism, the stolid and brutal idiosyncrasy of the Junker, and, first and foremost, the very existence of the internal political and social system of Germany, a land in which - F 81 THE LAW OF NECESSITY there is abundance of discipline and a lack of liberty. Crushed against the wall of logic, which is harder than granite, Prussia takes refuge in cynicism, and being unable to palliate or to give an honest appearance to her actions, she throws all principles to the wind. Alleging the law of necessity, she preaches faithlessness and falsehood as the supreme guiding prin- ciples in international life ; for this is what the declaration amounts to, that international treaties — or any other treaties — can be violated whenever the interests of one of the parties require it. Dr. Dernburg, formerly German Imperial Minister for the Colonies, as the authorised representative of his country in the United States, whither he has gone to enlist the sympathy of the American public for the Prussian cause, expresses himself as follows in the New York Times (6th October 1914) : " Nations are fully justified in violating those treaties which prove prejudicial to their interests. It suited British in- terests to maintain the treaty of Belgian neutrality (guaranteed by Great Britain), and therefore Great Britain upheld it. 82 THE LAW OF NECESSITY It did not suit German interests to main- tain this treaty (guaranteed by Germany too), and therefore Germany violated it." And the egregious ex-Minister of his Majesty the Kaiser adds, with an artless cynicism that would put a mountain to the blush : ** As far as I am concerned, I am a fer- vent believer in international agreements for the purpose of preventing difficulties and wars, but at the same time we must not exaggerate the value of international treaties." This doctrine is of royal ancestry ; Frederick William IV, in his speech at the opening of the first Prussian Parliament in 1847, said to his docile audience : " I will never consent to a written sheet of paper intervening like a second Pro- vidence between God our Lord on high and this earth, to rule us with its con- ditions." Dr. Dernburg, a most worthy apostle of the Prussian gospel, forgets that the case of a treaty proving inconvenient for a nation, so 83 THE LAW OF NECESSITY that she shall wish to free herself from it, is foreseen, and that she must then seek an honourable solution and not have recourse to a brutal and treacherous violation. In 1870, Russia arbitrarily suppressed the restrictions of Article 2 of the Treaty of Paris of 1856, by which the Black Sea was neutralised. The Conference of London which assembled in 1871, and which was attended by the representatives of the very Powers which had signed the Treaty of Paris in 1856, decreed with all solemnity that "it is an essential principle of the right of nations that no Power can free itself from the obligations of a treaty, or modify the stipulations of any treaty, except with the consent of the con- tracting Powers, by means of a friendly agreement." The Treaty of Paris of 1856 was signed on the 30th March of that year by Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, Sar- dinia, and Turkey. If Prussia is victorious in the present con- flict, we may consider as abolished, in point of fact, the basis of international life, which is faith in the pledged word of nations. Treaties 84 THE LAW OF NECESSITY with Germany have to-day no more force or scope than she pleases to give them. The world has been living in a fool's paradise. Prussia has been playing with loaded dice. To-day the world knows what to expect. In this respect matters have improved: the declaration has been explicit in word and appalling in deed. The Great Powers to-day are seeking their salvation on the battlefields. The small nations will be unable to resist a victorious Germany, the very country which only with the greatest reluctance tolerated the presence of the representatives of these nations at the Second Hague Conference. If Prussia is victorious, whenever her rulers please, "because the interests of Germany require it," the weaker nation whose turn comes next — that is, on which the bolt falls — will be subjected to humiliation, mutilation, or spoliation. The only law will be the law of German interests. And what will these German interests be ? Will they be those of the German people? Certainly not. These very people are the first victims of the supposed interests which are invoked. The real interests of all nations are the same. The differences and antagonisms 85 THE LAW OF NECESSITY are not in the nature of things ; they are the arbitrary creation of time-honoured error and incompetence, to the preservation of which, in Germany as in the rest of Europe, the dynasties, castes, and social classes that benefit by established abuses are pledged. Against this the four and a half million Socialist votes in the German voting-urns are a living pro- test. But at the first beat of the drum the ancient phrases which do duty for lofty con- ceptions have risen victorious, and in tragic concourse men have flocked in the wake of this jingling music to die for their oppressors. *' The law of national necessity," " the supreme interests of the Fatherland," are merely the necessity for dominion and wealth on the part of a presumptuous dynasty and insatiable governing classes. Dernburg's declaration has an ominous significance : it proves that official Germany feels itself so powerful that it can now throw off all deceit. This time the law of necessity has meant the martyrdom of Belgium ; Germany, to cover her shame, must stifle every voice of protest in blood and strike terror into the universal conscience. The New York Tribune expresses itself as follows : 86 THE LAW OF NECESSITY " History does not present a more flagrant example of the sacrifice of a neutral and innocent nation's well-being to the per- fidy and the ambitious military policy of a powerful neighbour. The more com- plete Germany's triumph over Belgium, the deeper will be the stain on Germany's honour. Every Belgian soldier killed or wounded, every Belgian woman, child, and citizen sacrificed, every piece of Belgian property destroyed, every refugee driven from his country, all of them aug- ment the immense responsibility which Germany will have to face." Infinite has been, and will be, the agony of the victimised nation ; infinite the grief of the martyred populations ; irreplaceable the ancient cathedrals that have been destroyed and the cities that have been devastated by this furor teutonicus. But Time the healer will provide a remedy. The harvests will return to the fields, and light to the eyes troubled with weeping; while fruitful toil will raise new temples and majestic structures. The real evil, the most wide-wasting and perhaps irreparable, will be in the minds of men. Germany, the cultured, the learned, the wise, 87 THE LAW OF NECESSITY renounces the ideal which makes life possible. There is no honour before appetite. To satisfy this all things are lawful, even the assassina- tion of one's own word, which is as it were a living thing sprung from the nation's loins. Such doctrines are not, cannot be, those of the German people. They are those of its merciless and tyrannical task-masters. Per- haps it is written that from this dark conflict there shall rise a dawn of freedom for the Fatherland of Lessing and Goethe. 88 VIII VISIONS OF HATRED In the atmosphere of war which, with the annihilation of distance and the identification of interests, is to-day that of the whole world, the moral perspective is distorted, the judg- ment is perverted and the emotions are excited beyond all the bounds of mental sanity. The reign of cruelty and sophistry supervenes. The first is blind and rapacious: it neither investigates nor analyses ; it neither fixes nor portions out responsibility ; and, like the tide, it covers everything with its impartial hatred. The second reaps a harvest of unreason in the field of controversy, justifies injustice in the past and prepares the way for its dominion in the future, establishing it on the basis of an arbitrary interpretation of historic experience. The days and weeks that pass seem empty and incomplete if they do not bring us our ration of corpses by the tens of thousands, 89 VISIONS OF HATRED and of horrors unspeakable, of murderous explosions which destroy entire regiments or crews, of surprises in which whole battalions perish, mown down by machine-guns like corn beneath the sickle. Such is the feeling in neutral countries among the friends and enemies of Prussia; and events like these, however frightful they may be, are part of legal warfare. In Germany, according to the evidence of the native Press, one would think there reigns a spirit of ferocity which sanctions not only every form of cruelty recognised by the laws of war, but even inhuman cruelty, the extermination of workmen and peasants, the unnecessary destruction of towns and villages and the slaughter of women and children. A wave of pathological emotion sweeps over the whole public and swamps their judgment, causing them to see red, and favouring iniquity. Pity, without which all salvation is im- possible, finds a refuge perchance among those who are actually fighting; it does not dwell in the cities, robbed of the flower of their citizens, and trembling with suspense; nor with the public of the neutral countries, among whom, divided as they are in their sympathies, the passions of the struggle re- 90 VISIONS OF HATRED verberate without losing a single vibration. It is to be met with perhaps in the bullet- swept trenches, in the threatened encamp- ments, where death is ever imminent, in the ships that sail the mine-strewn seas ; the men who are living such lives, the men who pay the supreme tribute of war — not those who have yoked them to the task — perhaps under- stand best the lesson of sorrow. The emotional judgment of the public forgets that the nations driven to the slaugh- ter are originally innocent. What was this German horde which devastates Belgium ? Who compose it? It is formed by millions of honourable men from every social category, now carried away by the dominant militarism which has darkened the national conscience and fomented war as the supreme human mission, just as a cornfield is systematically cultivated throughout several generations. Once the conflict is begun, individual aspirations and those of the oppressed classes disappear in a whirlwind of hate, and we are left with nothing but the irreconcilable antagonisms of people against people. The punishment must fall upon the authors of the crime. The human instruments, in so far as they are instruments, must be broken ; 91 VISIONS OF HATRED in so far as they are men, they must be shielded by pity. To confound them with their op- pressors in a single storm of execration is to play into the hands of these oppressors and to strengthen the bonds between them and their victims, which were already giving way under the strain of internal abuse and oppression. Between the Prussian Junker and the Prussian peasant or workman there is a fundamental antagonism, deep-rooted, festering, irrecon- cilable, of which not the slightest trace exists between the English soldier and the German soldier, placed by the hazards of battle face to face to slay each other. More dangerous than cruelty as an attitude of mind is sophistry, which takes advantage of emotional aberrations of the judgment to found on them the permanent reign of in- justice. Sentimental cruelty — let us call it — is a sincere emotion; if it is not just it is explicable. Sophistry is the handmaid of social and political infamy and tyranny in every country. Both of them are everywhere favoured by this terrible conflict, which in its turn will be the spark for future conflagra- tions, whenever it shall be decided that universal destruction shall once more be let loose. Thus sophistry justifies injustice in 92 VISIONS OF HATRED the past and opens for it the gates of the future. The champions of the armed peace which has culminated in this catastrophe maintain that their predictions have been fulfilled ; that once this war is over, the energies of all nations must be devoted to preparing for a new war ; that this is the duty of "patriotism." More- over they maintain that the efforts of the pacifists, pardonable yesterday as the Utopias of deluded dreamers, from to-day will the rather be punishable as treason to the " sacred national interests." They assume the his- trionic attitude and use the appropriate vocabulary of " saviours " in every country. They abound on all sides, in Germany as in France, as in England ; in Spain as in Italy ; and they make themselves felt in our own America, in Brazil, in Chile, and in the Argentine ; wherever there is money, or credit which is equivalent to money, they shout themselves hoarse in their Parliaments, demanding Dreadnoughts without end, al- though the treasury groan beneath the financial burden. They are the agents, direct or secondary, of the league of manu- facturers of munitions-of-war — cannons, small arms, ammunition, warships, &c. This cos- 93 VISIONS OF HATRED mopolitan league is the most unjust and the most infamous monster of iniquity which is recorded in history. They foretell a conflagration ; they pile up dry hay and apply the torch, and when the flame breaks forth the militarists and their agents claim for themselves all the honours of prophets. From false premises falsehood arises with the appearance of truth ; on an inclined plane the perpendicular is oblique to the hori- zontal plane. War is the inevitable result of the system of " balance of power " which has divided Europe into two groups of hostile nations mistrusting each other, and which has brought about the competition in armaments. If from this war there shall, eventually but surely, spring merely the necessity for another more disastrous still, and so on from link to link of horror and violence, then the advent of barbarism pure and simple may be proclaimed. The events which are now taking place reveal to us with what lightning-like rapidity things roll towards the abyss. The pacifists are seers ; historically they are in the right, although the facts at a given moment are against them. We must attack the evil in the minds of men ; we must root out prejudices and overcome the vested 94 VISIONS OF HATRED interests of commercialism, high finance, and the privileged castes and classes. All these are conventional and arbitrary, however powerful they may be. The fact is that man was not born to exterminate man, but to labour with him to wring bread and shelter from Nature. And it is true, as Mr. Lowes Dickinson pointed out the other day, that it is in this hour of darkness that we must redouble our efforts. Not because the end is not in sight will the darkness of the eclipse last for ever. 95 IX LYING LIPS AND MURDEROUS HANDS Above all, let it be borne in mind that " the game is between Christians." Japan — pagan Japan — is operating away in the Far East. She has shown herself teachable and tract- able. Soon will come the hour of her com- plete assimilation to the refined Western ways and modes of thought, which are inspired by the Sermon on the Mount, according to the professions of monarchs, politicians, historians, and other persons in authority, who are quali- fied to expound doctrine, to weigh motives, or to achieve action. The Sermon on the Mount is the decalogue in the mouth of Christ. It spreads its wings of love and forgiveness in protection over this frail and fleeting humanity. The law of love which derives from it dwells in the conscience, and is as broad or as narrow as the conscience itself ; so, too, the horizon is contained within 96 MURDEROUS HANDS the eye : its fundamental limits are not fixed by external conditions. Hence it is that the positive commands of the law of love are sus- ceptible of interpretation. They are one in spirit but not in scope. Within the same classification as Christians may fall all sorts of men, each one in his own degree, from S. Francis of Assisi down to the predatory banker or the extortionate usurer. The negative commands, on the other hand, are as sharp as the edge of a sword : " thou shalt not kill," "thou shalt not steal," "thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neigh- bour." If need be, these three acts are comple- mentary. Their identity of principle makes them interchangeable, as are heat, light, and force in physics. Lying, stealing, killing — the passage from the one to the other is as smooth and as easy as, in the world of the sublime and the beautiful, the passage from emotion to song and from song to strife. These negative commands are the funda- mental law among Christians — the divine law without distinctions or limitations. Indivi- duals or nations who lie, steal, or kill, are guilty of crime and cover themselves with ignominy. Is this not so? One would have thought there was no doubt about the matter. But G 97 LYING LIPS AND the lesson of life teaches us otherwise. In practice the law proves amorphous ; it is not firm and clear as a perfect crystal. It is plastic ; it accommodates itself to crime. Who is it plays men false here ? The eternal precept? No. It is the liars, the thieves, the assassins, whether individuals or com- munities, who play men false ; those who add conscious misinterpretation to the violation of precept, piling infamy on iniquity. Take a concrete instance. Antwerp has fallen. Her inhabitants are scattered without food or shelter. The " sucklings " of whom Samuel speaks, enjoining that they shall perish, are dying of cold and hunger by the thousand. The line of palpitating agony, that line of human beings who flee terror- stricken before the invader, extends through Holland, through France, crosses the Channel, floods London and the provinces. . . . These wretched people have lost everything. Their souls, once filled with hope, are now filled with agony. What was their crime ? They were weak — and wealthy. The official report of the capture of the city gives an inventory of the material taken by the victors from the vanquished. The numbers in this tale of plunder assume an air 9S MURDEROUS HANDS of ignominy that is foreign to figures. Besides the booty, of course, the report tells of the victors' intrepid heroism, of the dead and the prisoners, of the buildings destroyed by fire, of the ruin and devastation accomplished. Another great victory to inscribe in the calendar of the national glories and in the minds of the present and future generations. The news breaks forth over the Fatherland like a song, like a dawn. It is melody and it is light. Cities are decked with flags and triumphal arches, faces beam and hearts beat quicker with the warm blood of a renewed and ennobled patriotism. The martyrdom of Antwerp is a great sacrifice on the altar of the Fatherland. The army has oflficiated as High Priest. Hosannah to the Lord of Hosts ! Incidentally, too, there are the millions in gold levied on the city. As the Belgian people, whose political nationality has foundered in this storm, neither did nor ever had done anything but scrupu- lously observe the written laws and the estab- lished practices of nations, treating moreover Prussia's word as reUable, the deeds that Prussia has committed against this Belgian people are simply deceit, because she lied to her victim; robbery, because Belgium has 99 LYING LIPS AND been ravaged and despoiled of her sovereignty and independence; and murder, because her sons have perished in thousands before the Prussian guns, and continue to perish, helpless and unprotected, amid the hardships of winter and of exile. Does this mean that all these tens of millions of German citizens, shouting them- selves hoarse with enthusiasm, Christians one and all, and in addition, trained in the school of scientific thought and led by the most persevering and successful explorers of Nature, have recourse to deceit, robbery and murder ? There can be but one answer. They not only have recourse to them, they honour them, treat them as superlatively noble, and invest them with the sacred character of a holy crusade in the interests of the Fatherland. In this case, be it remembered, it is impos- sible, absolutely impossible, to plead aggres- sion, either actual or imminent, on the part of Belgium. If such aggression had existed, the aspect of affairs would have been different. Prussia, on the other hand, invaded Belgium and wrought the destruction she has wrought because it suited Prussia so to do. Here is the problem in a nutshell. . . . Individual Prussians, peers or commoners, soldiers or 100 MURDEROUS ftANDvS , civilians, who neither lie/ nor steal, nor slay, and who punish deceit, robbery, and murder with implacable severity, when once they are constituted into a nation, lie, rob, and slaughter with equally implacable fury, and having reached the end of one stage of their labour, even while preparing to continue it, they solemnly lift up their hearts to the God of mercy who dwells in their souls, and point out to their children their work of bloodshed, pillage, and extermination as the most sublime mission of which man on earth is capable. That which is criminal in the individual is praiseworthy in the nation. Wholesale, red- handed, unparalleled infamy, which sacks cities, devastates whole countries, and piles up corpses, as a hurricane the autumnal leaves in the forest, this monstrous, unsurpassable, imperishable infamy is a glory which one generation proudly bequeaths to its posterity. Verily, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark ! For the rest, neither can flames calcine nor shot and shell pulverise the judgment. Neither triumph nor time can remove the reproach. Practice differs altogether from precept. This hypocrisy is not the special prerogative of Prussia. All nations have practised it. It 101 LYING LIPS AND is the historic basis, the very essence of the traditional policy of communities. The national governments practise it among themselves, so too do communities or political parties in their internal struggles. All of them practise col- lective iniquity without measure and without shame. Prussia clings pertinaciously to this iniquity; she preaches it and practises it on all occasions as seems good to her. Among the other nations there is an awakening of the conscience to- wards justice, which is already at times in- fluencing practice, dissipating the darkness of reaction. The triumph of Prussia would be the greatest conceivable calamity ; it would close the gates of the future with the double lock of falsehood and brutal and brutalising force. The evil lies in the arbitrary splitting up of the moral law, in the setting up of one law for the individual and another for the community. We may be sure that the notori- ous Bernhardi is a model citizen ; that he pays his landlord and his tailor, and that, like almost every other of his fellow-subjects of the Kaiser, he lives honestly, regulating his conduct within the Penal Code, which in these hard times and under the present national 102 MURDEROUS HANDS practices, is already going a long way. If Bernhardi did not pay his debts, or if he stole his neighbour's goods, this same Govern- ment, which glories in the sack of Antwerp and the slaughter of the city's defenders, would clap him into prison. And yet Bernhardi is simply a preacher of robbery on a national scale. Frederick the Great's temperament followed the same tortuous trend. When the miller of Sans Souci resisted the will of the King, who threatened to take his mill by force if he would not sell it, he reminded his Sovereign that "there were still judges in Berlin." Frederick gave way and abandoned his pre- tensions. The mill still stands to delight the unsophisticated visitor to Potsdam and to try the patience of all with the hackneyed story which clings like a creeper to the venerable old mill. Yet this same Frederick made his way by falsehood, robbery, and slaughter ; perhaps at the very moment that he was letting himself in for this cheap exhibition of miller's justice, he was preparing to invade Silesia. Macaulay remarks : "The King of Prussia had already fully determined to commit the great crime of 103 LYING LIPS AND violating his plighted faith and of plunging all Europe into a long, bloody, and devastating war ; and all this for no end whatever, except that he might extend his dominions. . . . On the head of Frederick is all the blood which was shed in a war which waged during many- years and in every quarter of the globe. . . . In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America." Read "the Kaiser" for *' Frederick," and the paragraph squares with the present situa- tion. And, incidentally, remember Machia- velli's dictum: "No prudent prince can or should respect his word when to respect it would injure him, or when the reasons which induced him to pledge it have ceased to exist." Thanks to this double conception of the moral law, men are individually honest and collectively robbers. For Germany, according to the explicit official declaration, treaties are "mere scraps of paper"; the bonds of her merchants and bankers are — or at least they have been hitherto — pledges of honour which are binding on the signatories. Because Belgium refused to consent to the 104 MURDEROUS HANDS violation of her territory, Germany, in de- fiance of her pledged word, invaded Belgium. Germany pleads her own supreme convenience, her absolute necessity for acting thus. What does this mean? The supreme convenience of one German, plus that of another German, plus that of thousands, of millions of Germans. It would never enter the head of any single one of these to break an agreement with a Belgian, to rob him, burn his house and slay his relatives and servants, pretending that his own supreme convenience so required it. If any German were to do such things, the German authorities themselves would hang him on the highest gallows they could find, as a mark of infamy and in expiation of the crime. The conveniences of Germany are the sum of the conveniences of each individual German. Taken singly and separately these do not, according to the German conception, confer the right to lie, to steal, or to kill. How then can the sum of these conveniences create this right and convert vice into virtue and shame into glory ? How many Germans must lump together their conveniences to turn black into white or poison into honey ? The character of permanence, or of relative 105 LYING LIPS AND immortality, so to say, inherent in communi- ties, creates special duties and obligations which are incompatible, as far as duration is concerned, with the short and precarious life of the individual. It would be inadmissible, however, to pretend that this extension should cover crime. Men welcome complicity as though it were justice. They accept collective vice as though it were virtue. Crime is diluted in the col- lective conscience of a crowd as a drop of poison is diluted in a lake. But moral re- sponsibility cannot be diluted. It presses with its full weight on each of the participators in a crime, ais the atmosphere presses on the body of each one of the individuals who com- pose a crowd. On the other hand, the ap- preciation of moral responsibility is the fruit of education, of a slow process of development in the minds of generations. The root is feeble and precarious, whereas the passion for plunder is fundamental. The moral law which is summed up in the Decalogue bars the way against such passions. Hence it happens that the moral law is debased and overthrown, while the passions are given full licence, pro- vided only their actions are collective and sufficiently monstrous. 106 MURDEROUS HANDS In the present case, what have " Germany's supreme conveniences " culminated in ? In terror, slaughter, and devastation as the means, and pillage as the end. The facts are there. No fine language can gloss them over. As long as she is dealing with France or England, Prussia can plead historic feuds, half- forgotten hatreds, bitter rivalries. Not so with regard to Belgium. If pillage be not the objective, how are we to explain the enormous pecuniary indemnities levied on the smoking and deci- mated cities ? Pillage is the oldest and the most flourish- ing of all human institutions. Only, in order that it may not lead to the gallows, it must be practised on a large scale. So — to say nothing of the immediate gain — one passes through the golden gate of patriotism into the immortality of history. This pillage is called conquest. It is and it always has been the soul of Imperialism. It flourishes among the governing classes of the great Powers of the earth, and it is the first cause of the present war. Alas for freedom and justice if the con- querors of Belgium are victorious 1 107 X MOLTEN LEAD The official exculpatory note makes itself heard above the piercing din of the conflict. While cities battered by diabolical mortars are burning, while over the ravaged fields there w^inds an unending throng of maimed and outcast humanity in search of refuge, and v^hile men by the million are engaged in mutual slaughter from the Vistula and the Caucasus to the North Sea, the various Governments apply themselves to the task of saving their face : " It was not I," they say, " it was he who began the war." White books, blue books, yellow books, flutter down as though wafted by a breeze impregnated with powder and blood that saturate the atmosphere. Who would under- take the rash task of giving judgment in the case ? Do these fragmentary pleas perchance relate the whole truth of the disaster ? Can it be comprehended — for it is no trivial matter 108 MOLTEN LEAD — within the narrow limits of the feverish actions of the chancelleries during those passionate hours when the thin crust of the volcano was already trembling with the threatened eruption ? The defensive plea scarce touches the sur- face of things. The evil lies deep-rooted in the organism. The men of the hour defend their acts; these acts are the fatal result of historic currents, as deep as the very origin of the nations. The war was not caused by the passions or ambitions of the peoples : it is a storm let loose from the heights where vested interests dwell. There was no unavoidable collision between the popular elements across the frontiers. In every country there existed an antagonism, daily increasing in bitterness, between the vested interests and the people. The former are embodied in the established political, social, and economic structure which exploits wealth by means of the power crystal- lised in the existing institutions ; the people, politically emancipated, armed with the vote and with equality before the law, are striving after economic emancipation. The social fabric is breaking up on its foundations, which are shaken like an old wall when the 109 MOLTEN LEAD earth trembles. All this happens within the respective frontiers ; within them was the real enemy of the established, the traditional, the sacred order of things, which no longer squares with the audacious and inquisitive life of to- day, that investigates and exposes all things, and is as restless as it is irreverent. Do you by any chance pretend that be- tween the German workman or peasant and his French comrade, let us say, there are burn- ing hatreds which can only be quenched with blood, and a fundamental clashing of interests which admits of no other solution than the mutual slaughter of neighbours and fellow- creatures ? As with the sun and the air, the necessaries of life, on both sides of the Rhine, suffice for all. Their equitable distribution would pacify men's minds. This distribution is an ideal, far beyond the range of practical politics in the present state of human develop- ment. Nevertheless, it is something to aspire to ; and this aspiration is a menace to estab- lished privilege and a source of hope for the peoples. Privilege shelters behind the cult of force as the supreme and final justice, and in the denial of every right to the weak and defenceless. Hope for the future rests on the recognition of a moral law superior to force. 110 MOLTEN LEAD These are two diametrically opposed tend- encies : the one faces the past, the other the future. Prussia stands with her back to the morrow. Hence Prussia must succumb in the present struggle. Hence — while all the nations are responsible in varying degrees for the present conflict, though the Govern- ments endeavour to fasten the guilt on their opponents — hence the supreme respon- sibility rests with Prussia, beyond all the evidence of white, or blue, or yellow books, because Prussia, bent on reaction, obstructs the deliverance of the peoples, who are starved and oppressed in peace and sacrificed in war. Neither their thinkers, nor their poets, nor their artists succeed in rescuing Prussia and the German Empire from this benighted policy. The enlightened labour of these men, so fruitful in results throughout the whole earth, are arrested, like the waters before a dam, as soon as they come into contact with the practical forces which are moulding the national life. Perhaps the most humiliating spectacle in this sad and painful hour is the perversion of the German intel- lectuals, those unpardonable renegades from reason and good judgment who, in passing from the abstract and speculative to the con- 111 MOLTEN LEAD Crete and practical, lower their mentality — and their conscience — to the level of that of the nearest corporal from among the denizens of Berlin barrackland. Prussia shamelessly maintains the doctrine of a twofold morality, one for the individual and another for the community. In pursuance of this doctrine her armies in the field burn, destroy, ravage, and massacre, all in the name of the Fatherland and of the sublime German Kultur. This privilege of national crime, premeditated, scientific, inexorable as a natural phenomenon, and advocated as a right of life and a claim to honour, constitutes the in- famous side of Prussian achievement which, as she herself admits, has kindled against her the hatred of the whole world. In the Fraiikfurter Zeitung of the 24th October there is an article headed " Hate," in which it is declared that since the beginning of the war Germany has discovered at once her own unity and strength, and the depth and bitterness of the hatred against her and against everything German, not only amongst the enemies of Germany, but also in a much wider circle. And the article ends : " The greatest mistake that we could make would be to reciprocate the impotent hatred which 112 MOLTEN LEAD is levelled against us from all sides. The struggle in which we are engaged is too glorious, and in truth we shall find better things to do than to pay back in the same coin." -^ The Prussian doctrine, put into practice to-day by the whole nation, might very well be adopted by parties or by private indivi- duals, under the national auspices, if Prussia is victorious. Certainly the colonizing com- panies would be given roving commissions to extend the political boundaries of the Father- land. Latin-America would offer the widest and richest field for this colonization. What have our republics done to deserve a better fate than Belgium ? The New York World of the 3rd November contained the following : "It may be said that as a matter of fact the whole of Belgium has been devastated. More than a million of her seven and a half million inhabitants are fugitives in a strange land. Several millions of those who have stayed in the country are homeless and absolutely destitute. The nation which has destroyed the industries of Belgium and laid waste H 113 MOLTEN LEAD her fields, has also seized her stores of provisions and imposed a monetary tribute which deprives the inhabitants of the means of buying food. In this oppres- sion of a nation that is dying of hunger, there is not the slightest pretence on the part of the oppressor to deny or disguise the facts. The sack of Brussels is as open and as shameless as the sack of Lou vain." The well-known American naturalist, John Burroughs, referring to Germany's conduct in Belgium, says : *' War, as waged by the Kaiser in Belgium and France, is nothing else than a high-sounding euphemism for collective murder, robbery, and incendiar- ism, carried out by a band of criminals." Such is the way the war, as Prussia is waging it, is regarded. The world knows that a victorious Prussia would be a merciless Prussia; the world feels that it is better to die fighting than to come beneath the Prussian yoke. If Belgium has been punished with such undreamt-of cruelty, who but a madman would hope for a better fate after defeat ? These considerations will prolong the war 114 MOLTEN LEAD to the extreme limits of human resistance. National existences are at stake. After forty years of training and preparation in the school of the barracks and the manoeuvring ground, with her muscles and her conscience hardened, Germany has flung herself on the world, as a hunter descends on the woods in quest of his prey. The prey in this case is wealth, terri- tory, and political lordship over other nations. There is no hypocritical pretence of noble or altruistic ends, no lying humanitarian pretext ; in the plainest of words Germany says to the nations : " I am going to rob you of your colonies. I am going to capture your trade." And when she enters towns and villages, she imposes on them war- contributions, which are wrung from them by terror and torture in amounts limited only by the material capacity of the vanquished. Max Harden, the editor of the Zukunft, writes in a recent article : " Let us give up these miserable at- tempts to excuse Germany's acts. Let us have done once and for all with every unworthy abuse of the enemy. Let it be clearly understood that it was not unwillingly and as a nation surprised by 115 MOLTEN LEAD the facts that we threw ourselves into this gigantic adventure. It was our wish to act thus, and thus we decided to act. We are not arraigned in judg- ment before Europe. We recognise no such jurisdiction. Our might will create a new law for Europe. It is Germany which strikes. When she has conquered new realms for her genius, then the priests of all the gods will praise the war as righteous. We are at the beginning of a struggle the development and dura- tion of which none can foretell, and in which up till now none of the combatants has been overcome . . . " Germany does not go to war with a view to punishing wrong-doers or to freeing oppressed peoples, to grow rusty afterwards in the peaceful conviction of her own disinterested magnanimity. Ger- many obeys the insuperable conviction that what she has accomplished gives her the right to seek greater scope on earth, and wider spheres of activity . . . ** Spain, the Netherlands, France, and England have seized, taken possession of, and colonized vast regions in the most fertile portions of the globe. Now Ger- 116 MOLTEN LEAD many's hour has sounded, and it is time for Germany to take her place as one of the ruUng powers in the world." Where, if not in Latin-America, are to be found this " greater scope on earth " and these ** wider spheres of activity " ? All Germany is demanding new territory, now through the mouth of ex-Chancellors of the Empire, like Prince Biilow — the incarnation of tradi- tional privilege — now through the mouth of apostates from liberty and democracy, like the editor of the Zukunft. We have no right to weave illusions ; the fact must be recognised: Germany deceives no one with regard to her doctrines, her actions, or her intentions. The garrulous Ambassador, Count Bernstorff, is responsible for a priceless confidence to a group of select friends in a New York club, describing the fate of France after the German victory. "The conditions which Germany will impose on France after her victory will be as follows : " 1. The handing over to Germany of all the French colonies, including Morocco, Algiers, and Tunis. ** 2. The cession of all the territory on 117 MOLTEN LEAD Germany's eastern frontier up to a line running from Saint-Valerie to Lyons. " 3. An idemnity of ten thousand million francs (£400,000,000). " 4. A commercial treaty allowing German goods free entry into France for a period of twenty-five years, with- out reciprocity. *' 5. The suspension of recruiting in France for a period of twenty-five years. " 6. The demolition of all the French fortresses. ** 7. The surrender by France to Ger- many of three million rifles, three thou- sand cannon, and forty thousand horses. ** 8. The recognition of German patent rights in France, without reciprocity. "9. The abandonment by France of every kind of alliance with Russia and England. ** 10. A treaty of aUiance with Ger- many for a period of twenty-five years." The poem quoted below is indicative of the German state of mind. The Crown Prince of Bavaria, in a general order recently issued to his army, commands copies of this poem to be distributed among all Bavarian soldiers 118 MOLTEN LEAD in the field. As will be seen, the poem breathes intense hatred, but as a national manifestation it borders on hysteria and is far from being an indication of strength. A SONG OF HATE " England the only Enemy " By Ernst Lissauer (English version by Barbara Henderson) French and Russian they matter not, A blow for a blow and a shot for a shot : We love them not, we hate them not, We hold the Weichsel and Vosges-gate, We have but one and only hate, We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe, and one alone. He is known to you all, he is known to you all, He crouches behind the dark grey flood, Full of envy, of rage, of craft, of gall. Cut off by waves that are thicker than blood. Come let us stand at the Judgment place, An oath to swear to, face to face. An oath of bronze no wind can shake. An oath for our sons and their sons to take. Come, hear the word, repeat the word. Throughout the Fatherland make it heard. We will never forgo our hate, We have all but a single hate. We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe, and one alone — ENGLAND ! 119 MOLTEN LEAD In the Captain's Mess, in the banquet-hall. Sat feasting the officers, one and all, Like a sabre-blow, like the swing of a sail. One seized his glass held high to hail ; Sharp-snapped like the stroke of a rudder's play, Spoke three words only : *' To the Day ! " Whose glass this fate ? They had all but a single hate. Who was thus known ? They had one foe, and one alone — ENGLAND ! Take you the folk of the Earth in pay. With bars of gold your ramparts lay, Bedeck the ocean with bow on bow, Ye reckon well, but not well enough now. French and Russian they matter not, A blow for a blow, a shot for a shot. We fight the battle with bronze and steel. And the time that is coming Peace will seal. You will we hate with a lasting hate. We will never forgo our hate, Hate by water and hate by land, Hate of the head and hate of the hand, Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown, Hate of seventy million, choking down. We love as one, we hate as one. We have one foe, and one alone — ENGLAND ! The English reply to these German effu- sions and amenities is contained in Mr. 120 MOLTEN LEAD Asquith's speech delivered on the 9th Novem- ber last at the annual Lord Mayor's banquet in the London Guildhall : " We shall never sheath the sword which we have not lightly drawn until Belgium recovers in full measure all and more than all that she has sacrificed, until France is adequately secured against the menace of aggression, until the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed upon an unassailable foundation, and until the military domination of Prussia is wholly and finally destroyed. That is a great task worthy of a great nation. It needs for its accomplishment that every man among us, old or young, rich or poor, busy or leisurely, learned or simple, should give what he has and do what he can." Never since the beginning of history have words been uttered which so pledge the whole credit and honour of a nation to the defence of a cause. This cause is the cause of human liberty and dignity. 121 XI VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN (The Vain Suit) In this hour of death and destruction some vestige of a sense of shame remains. If it is not strong enough to prevent crime, it at any rate betrays the consciousness of the fact that material victory is not everything. The ruthless violation of treaties is a crime ; the slaughter of non-combatants and the destruc- tion of towns and villages, in order to strike terror into the inhabitants, is a crime. All this forms part of the German method of making war. The Kaiser has said : "The only method of avoiding surprise attacks on the part of the civil popula- tion has been to intervene with implac- able severity and to make examples which by their very horror shall serve as a warn- ing to everyone in Belgium." ( Wireless message from the Kaiser, published by the English Press Bureau, August 29, 1914.) 122 VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN Germany, however, like all the belligerent nations, courts the good opinion of neutrals. This respect for public opinion is the one ray of hope for the restoration of honesty as a rule of life. Neither history, nor detached contemporary opinion, which is the precursor of history, can be deceived by sophistry, nor suborned by doles of pity or justice a posteiioriy as a highwayman pays for masses with the money stolen from his victims. The United States of America is the one really neutral nation among the Great Powers. The neutrality of Italy is as precarious as the life of a leaf on the branch when the storm is at its height. The other European countries, with the exception of Spain, are all of them, in a greater or lesser degree, on the brink of the precipice. The attempt to win over public opinion is concentrated on the United States. At the same time that she was sending her 16-inch howitzers to pulverise Paris, Germany was sending her agents — diplomats, authors, and orators — to ingratiate themselves with the American public. Months now after the outbreak of the war, Paris is still standing, and public opinion in the United States, in spite of the eighteen million Germans or persons of 123 VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN German descent among the hundred million inhabitants of the Republic, is violently op- posed to the German cause. The fact looms as large as a cathedral, and would require no better proof than the chorus of wrathful in- dignation it has evoked in the German Press. These worthy Teutons cannot bring them- selves to accept the fact that they are not thought perfectly adorable when they give themselves over to pillage and slaughter, to which they fancy the harsh law of necessity constrains them, and on seeing themselves misunderstood, they suffer all the torments of injured innocence. The world is indeed a cruel place. The two principal agents whom Germany has maintained in the United States are her Ambassador, the garrulous Count BernstorfF, and her ex-Minister for the Colonies, Herr Dernburg. One would have thought that for so delicate a task the Kaiser would have chosen, from his staff of highly-trained and tested officials, the most competent men beyond all possibility of failure, in that Empire where everything is foreseen and provided for except — as facts are proving — the perverse workings of destiny, allied with Nemesis, who lowers pride and restores equality. 124 VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN The aforementioned imperial agents, to put it colloquially, have made a frightful mess of the business entrusted to them ; they have set about their work like an elephant trying to thread a needle, or pour out a glass of Lachrima Christi from a decanter of Venetian glass. They have succeeded in wounding susceptibilities and rousing suspicions among the very people whom they came to con- ciliate towards their Kaiser and his glorious deeds of " blood and iron." Dr. Dernburg said in one of his speeches that, whatever might be the result of the present war in Europe, Germany would respect the Monroe Doctrine, and that the German Ambassador had given assurances to this effect to the Secretary of State, Mr. Bryan. When the matter was investigated, it turned out that on the 3rd September last. Count BernstorfF had stated in a Note that he had instructions from his Government to deny in the most emphatic manner the rumours that were being circulated to the effect that Germany proposed, in case she were victorious in the present war, to seek territorial expansion in South America. The Ambassador spoke of proposals, that is to say, of intentions, which is much like 125 VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN talking of the weather. To-day it rains, to-morrow the sun shines in the clear and cloudless blue. Moreover, the theory — now identified with the German nation — that treaties can and should be torn up as mere scraps of paper whenever they interfere with the national convenience, has this disadvantage, among others, that it induces mistrust and excites suspicion. Qui s'eoccuse s' accuse. The obvious thing, the only sensible thing to do under the circumstances, was to avoid the subject. Every mention of the Monroe Doctrine was bound to send the public imagin- ation roaming over the fields of speculation in search of facts, of historic tradition, and of recognised tendencies; and this investigation at the present moment could not help but be disastrous for the task of conciliation and love — diflficult enough in itself — to which the two egregious Teutons and their countless swarm of satellites are so zealously devoting them- selves. What did Prince Biilow mean by his well-known declaration that Germany simply wants her " place in the sun " ? Simply this and nothing more; that Germany wants territorial expansion. She came late to the parcelling out of the Eastern hemisphere ; the 126 VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN remains of the feast fell to her share — ^just a bite, which simply served to whet the appetite. Where is she to look for this expansion to- day? Having reached this stage in their reasoning, the Americans turn their eyes to their own continent, where fertile and un- populated districts, exactly what Germany requires, abound in profusion. And at this precise moment the two messengers of con- cord exclaim : " What ? We dream of colonies in America! We not respect the Monroe Doctrine ! 'Tis a libel ; they misrepresent our intentions. Calm yourselves, dear Americans of the north, of the centre, and of the south, and sleep in peace, resting your head on the cushion of our intentions, until we crush these confounded Allies. Morgen ist auch ein Tag — to-morrow we shall see." And if they were victorious this mention of to-morrow would be as pointed as an attack, or various attacks, on the countries of America. The victorious Germans would not waste words, but a conceivable harangue suitable to the occasion would be as follows : "At last the hour has come. The Monroe Doctrine is an intolerable night- mare. It must not last a minute longer. 127 VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN All Europe has become its accomplice; like a coward and a craven she has tolerated it, and she has even strengthened it through her servile respect for it. To-day this Europe lies vanquished at our feet. Never again will we — as we did through- out the whole of the nineteenth century — never again will we open our veins and fertilise with the best of our blood the fields of others, of rivals, of potential enemies. The cities which to-morrow shall rival St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago, the wastes which, like Illinois, Missouri, or Iowa, we shall reclaim and convert into wealthy marts on the banks of the Parana or Orinoco, or at the foot of the Andes, must be an integral extension of the German Fatherland. We do not ask for our place in the sun, we take it by right of might, which is the only right. Your Monroe Doctrine pro- claimed in the north, your nationalities sheltering under its protection through- out the central and southern continent, your right of dominion, your vapourings of democracy and liberty and other Utopias and impossible nonsense, will last till just such time as we arrive. 128 VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN Ours is the might, ours the culture. The day has come. Deutschland uber allesJ' But the hour has not yet come for making history in this fashion. The tremendous game is being played out on the battlefields, and meantime we must keep our distances and observe the established conventions. It would be madness to create antagonisms or to pro- voke them to active hostility. Each day has its allotted task. And so the Ambassador, polite and solicitous, explains to a representa- tive of the New York IForld the genuinely respectful attitude of Germany : ** If the United States Government wishes for an assurance that Germany, in case of victory, will not seek territorial expansion or colonies in North America, including Canada, or in South America, Germany will give this assurance immedi- ately. Germany has not the slightest intention of violating any part or portion of the Monroe Doctrine. Be so good," added the Ambassador to the journalist who was interviewing him, ** as to express as emphatically as possible what I am telling you, and say that I wished to state it with all the seriousness and 129 I VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN sincerity at my command. We have already presented to the United States Government an official Note, in which we make it clear that Germany will not seek territorial expansion in South America." The future will take care of itself. For the moment what is clear is that the German mediators in the United States not only have not succeeded in their object, but have sown fears and suspicions with regard to the most delicate and thorny question imaginable in dealing with that country. The Allies, too, have had occasion to define their attitude toward the Monroe Doctrine. The Times of 1 4th November last publishes the following cablegram from Washington : *' The revelations regarding the favour- itism shown to Germany by Ecuador and Colombia have produced an Anglo-French Note of protest to the United States. That the Note should be addressed to the United States instead of to the delinquent Republics is due, presumably, to the de- sire of the Allies to respect scrupulously the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine. The Allies, it is understood, repeat the story 180 VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN of the use to which, it is alleged, Germany has been allowed to put the wireless in- stallations of Ecuador and Colombia, and state that there is reason to believe that the Galapagos Islands are serving as a German naval base. After pointing out the impossibility of allowing such abuses of the rules of neutrality to continue, they ask the United States to bring pressure to bear in the appropriate quarters. It is intimated that otherwise the Allies will have to take their own steps to bring the Republics to a sense of their responsi- bilities." With regard to this same incident of the " delinquent Republics," as the correspondent of the Times calls them, it should be stated that neither Colombia nor Ecuador had any difficulty in proving the absolute correctness of their proceedings. A few days later the Press took note of this, and the incident passed off, doubtless without leaving any permanent trace of suspicion against the South American Republics. Things are different with regard to the Monroe Doctrine. The Anglo-French Note is an explicit recognition of this Doctrine on 131 VERGEBLICHES STANDCHEN the part of these two Powers, such as never before has existed. Side by side with this we have Germany's no less explicit recognition. So that before the first four months of the war are over, the Doctrine has been recognised by both groups of belligerents; for it is not to be supposed that Austria will disown Germany's action, or that the action of France and England will encounter opposition in Russia or Japan. Here we may observe: if treaties signed with all the solemnity that an international act involves, and mellowed by the lapse of long years, are mere " scraps of paper," what value have precedents founded on historic facts before the law of convenience or necessity? To this the answer must be: If Prussia is victorious, no treaty and no precedent will be worth the proverbial straw ; if, on the other hand, the Allies are victorious, the hope that the pledged word of a nation may have some value, will at least be excusable. 182 XII THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAR^ Speaking in the Reichstag on December 2nd, the Chancellor of the German Empire said, amongst other things : "We can regard the future with every confidence, but the enemy's resistance is not broken. We are not yet at the end of our sacrifices. The nation will con- tinue to support those sacrifices with the same heroism as hitherto, for we must and will fight to a successful end our defensive war for right and freedom. We will then remember how our defence- less compatriots in hostile countries were maltreated in a manner which is a dis- grace to all civilisation. The world must learn that no one can hurt the hair on the head of a German subject with im- punity. 1 Reprinted from the Scotsman of December 21, 1914. 133 THE RESPONSIBILITY ** It is evident to us who is responsible for this, the greatest of all wars. The apparent responsibility falls on those in Russia who ordered and carried out the mobilisation of the Russian Army. The real responsibility, however, falls on the British Government. The Cabinet in London could have made the war im- possible if it had without ambiguity de- clared at Petrograd that Great Britain would not allow a Continental war to develop from the Austro- Serbian con- flict."— J%^ Times, December 3, 1914. These words of the Chancellor of the Empire burn with the fire of the furnace where the destinies of humanity are being cast at this very hour. Their sincerity must be taken for granted. The Chancellor must be convinced of the truth of his statements. Sincerity grows under cultivation, like plants do. For the inner conscience the premedi- tated lie becomes crystallised as sacred truth if one only perseveres in its utterance as if it were the truth itself. It is thus that super- venes that most wonderful and not infrequent transformation of the liar into the apostle. Give him the sword and he will impose his 134 FOR THE WAR truth on mankind, and woe to the man who, not having stepped from the conscious lie into the apostolate, or at least into faith, shall dare to resist. Such an one will be doomed; he will be crushed in the name of truth eternal ; thus was salvation forced upon mankind in days of yore through fire and sword, and thus are ** liberty and justice" defended by the Chancellor and his master at the present hour. In our days such worthies care but little for supernatural possibilities ; the coin of their market is earthly, and provided people pay and obey, and provided they kill and die with- out murmur, they can choose their own road to heaven. As the old Frederick had it, ** Chacun a sa facjon." The Chancellor's speech contains the usual and unavoidable flattery of such orations to the race and the nation to whom they are addressed. It contains, besides, most eloquent and revealing clauses. The hour of victory will be the hour of remembrance. The offence and the harm in- flicted upon " defenceless German subjects in hostile lands" will be avenged. The world will learn how the victors can remember and punish. It is the promise of vengeance; it must be taken in the light of Prussian methods 135 THE RESPONSIBILITY as shown by Prussian warfare. That means terror before, during, and after the battle, with the sole relief of an occasional Imperial mani- festation, as in the case of Louvain, that the Emperor's heart ** bleeds." Surely, surely, an invaluable boon, but perhaps not sufficient to redeem the hideous work of the German warri6rsl The Chancellor's admonition to the vanquished nations of the morrow is pre- cise and clear as a trumpet sounding a charge. Notwithstanding his conviction, the Chan- cellor is uneasy. His conviction may be artificial, and be the result of a constant repetition to himself that the lie is the truth ; it may be the genuine reflection of life as it passes before his eyes. That is his own con- cern. Yet the Chancellor groans under the obsession of an idea which will not leave him. War in action developing before his eyes, the flower of the manhood of his native land crushed, the darkened homes, the wave of sorrow invading the home of the workman gone to fight and the home of the Prince also gone to battle, the anxiety of those who wait with trembling hands for news from the front, where their beloved ones are in constant danger, the anguish which at every hour and at every minute stirs the whole 186 FOR THE WAR nation, must penetrate into his heart like a dagger, no matter what dreams he may dream of victory or vengeance satisfied. Were it otherwise, the Chancellor would be a monster. The responsibihty for the war must rest upon other shoulders. If that can be shown, the internal clamour of the conscience will be stilled, and the tribunal of the world and of history will be appeased. At this point the horizon becomes diaphan- ous. There is not the slighest shadow of a doubt. The responsibility for such horrors as have never before been seen does not rest with Serbia, in her rebellious and recalcitrant spirit; nor with Austria, perplexed and in- furiated; nor with France, seeking for a vengeance dear to the heart of her people generation after generation ; nor with Russia, despotic and suspicious ; no, the one, the sole responsible is Great Britain. "It is evident to us who is responsible for this the greatest of all wars. . . . The real responsibility falls on the British Government." Thus the Chancellor. He may quieten his conscience ; he certainly will not convince the world ; but he bares to the world's gaze the 137 THE RESPONSIBILITY passion that is dominant in his heart, and in the heart of Germany : — undying hatred of England. The responsibility for the war, however, cannot be defined and allotted by the mere analysis of the events immediately preceding the declaration of war. The spark would have been harmless without the accumulation of inflammable matter. Who is responsible for that accumulation ? Prussia primarily, and, with Prussia, the militarists and the traders in war and hate in all the nations that are now intent upon mutual extermination. Prussia, and under Prussia the whole of Germany, have existed exclusively for war since Jena and Waterloo, at an ever-increasing degree of intensity. They have based their way of life on military models, suppressing all moral conceptions of justice, and replacing them exclusively with the aim of victory as the supreme law and the absolute justification. They have converted their military caste into a privileged class above the law; they have turned the uniform into an investiture that dignifies abuse, arbitrariness, and even crime ; they have obliterated all precepts, all deca- logues, that curb the appetite ; they have destroyed the faith of the world in the pledged 138 FOR THE WAR word^and in the honour of mankind, and they have reduced the songs of their poets and the meditations of their philosophers to empty utterances of impractical application to life. They have steered the national course by the Satanic and ridiculous conception of the im- measurable superiority of the German over any other human being, and they have bribed their people into this belief by the predatory corollary that "since we are superior to all other men, whatever belongs to them is ours by right, and, should they resist, let us ex- terminate them." It is thus that Germany wants a " place in the sun," meaning colonies that belong to other nations, and territory in France, and the whole of Belgium, and Holland later on, and soon, very soon, territory in America. For the accomplishment of this great crusade against the wealth and the territory of other nations, Germany has become united as a steel blade ; the preparation has been twofold — an atmosphere of violence as the supreme law of life for the mind ; and all the energies of the nation bound together for the victory in the coming war — finance, industry, railroads. Press, Universities, and even Art. Thus the nation became an immense mailed 139 THE RESPONSIBILITY claw to strangle the enemy or tear him to pieces ; and the enemy would be whosoever opposed or obstructed the Germanisation of the world. At the Hague Conferences Germany ob- structed every effort to limit the horrors of war to the actual combatants. Germany re- tained the right of terror. Thus cities are burned after occupation, the helpless are shot without distinction of sex or condition, and the seas are sown with contact mines. Thus it is that Germany, during the last decades, has been heaping the inflammable substance ; when the spark supervened — no matter whence it came — the conflagration was unavoidable. The most inflammable of these substances, the real decisive element, has been the national frame of mind, identified with injustice, with depredation, and with violence, and consider- ing them as legitimate means towards the greatness of Germany as defined by the Prussian creed. The German Chief of Staff thus defined the rules of conduct to be observed (French Yellow Book, p. 11): "The commonplaces as to the respon- sibility of the aggressor must be disre- 140 FOR THE WAR garded. When war has become necessary, it must be waged by ranging all the chances on one's own side. Success alone justifies it. Germany cannot and must not give Russia time to mobilise, or she will be obliged to maintain on the eastern frontier a force which would leave her in a position of equality, if not of inferiority, in front of France. Therefore we must forestall our principal adversary immedi- ately there are nine chances in ten that we are going to have war, and we must begin war without waiting, in order brutally to crush all resistance." These violations of the fundamental har- mony of things entail disturbances which become actual retribution. Those who believe in force and in violence as the sole efficacy and the sole justice of life must be prepared to have the law of violence and force imposed upon them. Germany planted the seed of menace, and has reaped the harvest of terror, which finally became a panic. As she did not respect treaties, she could not expect that others would respect them. As she was perennially waylaying others to rob them, she thought that others were doing likewise to- 141 THE RESPONSIBILITY wards her. Panic, unwittingly to her, became the guiding principle of her administration and her policy. A victorious war, not a fruit- ful peace, thus became the sole and supreme national objective. All the energies of the nation were engaged in the preparation for that war. All other efforts would be treason to the Fatherland. The secret document signed in Berlin on the 19th of March 1913, and distributed by the General Staff, about the new military law, published in the French Yellow Book, appears prophetic in the light of later events. It establishes the facts and fixes the respon- sibility upon Germany. It crushes to atoms the arrogant assertions of the Chancellor of Germany's innocence and virtue : " Opinion is being prepared for a further strengthening of the Active Army, which will ensure an honourable peace to Ger- many and the possibility of suitably guar- anteeing her influence in the affairs of the world. The new Amy Law and the complementary measures which must follow will nearly allow the complete attainment of this aim. Neither the ridiculous clamours for revenge of the 142 FOR THE WAR French jingoes, nor the English gnash- ing of teeth, nor the wild workings of the Slavs, will turn us from our end, which is to strengthen and to extend Germanism (Deutschtum) throughout the entire world. The French may arm as much as they like. They cannot from one day to another increase their popula- tion. The use of a black army on the European theatre of operations will for long remain a dream — a dream, moreover, lacking in beauty. "Our new Army Law is but an exten- sion of the military education of the German people. Our ancestors of 1813 made greater sacrifices. It is our sacred duty to sharpen the sword which has been placed in our hands, and to hold it ready for our defence, as well as to strike our enemy. The idea that our arma- ments are a reply to the armaments and policy of the French must be instilled into the people. The people must be accustomed to think that an offensive war on our part is a necessity if we are to combat the adversary's provocations. We must act with prudence in order to arouse no suspicion, and so as to avoid 143 THE RESPONSIBILITY the crisis which might damage our eco- nomic life. Things must be so managed that under the weighty pressure of powerful armaments, of considerable sac- rifices, and of political tension, an out- break (losschlagen) shall be considered as a deliverance, because after it would come decades of peace and of pros- perity, such as those which followed 1870. The war must be prepared for from a financial point of view. There is much to be done in this direction. The distrust of our financiers must not be aroused, but nevertheless there are many things which it will be impossible to hide." On the 5th of December last, Sig. Giolitti, ex-Prime Minister of Italy, declared that in August 1913, during the second Balkan War, the Marquis of San Giuliano, Itahan Foreign Minister at the time, had been noti- fied by Austria that Austria, acting in accord with Germany, would declare war upon Serbia, and that Italy was called upon to join her allies. An ultimatum had been prepared practically identical to the one that was pre- sented to Serbia in July 1914. 144 FOR THE WAR That ultimatum was the spark that brought about the present conflagration. Thus Ger- many and Austria are responsible even for the spark that has set the world ablaze. 145 XIII THE INVASION OF CANADA Germany and the Monroe Doctrine Count Bernstorff, the German Ambassador to the United States, has stated, according to the Associated Press ( Times, October 27), that Germany might, if she could, land troops to obtain " at least a temporary " foothold in Canada. The Count is further described as saying that, in view of the fact that Canada has sent troops to Europe, the United States ought not to consider such an action a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. The question for the present is academic. The Allies will have to be crushed by land and sea before the German invasion of Canada becomes a live issue. On the other hand, the principles involved in connexion with the Monroe Doctrine will not in any way be affected by the fortunes of war in Europe and the final consummation there. The Monroe Doctrine, in its conception and development, is 146 THE INVASION OF CANADA based on and guided exclusively by American considerations, meaning thereby those of the interests of the United States in relation to the whole continent, as appreciated by the United States themselves. The Monroe Doctrine, it should be remem- bered, is not rigid; it is plastic. In 1895, referring to the declarations made by the United States in the British Guiana and Venezuela boundary dispute, which brought the two countries to the brink of war, Lord Salisbury maintained that "in the present instance a new and strange extension and development of this doctrine is insisted on by the United States " ; and that ** the reasons justifying the appeal enun- ciated by President Monroe are gener- ally inapplicable to the state of things in which' we live at the present day." Dealing with this contention, President Cleve- land, in a message to Congress of Dec. 19, 1895, said : '* It (the Monroe Doctrine) was intended to apply to every stage of our national life, 147 THE INVASION OF CANADA and cannot become obsolete while our Republic endures." As endurance here implies growth and con- ditions ever in the process of alteration, even so with the Monroe Doctrine, of which Jeffer- son said, when advising its promulgation, that " it sets our compass and points the course which we are to steer through the ocean of time opening on our view." Count Bernstorif and the rulers of the German Empire should be prepared for surprises from the Monroe Doctrine, in the present very complex, and in some respects unprecedented, conditions brought about by the most stupen- dous war in the history of mankind. Colonies rank as territory of the Mother- land. Such is the recognised principle in in- ternational law. No one could deny Ger- many's right to invade England ** if she could," as the Count modestly puts it in the case of Canada. In so doing Germany would not violate her plighted word, as when she in- vaded Luxemburg and Belgium. Canada should stand exactly like the Motherland. The Count, however, seems to harbour mis- givings, otherwise the tentative mention of 148 THE INVASION OF CANADA the Monroe Doctrine would not occur in his hypothetical considerations. The misgivings are well founded. Without a fundamental and almost inconceivable change in the tradi- tional policy of the United States, Germany, in the case of Canada, will find herself con- fronted with a condition of privileged belliger- ence, anomalous and irregular from Germany's point of view, and without a parallel in history. Canada is waging war on Germany by every means in her power ; yet Germany could not invade Canada, even if she were able to do so, for it is not within the limits even of accept- able surmise that the United States would tolerate the landing of European troops on warfare bent on any part of the continent, and far less so within such proximity to their borders. An incomplete analysis might induce the idea of unfairness to Germany ; to watch un- moved Canadian aggression against Germany and to prevent German hostilities against Canada would, in ordinary circumstances, point to a grievous breach of neutrality. But the circumstances are not ordinary. The anomaly arises out of the Monroe Doctrine ; it is a lucky coincidence for Canada and an un- expected check for Germany, but, as far as 149 THE INVASION OF CANADA the United States are concerned, it does' not constitute a violation of covenant or of logic. In the international life of the American continent the Monroe Doctrine, by the tradi- tional and unswerving policy of the United States, has become a fact to be reckoned with, ** as the conformation of the earth, which is now an element of security and defence." — Secretary of State Frelinghuysen to Ambassador Lowell, May 8, 1882. The starting-point of the Monroe Doctrine is to be found in Washington's Farewell Address of Sept. 17, 1796. There is astir, in the pregnant clauses of that memorable utter- ance, a breath as of prophetic inspiration. The serene wisdom of its advice and admoni- tions to the American people has withstood the test of over a century of national life, during which the conditions of humanity, in all sections of the planet, and nowhere else more so than in the United States, have ex- perienced greater and more fundamental alter- ations than in any other ten centuries in the past. The attitude of the American people towards that Address is one of reverence akin to religiosity. Washington says : 150 THE INVASION OF CANADA " The great rule for us, in regard to foreign nations, is ... to have with them as little political connexion as possible. . . . Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and colli- sions of her friendships or enmities. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient Government the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from ex- ternal annoyance ; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neu- trality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belli- gerent nations under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation ; when we may choose peace or war as our interests, guided by justice, shall counsel." 151 THE INVASION OF CANADA The principles embodied in the Farewell Address, concerned principally with the United States, were extended to the American con- tinent, and amplified to suit their extension, by President Monroe in 1823 : "The Monroe Administration did not hesitate to accept and apply the logic of the Farewell Address by declaring in effect that American non-intervention in European affairs necessarily implied and meant European non-intervention in American affairs." — Secretary of State Olney to Ambassador Bayard^ July 20, 1895'. The invasion of Canada by Germany, in any case, and irrespective of how justified it might be, would be a case of European inter- vention carried out in the territory of the American continent. The inviolability of that continent, from the standpoint of the United States, is not conditional ; it cannot be affected by extraneous international complications, even though a given section of the continent may happen, through its political status, to be involved in those complications, the political consequences of which, in pursuance of the 152 THE INVASION OF CANADA Monroe Doctrine, must stop at the very point where they acquire the quahty of European intervention in America. The conditions obtaining now in the case of Canada are derived from facts anterior to the present conflict. The hardship — potential so long as Germany is unable to invade Canada — flows from the very nature of the existing and long-established conditions of international life on the American continent. The Monroe Doctrine is not an international covenant with Canada, with Germany, or with any other nation. It is a declaration of principles as firmly rooted in the policy and traditions of the United States as any tenet or precept explicitly laid down by the Constitution. Count BernstorfF might suggest that the United States, in exchange for their protection from invasion, should exact Canada's absten- tion from hostilities against Germany. Such a course would lack adequate foundation. In preventing the invasion of Canada the United States are primarily and essentially protecting their own interests, not those of Canada. They would act identically, even if the inva- sion — i.e. the European interference — were to take place at Canada's request. The attitude of the United States has not been assumed at 153 THE INVASION OF CANADA the solicitation of Canada or in pursuance of an agreement or a treaty with Canada. The interference of the United States to stop Cana- dian hostihties against Germany would be an intervention in European affairs, since for the purpose Canada is British, the colony ranking with the Motherland. From these complex political circumstances there emerges the unprecedented and un- sought-for condition of " privileged belliger- ence" for Canada, under which Canada can carry out hostilities against Germany and Germany cannot retaliate, if that retaliation means the landing of troops and the occu- pation of Canadian territory even as a "tem- porary foothold." 154 XIV SONGS OF WAR When I reflect upon things seen and heard, my memory thrills with the recollection of a day ringing with martial airs and songs foreign to my temperament and language. My feel- ings were carried away by the melodies as a feather by the breath of the wind. The human panorama, palpitating with patriotic emotion, appeared to me not as history in action, warm with the warmth of blood, but as a spec- tacular and miraculous picture, agitated and changing in its aspects, almost articulate — like a forest stirred by the breeze — as it passed in procession before my eyes. The Emperor William I was returning to Berlin, having recovered from a wound which he had received a few months before. An attempt had been made on his life. The nation, schooled in war, calm on the battle- field sown with corpses like seed in the fresh furrow, felt a thrill of terror in face of 155 SONGS OF WAR treachery. The aged monarch was the living symbol of the victories of the previous twenty years, and of the all -conquering renaissance that stirred the German people under the aegis of the Empire. It was a deferred vindi- cation. The new wine of victory warmed the people's hearts and filled their heads with visions of greatness which for them were the only realities. My university, in the neighbouring city of Leipzig, sent a delegation to the reception of the Emperor, who had been, as it were, saved from shipwreck. Any student might join it who wished to do so. We were more than fifteen hundred — a regiment of students. We took our stand on the footpaths in the streets through which the procession was to pass : Unter den Linden, Wilhelmstrasse, the Brandenburg Gate, the approaches to the Royal Palace. Here, too, were the repre- sentatives of other universities in their hundreds and their thousands: Breslau, Heidelberg, Bonn, Tubingen, Gottingen, Halle. . . . They were distinguished from the mass of the townsfolk by their caps and the sashes of the Students' Corps, by the scars on some of the faces, and by the noisy waggish comments, punctuated with winks 156 SONGS OF WAR and laughter, which broke out boisterous and irrepressible on that cloudless spring morning, like a babble of a rushing stream. The troops passed by: infantry, cavalry, artillery. The earth shook beneath the wheels of the cannon. The sunhght played round the bayonets and flashed from the steel- tipped flag-poles ; the flags themselves seemed like eagles' wings folded against the poles. The bands dominated the din and imposed the rhythm of their music on the variegated mass of men and horses passing down the centre of the street like a river in its bed, on the human wall watching its progress, and on the inanimate objects borne along in that palpitating show of war, from the gun-carriages moving down the roadway to the flags flutter- ing aloft as though about to take wing. The crowd acclaimed its heroes. Giants still walked the earth. It was a procession of victories. Of the late war the glory alone remained. The verdure had returned to the trampled fields ; the earth enclosed the dead ; eyes were dried of their tears, and the sword was cleansed of blood. The bands played, the troops sang, the crowd sang, ** Germany, Germany above everything in the world." But yesterday this song was a prophecy, a 157 SONGS OF WAR promise ; from the war it sprang forth, like a bead of gold from the crucible, into reality. ** Germany, Germany above everything in the world." The lordship of the earth be- longed to the victors of Sedan. Every German, every son of the Fatherland must claim his heritage, his incontestable right, which would be enforced by these cannons and these bayonets, now displayed in the streets of the Imperial city, in an orderly and pacific progress, like a sheaf of sparks and thunderbolts in the hand of Jupiter. . , . When the sun set in the clear sky, which too had favoured the return of the Emperor, the processions still continued, and so did the singing, tireless as the voice of the wind over the sea : " Germany, Germany above every- thing in the world." Song in Germany is a sonorous thread intimately interwoven in the texture of the national life. It is not the special prerogative of any clique or class. It is a tradition, a custom, a universal rite. It is with the people at all times and in all places. In every country there are songs associated with all life's activities, from the cradle to the grave. Tradition, recollection, imagination, love, hatred, life's vague melancholy and its 158 SONGS OF WAR fleeting happiness, these have their songs among all people. With none, however, as with the Germans, are they a fundamental feature of the whole life of the whole nation. By tracing the melodious course of the national song down the generations, the national history, not only in the recalling of the concrete fact, which is a secondary manifestation, but in the fixing of the living current that creates the fact, which is the supreme and essential thing, might be reconstructed, just as a temple may be reconstructed from the foundations revealed when the dust of centuries is cleared away. This same song, which yesterday did duty at the spectacular parades in Germany's own cities, accompanies the invading armies in Belgium and France. It is no longer a melody vibrating with patriotic emotion, uniting the army and the people in heart and voice. It sounds the note of uncondi- tional surrender, or of death and destruction. " Germany, Germany above everything in the world." . . . For this Belgium is a ceme- tery, and France would be humiliated and enthralled if, even as it has wings to fly from reality to dreamland, song had bolts to blast the world. . . . Theodor Korner, in 1813, wrote a poem 159 SONGS OF WAR which he called '* Prayer during Battle." The iron hand of the Master of Europe weighed heavily on a vanquished Germany. The war of liberation was being fought. The nation went forth to the fight in search of freedom, either through victory or through death. PRAYER DURING BATTLE Father, I call on Thee, The roaring artillery's clouds thicken round me, The hiss and the glare of the loud bolts confound me ; Ruler of battles, I call on Thee. O Father, lead Thou me. Father, lead Thou me ; To victory, to death, dread Commander, O guide me ; The dark valley brightens when Thou art beside me ; Lord, as Thou wilt, so lead Thou me. God, I acknowledge Thee. God, I acknowledge Thee ; When the breeze through the dry leaves of Autumn is moaning. When the thunder-storm of battle is groaning, Fount of mercy, in each I acknowledge Thee. O Father, bless Thou me. O Father, bless Thou me ; I trust in Thy mercy, whate'er may befall me : 'Tis Thy word that hath sent me ; that word can recall me. Living or dying, O bless Thou me. Father, I honour Thee. 160 SONGS OF WAR Father, I honour Thee ; Not for earth's hoards or honours we here are contending ; All that is holy our swords are defending : Then falling, and conquering, I honour Thee. God, I repose in Thee. God, I repose in Thee ; When the thunders of death my soul are greeting, When the gashed veins bleed, and the life is fleeting. In Thee, my God, I repose in Thee. Father, I call on Thee. In 1840 Max Schneckenburger wrote ** The Watch on the Rhine," perhaps the most genuinely German song among all the nation's war-songs. The Rhine flows through the pages of German history as surely as it flows past the foot of the Drachenfels or the towers of Cologne Cathedral. *' On the banks of the Rhine, our golden grapes do grow," sings the Teuton in the piping times of peace. And his thoughts rush to these sacred banks when- ever he fancies them threatened. It is still a call to defence which is sounded in this poem : THE WATCH ON THE RHINE What sounds of thunder seem to call, With noise of arms they wavelike fall ; The Rhine, the Rhine, the German Rhine ! Oh who will guard our German Rhine ? Dear Fatherland, repose be thine ! True hearts will watch the German Rhine. L 161 SONGS OF WAR A hundred thousand quick as light Of stalwart Germans rise to fight ; Armed, stout and true, they take their stand To guard our holy Fatherland. Dear Fatherland, &c. They seem to see thro' azure skies Their hero-fathers' watching eyes ; Each vows the Rhine shall ever rest As German as his valiant breast. Dear Fatherland, &Ci As long as blood flows in his veins. Or while his hand the sword retains. While lives one man to strike a blow. Its shore's ne'er trod by mortal foe. Dear Fatherland, &c. The oath resounds, the waves run high. The flag is floating 'neath the sky ; The Rhine ! The Rhine ! The German Rhine ! To guard thee all our souls combine. Dear Fatherland, &c. Hoifmann von Fallersleben, in 1841, in his " Germany, Germany above everything in the world," crystallised the overweening pride which has turned the nation's head and is bathing the world in blood. The German, perfect in his own eyes, or at least, superior to other men, feels himself defrauded because others have what he has not. His song 162 SONGS OF WAR changes to a growl. Loyalty, union, liberty, justice, fine ideals, lofty conceptions, holy as- pirations — but only for God's chosen and favoured people ; and to the echo of such words as these the German hosts trample the conquered peoples under their feet, as the grape is trodden in the wine-press, crushing out their life-blood and despoiling them of liberty and justice. For these peoples this song is a song of malediction. In 1840 Nikolaus Becker wrote an ode to the Rhine, to which Alfred de Musset wrote a reply. The two poems are as follows : THE GERMAN RHINE They shall not have it, cravens ! The free and German Rhine, Though hoarse for it as ravens For carrion prey they whine. So long as o'er the river The pleasant borders gleam. So long as there shall quiver An oar within the stream ! Thou shalt not fear a craven. Thou free and German Rhine ! So long as lips shall lave in The fervour of thy wine. 168 SONGS OF WAR So long as bloom thy flowers On cliffs that aye have stoodj So long as stately towers Are mirror'd in thy flood. They shall not have thee, peerless And deep and German Rhine ! So long as lads are fearless. And maids to love incline. So long as yet there lingers A fish beneath thy wave. So long as thou hast singers To laud thee in a stave. They shall not have thee, tender And true and German Rhine, Until thy last defender Sinks in that flood of thine ! Alfred de Mussel's Reply Nous Tavons eu, votre Rhin allemand : II a tenu dans notre verre. Un couplet qu'on s'en va chantant Efface-t-il la trace alti^re Du pied de nos chevaux marque dans votre sang ? Nous Tavons eu, votre Rhin allemand. Son sein porte une plaie ouverte, Du jour oil Cond^ triomphant A d^chir^ sa robe verte. Oil le p^re a pass^, passera bien Tenfant. 164 SONGS OF WAR Nous Tavons eu, votre Rhin allemand. Que faisaient vos vertues germaines, Quand notre Cesar tout-puissant De son ombre couvrait vos plaines ? Oii done est-il tombe, ce dernier ossement ? Nous Tavons eu, votre Rhin allemand. Si vous oubliez votre histoire, Vos jeunes lilies, sArement, Ont mieux gard^ notre memoire ; EUes nous ont verse votre petit vin blanc. S'il est k vous, votre Rhin allemand, Lavez-y done votre livree, Mais parlez-en moins fi^rement. Combien, au jour de la curee, Etiez-vous de corbeaux contre Taigle expirant ? Qu*il coule en paix, votre Rhin allemand ; Que vos cathedrales gothiques S'y refl^tent modestement ! Mais craignez que vos airs bachiques Ne r^veillent les morts de leur repos sanglant. 165 XV WHY A SPANISH-AMERICAN SHOULD NOT BE PRO-GERMAN Open Letter to a young South American, studying Natural Science in Europe London, December 1914. Dear Sir, — The annals of your country — which is also mine — record at no very distant date, and in connexion with your name, a noble and energetic action in which the popular pro- test was crystallised. At that time you neither weighed consequences, nor studied arbitrary or conventional interests. Considering that falsehood predominated, you vindicated the truth. As a citizen of a sovereign Republic, you demanded that the government should be carried on, as consecrated in the national in- stitutions, " of the people, for the people, and by the people." Certainly at that moment you thought of your father in his struggles for those same ideals, and of the temper of the pen he wielded, 166 A SPANISH-AMERICAN which at times flashed before the public con- science with the gleam of a conquering sword. In such wise, and with such subtle bonds, does Providence unite men in sacred con- tinuity by name and blood. In this action of yours we, your country- men, beheld a manifestation of character, which blossoms but rarely in our oppressed democracies, and indeed everywhere else ap- parently, in these dark days when sordid ambitions abound on every hand. It was like the golden gleam on the surface of the rock, that reveals the presence of the vein within. Character is the human medium on which life moulds honour and nobility. We, your countrymen, set our hopes on you. . . . This summary relation will serve to justify the present letter. Whether we are labourers in the field, or simple pilgrims on life's journey, we have all of us the right, nay, rather the duty, to shield from the blighting frost and from the beast of prey, the furrow in which we sow the seed for the harvest or the seed of hope : there lies the bread or the faith of to-morrow. . . . Let us examine the matter a Uttle; no more than is just necessary. 167 WHY A SPANISH-AMERICAN What ideas and what principles did you represent by tradition and by your bold de- claration, which circumstances have made historic and outstanding as an example to the youth of your country ? Those of democracy and liberty. Can you circumscribe your judgment within narrow geographical and political limits, and love justice and liberty in your own country, and accept and applaud oppression and tyranny elsewhere? Because in the mould of your conscience you lately stamped the sterling coin of truth, have you the right now to stamp and circulate spurious coin? Have you the right to protest against tyranny in America, and to accept in Europe the law of '* blood and iron " which Prussia is seeking to impose on the world ? Would such a course be logical, would it be honourable, would it be worthy of your name and fame ? In this dark hour there is no refuge nor sanctuary; the battle-thunder shakes the whole world. We are all of us, in one way or another, in the line of fire ; somewhere the bullets are dealing death, others fighting out the battle in the conscience. In either field one may be a hero or a turncoat. The hour 168 SHOULD NOT BE PRO-GERMAN is a solemn one, and fraught with destiny, as never before in the world's history. Wherever there is a clique, a caste, or an individual above the law, liberty cannot exist. Towards such a social medium the streams of material well-being and prosperity may flow ; the arts and sciences may flourish there, and a semblance of greatness may arise which is to outward view fruitful in benefits both for those at home and for the foreigner, and which will serve to justify political and territorial ambitions. All this will be but a passing show. The organic lie will gain the upper hand and control the development of the national life ; it will darken the sun and stifle in blood the voice of the public conscience. In Germany, the military caste is above the law. The military uniform at times shields crime. Militarism is the fundamental system on which the German conception of government and the traditional policy is based ; it is not merely a matter of sporadic manifestations. Lend me your honourable attention as a democrat and citizen of a South- American Republic. "In January 1901 a lieutenant supposed himself to be insulted by a student of 169 WHY A SPANISH-AMERICAN Jena. There had been a dispute, which would not have been of significance in any case, and was of no significance at all in the circumstances, as both parties to it were drunk. The lieutenant drew his sword and killed the unarmed student. The lieutenant was sentenced to two and a half years' confinement — the penalty of a successful duellist. After nine months he was released. The Briisewitz case in October 1896 is better known. In a caf^ at Carlsruhe the chair of a lieutenant named Morned von Briisewitz was unin- tentionally pushed by an artisan named Siepmann. The officer demanded an apology on the spot. Siepmann, con- scious of no offence, refused it. The officer drew his sword and rushed on the unarmed artisan, who fled. The officer overtook him as he was trying to escape through a locked door, and killed him. Briisewitz was dismissed from the army and sentenced to four years' detention in a fortress. The sequel was very curious. The Emperor himself reduced the im- prisonment to three years and twenty days, and afterwards, when addressing some recruits, said, by way of explana- 170 SHOULD NOT BE PRO-GERMAN tion, ' Whoever lays hands on the bearer of the King's uniform lays hands on the King himself.' As for the Minister of War, General von Gossler, he defended Briisewitz's act in the Reichstag.'' —The Spectator, 6th December 1913. And again : " It will be remembered that recently there was serious rioting at Zabern owing to a young lieutenant having called native Alsatians by an odious name. This young officer when he goes shopping is escorted by soldiers with fixed bayonets. What a picture ! On Friday week the rioting was renewed. Some officers were returning from the fencing school, when they were, or at least believed that they were, insulted by some pupils coming out of a continuation school. Immediately a colonel drew up sixty men in the public square and ordered them to load their rifles. These troops then proceeded to arrest civilians apparently without any method. Ridiculous scenes followed, as we learn from the Times correspondent. A judge and barristers coming out of the law court were actually arrested. A 171 WHY A SPANISH-AMERICAN fireman was arrested on his way to his duty. People were seized indiscrimi- nately in caf^s. About thirty citizens spent the night in the cells before they were released. . . . On Tuesday there was a scuffle near Zabern, and it is reported that the young lieutenant, on whom a sinister limelight seems always to play, struck a lame cobbler on the head with his sword and dangerously wounded him." — The Spectator^ 6th December 1913. Herr Ed. Bernstein, a member of the Reichstag, in dealing with the Zabern affair, says : "When the Minister for War, von Falkenheim, carried away by his anxiety to excuse the conduct of Lieutenant von Forstner (the notorious person who seriously wounded the lame cobbler), suggested as an alternative that the lieu- tenant might have run his sword through the first man who offended him — when the Minister for War spoke of this alternative as though it were the most natural thing in the world — then matters reached a climax. Against such a form of defence the Reichstag was bound to protest, 172 SHOULD NOT BE PRO-GERMAN unless it wished to sanction military ruffianism." You see then the presumption, at once diabolical and ridiculous, in which German militarism culminated. In no other country in the world is it conceivable that such arro- gance, or the brutal prospect of men killing their own fathers, would be tolerated. Only an implacable and all-pervading military disci- pline, handed down from generation to gener- ation, could lower the soul to such a level. Listen to the Kaiser s speech at the swear- ing in of the new recruits at Potsdam on 23rd November 1891 : " Soldiers of my Guard : From to-day you form part of my army. You are under my orders, and you have the right to wear my uniform. Wear it with honour. Think of the glorious history of our Fatherland. Remember that the German army must be prepared against the enemy from within as well as against the enemy from without. " Recruits : Before the altar and before the ministers of God you have sworn the oath of fealty to me. You are too young fully to understand the significance of 173 WHY A SPANISH-AMERICAN what has here been said. Your first duty is Mindly to obey every order and every command. You have sworn fealty to me. You are the men of my Guard and my soldiers. You have committed yourselves to me body and soul. There can be but one enemy for you, and that is whoever shall be my enemy. Owing to the present machinations of the Socialists, it may happen that I shall order you to fire on your own re- lations, on your brothers and on your fathers — God grant it may not be — and in that case you are bound to obey my orders blindly." The two opposing theories which serve to define liberty and tyranny are these in prin- ciple, that right is might, and that might is right. The first is the supreme aspiration towards freedom and justice. The respect it secures for itself is the measure of the degree of civihsation attained. The second is the law of the forest, claw and fang law. Its dominion means barbarism. Right is crystallised in the written law. The law is a compact governing the relations between men and nations respectively. It is 174 SHOULD NOT BE PRO-GERMAN the supreme protection for the weak, be they men or peoples. He who, as the son of a weak nation, accepts and applauds the viola- tion of defenceless right, betrays his own people and accepts and glorifies slavery. Germany, through the mouths of her apostles of the gospel of brigandage, preaches the infamous doctrine that treaties should only be respected as long as it is convenient to respect them. Bernhardi says : " What governs the relations between one nation and another is an obstinate struggle for power, wealth, and dominion, in the course of which right must only be respected in so far as it is compatible with convenience." When the time was ripe, Germany conse- crated this doctrine as a rule of national conduct : she violated the neutrality of Bel- gium. Her Imperial Chancellor confessed the fact. On the 14th August Herr Bethmann- Hollweg declared in the Reichstag : "We saw ourselves obliged to trample on the just protests of Luxemburg and Belgium. I recognise with all frankness 175 WHY A SPANISH-AMERICAN the wrong which we are committing, and for which we shall make amends as soon as we have attained our military ends." There is no need to labour the point. The tragedy of Belgium, attacked with cold de- liberation and torn limb from limb by the troops of his Majesty the Kaiser, has stag- gered humanity ; it stands out against the horizon like a hellish vision of agony and of shame for the whole human race. With what right would a Spanish- American, identified through his support with Prussia's unspeakable acts in Belgium, and therefore willingly stained with the blood of the victims and the tears of the helpless mothers, with what right would a Spanish - American, a zealous accomplice — for the will is as good as the deed — of Prussia's deeds of darkness in this war, demand a better fate for his own country — a weak nation with a soil a hundred times richer and a hundred times less capable of defence than Belgium — when, if Prussia is victorious, in her fatal and inexorable evolu- tion the surging wave of German voracity reaches his own native land ? The abolition of war between the nations is a remote ideal, impossible of attainment in 176 SHOULD NOT BE PRO-GERMAN the present embryonic state of human civilisa- tion. Men of benevolent intentions, men who profess the principles of Christ, men of other faiths who love justice and can conceive com- passion, are all labouring to circumscribe the horrors and the ravages of war within definite limits, which are fixed by the inexorable neces- sity of gaining the victory. Up till the present time these efforts have succeeded in securing protection, under the guarantee of the nations, for non-combatants and for disarmed combat- ants who are at the mercy of the victors. All this is clearly expressed in the stipulations signed by Germany, in conjunction with all the civilised nations of the earth, in an inter- national convention of the widest and deepest significance for humanity that the Govern- ments have ever signed. Among other things this convention pro- hibits **the pillage of a town or place, even when taken by assault." It enjoins that "family honours and rights, individual lives and private property, as well as religious con- victions and liberty, must be respected," and that " private property connot be confiscated." It establishes the principle that " no general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, can be in- flicted on the population on account of the M 177 WHY A SPANISH-AMERICAN acts of individuals for which it cannot be re- garded as collectively responsible." The world knows what Germany's conduct in Belgium has been; the orders issued by her own generals proclaim it with painful clearness. The Kaiser himself gave the keynote, the leit-motif, in this infernal symphony : ** The only method of avoiding sur- prise attacks on the part of the civil population has been to intervene with merciless severity, and to create examples which, by their very frightfulness, shall serve as a warning to every one in Belgium." — Wireless message from the Kaiser published by the English Press Bureau, 29th August 1914. The first German proclamation issued in Belgium, dated August 4, still breathes the hope that Belgium will give way without fighting. The next, dated August 9, again endeavours to win over the Belgians, but it ends now with a threat : "We will act severely on any attempt by the population to offer resistance to 178 SHOULD NOT BE PRO-GERMAN the German troops, or to do injury to our military interests." On August 17 the Mayor of Haesselt warns the inhabitants that, by agreement with the chief German authorities, "in the case of civilians firing on the German army, a third part of the male population will be shot." On August 22 General von Biilow issued his now famous proclamation to the com- munal authorities of the town of Li^ge, which runs as follows : " The inhabitants of the town of Andenne, after having protested their peaceful in- tentions, made a treacherous surprise attack on our troops. It was with my consent that the General had the whole place burnt down, and about 100 people shot. I bring this fact to the knowledge of the town of Li^ge, so that its inhabi- tants may know the fate that threatens them, if they take up a similar attitude. *' The Commander-in-Chief, " VON BULOW." On August 23 a proclamation was issued in Namur, the nature of which is sufficiently indicated by the following extracts : 179 WHY A SPANISH-AMERICAN *' (3) Every street will be occupied by a German guard, who will take ten hostages from each street, whom they will keep under surveillance. If there is any rising in the street, the ten hostages will be shot. " (4) Doors must not be locked, and after eight o'clock at night there must be lights in all the windows of every house. " (5) It is forbidden to be in the street after eight o'clock at night. The in- habitants of Namur must understand that there is no greater nor more horrible crime than to compromise the existence of the town and the lives of its citizens by criminal acts against the German army. " The Commander, *'V0N BULOW." On October 5 the following proclamation was issued in Brussels : " During the night of September 25 the railway line and the telegraph wires were destroyed on the line Lovenjoul- Vertryck. In consequence of this, these two localities have had to give hostages on the morning of September 30. In future, the localities nearest to the place 180 SHOULD NOT BE PRO-GERMAN where similar acts occur will be punished without mercy ; it matters little whether they are accomplices or not. For this purpose hostages have been taken from all localities near the railway line thus menaced, and at the first attempt to destroy the railway line, or the tele- phone or telegraph wires, the hostages will be immediately shot. ** Further, all the troops charged with the duty of guarding the railway line have been ordered to shoot any person who in a suspicious manner approaches the railway line, or the telephone or telegraph wires. " The Governor-General of Belgium, " Baron von der Goltz, " Fieldmarshai:' In the preamble to the fourth convention of the Second Peace Conference, with respect to the laws and customs of war on land, it is stated : ** It could not be intended by the High Contracting Parties that the cases not provided for should, for want of a written provision, be left to the arbitrary judg- ment of the military commanders." 181 WHY A SPANISH-AMERICAN It is further stated that : " Until a more complete code of the laws of war is issued, the High Contract- ing Parties think it right to declare that in cases not included in the Regulations adopted by them, populations and belli- gerents remain under the protection and empire of international law, as they result from the usages established between civil- ised nations, from the laws of humanity, and the requirements of the public con- science." In the preceding quotations I have limited myself strictly to irrefutable documents, rely- ing on the declarations of the Kaiser, his ministers, his generals, and his governors in the invaded territory ; or on the accounts of notorious facts given by newspapers of recog- nised repute, many months or years before the war broke out. I do not discuss a single one of the accusations of ferocity, of inconceivable cruelty, of mad fury in the destruction of life and property, with which the air is full, and which trail behind the German hosts like the blood-red tail of some portentous comet. I make no particular reference to the towns and villages burned to the ground or pulverised by 182 SHOULD NOT BE PRO-GERMAN shells after their occupation. This would give an opening to the well-worn plea that we were merely dealing with slanderous inventions, launched under the protection of war, when horror abounds and falsehood flourishes. I present to you the Prussian doctrine, the Prussian creed, which are much more ominous and overwhelming than the most terrible acts due to Prussian militarism either inside or out- side Germany, because the material fact, how- ever horrible it may be, necessarily has its limits, whereas if perversity and iniquity are established as the supreme law, these limits no longer exist, either in the material world or in men's consciences. The most pitiable victim of this Prussian militarism which threatens the whole world is the German people itself, sacrificed to-day by its rulers, for whom hundreds of thousands of human lives count as nought : "We will not hesitate to sacrifice one hundred or two hundred thousand lives to effect a landing on the coasts of Great Britain." As in every human dispute, the good and the bad are interwoven in the opposing forces 183 WHY A SPANISH- AMERICAN in this conflict. The tendency towards liberty and democracy is evident in England and France. History proclaims the fact. It does not exist in Russia. On the other hand, the darkness of despotic reaction hangs over the alliance of Germany, Austria, and Turkey, increased by the pedantic and slavish hypocrisy of the German professors and intellectuals. If, abandoning the exact rules of analysis, you give way to emotional impulses and declare yourself on the Prussian side, and if you wish to be consistent, the first thing you must do is to give up your studies in strict scientific investigation. Smash your balance, your microscope, your retort, and your crucible ; pour your reagents down the drain ; forget the laws and the formulas into which the scant measure of scientific truth ascertained by man has been crystallised, and devote yourself to the venerable practices of Zoroaster, or to astrology, or to black magic, or green, or blue, if such things exist. There would be no sense in analysing in the scientific laboratory, and shutting your eyes to the lesson of facts in the great laboratory of human life, at this very hour when such tremendous issues are at stake. 184 SHOULD NOT BE PRO-GERMAN Furthermore you must say to us, who have placed our hopes in you : "My sympathies are with Prussia. Wherefore I renounce my ancestral traditions and my country's efforts to- wards freedom. I accept and applaud the doctrine that public treaties and national conventions should only be re- spected so long as it is convenient to do so. I recognise that might is the only right, and I henceforth accept this doctrine for my country. I accept as a genuine law of war the preventive ' frightfulness ' which consists in shoot- ing hostages and decimating conquered populations, proclaimed by the Kaiser and von Biilow, and practised by the Germans in this war, and I reject the merciful provisions of the Hague Con- ferences. I leave the ranks in which I have hitherto stood, and trampling down all obstacles, I range myself in the ranks of reaction. I recognise the boasted absolute superiority of the Germans over all other men, and the right they claim to rule the world and to impose on it the system which culminates in Zabern, 185 A SPANISH-AMERICAN in the mediaeval conception of Use majeste at home, and in this desperate struggle with the rest of the world. " I accept in fact the theory, which I have hitherto considered infamous, and which is now put into practice by Prussia, that there is a twofold morality, one for the individual and one for the community, and that what is criminal in the individual may be practised by the community, and may be a legitimate source of glory and of so-called national aggrandisement. " I accept, then, Prussian imperialism, and with it the imperialism that shall spring up in America, as the supreme law of life for the nations, and I agree that the small nations shall disappear under the heel of the strong nations, for the sole reason that the small nations are weak." All this and much more is what it means to-day to be a Prussian. There can be neither neutrality nor indifference before the bar of the conscience. We must all sink or swim together. The tempest rages furiously beneath a sky vivid with the lightning-flash in this hour of destiny. I am, yours faithfully, - o/j S. PiREZ Triana. loo XVI THE ^' PLACE IN THE SUN" " In spite of the length of their history, the German people are the youngest of the Great Nations of Western Europe. A period of youth has twice fallen to their lot, and with it the struggle to establish their power as a State and to gain freedom for civilisation." Thus the ineffable Treitschke, in the open- ing words of his German History, which consecrates him as the apostle and the prophet of his people. Treitschke is wary. " Freedom," unquali- fied, would commit him to liberty, as uni- versally comprehended : ** civilisation " is a vague and elastic concept : " freedom for civilisation" is non-committal and absolutely safe. Furthermore, it flatters the popular fancy, forever dreaming of ** liberty " and such like Utopias, whilst really meaning solely whatever may maintain and promote a given 187 THE "PLACE IN THE SUN" condition of affairs. Treitschke could not refer to freedom, as understood in democratic countries, which has never existed in Germany. On the other hand, civihsation without liberty is incomplete. The difference of attitude to- wards life, in this respect, between Germans — barring the advanced parties, found so woe- fully wanting when tested — and the freemen of other parts, is fundamental. Words are apt to mislead. The gold and the copper coins of a monetary system all bear the same effigy. The circulating medium in German mentality, in politics and administra- tion — so to speak — is mainly copper. What is the message of this young and vigorous people to humanity? That of a liberty adapted to and compatible with the civilisation that it has evolved and practises. This also means the suppression of whatever may disturb or antagonise that very type of civilisation. Thus we arrive at something tangible and precise, namely, the present life of Germany, economic, social, and political. Such is the ideal achieved by the German people in the two periods of youth that have been vouchsafed to it. That ideal, already firmly established at home, should and must be imposed on the world. The Germanisation 188 THE "PLACE IN THE SUN" of the world is the mission of the German people at the present hour, sacred, unavoid- able, and peremptory. Germany will fulfil her mission at any cost to herself or to others. Self-sacrifice animates her soul. Happily, the sacrifice at home will fall upon the millions who, thanks to the excellences of the estab- lished system, are well-nigh inarticulate and helpless in the decision of their own fate, like the fallen leaves when the wind blows. Thus the guides of the nation, basking in undisturbed equanimity, can leisurely con- trive the tremendous combinations of actual warfare, drenched in the blood and tears of others. Germany possesses everything — science, art, industry, wealth — everything except liberty. In its stead it has discipline and system. 'Tis true that life may generally flow placidly be- tween the two, untorn by their relentless edges. What is ominous and insupportable is the potentiality for outrage inherent in the law. Where right is not right, but simply a merci- ful and precarious concession on the part of might, barbarism obtains supreme. The task of dominating the world required adequate preparation. Opinions and aspira- tions differ from land to land ; blind to their 189 THE "PLACE IN THE SUN" real interests, other peoples would surely ob- ject to the blessings of being Germanised ; their obduracy — for their own happiness — would have to be overcome by force. Thus and only thus could Germany accomplish her mission as a redeemer of mankind. It became necessary to convert the nation into a sword, a blade invincible ; this, in practice, meant the absolute and ubiquitous supremacy of the military institution. The nation was converted into a barracks, and the ruling principle of the barracks became the law of life. That may have been a wise move towards attaining a certain aim, and might hasten its attainment, but in such a medium liberty perishes like a rose-bush in a cave. Flowers want air and sunshine. Germany — official Germany — in making history, seeks primarily territorial expansion. Her frontiers have become too narrow; life overflows. In so far as that overflow means migration of human beings — not of capital or industry — that life must at all hazards remain politically within the Empire. The Empire must expand its territory, unavoidably at the cost of others, since there is not an inch of ground on the surface of the planet without an owner, weak or powerful. 190 THE ''PLACE IN THE SUN" In his book, Iviperial Germany, Prince Billow says : " A great oppression, which weighed on the spirit of the nation, had been occasioned by the rupture between the wearer of the Imperial Crown and the mighty man who had brought it up from the depths of Kyffhauser. This oppression would be lifted if the German Emperor could set before his people, who at that time were not united by common hopes or demands, a new goal towards which to strive, and could indicate to them a * place in the sun' to which they had a right, and which they must try to obtain." Elsewhere, in the same work, Prince Biilow, surely a witness whom no German could or would impugn, referring to the advent of Germany, victorious and irresistible, to the company of the Great Powers, says : '* The new Great Power was formidable after three glorious and successful cam- paigns, and was looked upon as an un- invited and unwelcome intruder when it entered the company of the Great Powers of Europe and demanded its share of the treasures of the world." 191 THE "PLACE IN THE SUN ' " The treasures of the world." One begins to grasp realities. Germany demands "her share " of those treasures. As that " share " does not lie uncalled within the precincts of uncreated chaos, to be blown into tangible reality by an imperial whifF from the Kaiser, it must indispensably be seized and torn from the possessions of other nations, large or small, who, in their turn, most assuredly consider that those selfsame " treasures " are their legitimate and inviolable " share." Thus, for the accomplishment of her noble mission — for the nonce reduced to the ac- quisition by violence of what belongs to others, which, be it said in passing, is what short-sighted and narrow-minded people call pillage — Germany must wield the sword un- remittingly to the end and achievement of her glorious destiny. The acquisition of the *' share " will con- stitute the first stage. It will be followed by the longed-for Germanisation of the world. Triumphant militarism will stamp out with relentless severity whatever may, even in thought, disturb its rule. The German drill- sergeant will rule over a docile and regenerate humanity ; the Almighty will still rule the universe, and the Kaiser, in modest self-efFace- 192 THE "PLACE IN THE SUN" merit, taking a back seat, will look after the earth. Verily a prodigy of grandiose and universal felicity ! During forty years Germany prepared for war ; she lived for war, war was the dream of her soul, her political religion and the one guiding principle of her collective and indi- vidual life. When she thought the day had arrived, she let war loose upon the world, like iEolus loosing the hurricanes, her objective being to secure her " place in the sun." What does this symbolical phrase really mean ? It should mean equality of opportunity. Has that equahty of opportunity been denied to Germany ? Was there any reason to believe that it would be denied in the future ? If that equality of opportunity has been denied to Germany in the past, or if its denial was imminent, Germany's right to redress the wrong done or threatened her, by whatever means in her power, would be undeniable. But if that equality of opportunity has existed in the past, and there was no danger of its being suppressed or curtailed, the war be- comes a nefarious crime against God and man, and the pretence of a mere justifiable quest for "a place in the sun" a shameful and bloodstained lie. N 193 THE "PLACE IN THE SUN" The industrial and commercial development of Germany was necessarily based upon her equality of opportunity in the world's activi- ties. The figures of that development prove beyond all doubt that Germany has had her place in the sun, and show how wonderfully she has improved her opportunities. "During the same period of time (1885- 1914) German foreign trade rose from 6,000 million marks to 19,160 million. Foreign trade and the means of support of a nation have an obvious connexion with each other. . . . The enormous in- crease in number and extent of the indus- trial enterprises, which to-day employ millions of workmen and officials, could only be attained by winning a prominent place for German industry in the markets of the world. . . . With its foreign trade of 19,000 millions, Germany is to-day the second greatest commercial power in the world ; for it is second only to the United Kingdom with her 25,000 million, and surpasses the United States with her 15,000 million. In the year 1910, 11,800 German ships and 11,698 foreign ships entered the German ports, while 11,962 194 THE "PLACE IN THE SUN" German and 11,678 foreign ships sailed from them." Germany has had the full measure of equality of opportunity. Her industry, her commerce, and her finance have penetrated unhindered into every region of the world : her sons have made their homes on a par with the nationals, wherever it has suited them, in sovereign nations or in colonies of sovereign nations ; her commerce has enjoyed the most favoured nation clause everywhere ; her best customers were the United Kingdom, the British colonies, and Russia. The Ger- many of the plough and of the workshop, of the mill and of the foundry, of the counting- house and of the laboratory, the Germany that thinks and ponders and sings and keeps and increases the treasures of the generations and the spoils of time, has had open and free to her the entire surface of the planet and the conscience of mankind, and often she has scattered broadcast the seeds of light which her thinkers and her seers have snatched from the stars. Official Germany, Imperial Ger- many, whose principal victim is the German people, first duped and then hurled headlong into the abyss, has not enjoyed equality of 195 THE "PLACE IN THE SUN" opportunity with Democracy to extend over the world its system of oppression and of privilege. The ''place in the sun" is not intended for the German people, but for a despotism bankrupt in ideals and as barren for the good of man as the shrapnel of her cannon. 196 XVII GERMANISM IN AMERICA The founders of the Republic, the framers of the national institutions in the United States, had that prescience of the future which Provi- dence seems to bestow, sparingly and on rare occasions, on the great artificers of history. In launching the ship of the nation on the sea of time, they could have said, like the national poet of later days : " Sail on, Oh Union, strong and great, Humanity with all its fears. With all the hopes of future years. Is hanging breathless on thy fate ! " They scanned the anxious horizon, darkened with the gathering clouds of impending dis- aster, and they uttered their warning : "Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence I conjure you to believe me, fellow - citizens, the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that 197 GERMANISM IN AMERICA foreign influence is one of the most bane- ful foes of republican government." — Washington, Farewell Address, Sep- tember 17, 1796. What those founders of the nation princi- pally feared was the extension of " the systems of Europe " to the continent of America. These systems appeared to them as the seeds of disturbance, or perhaps rather as the germs of contamination. Untrammelled by tradition and privilege, deep-rooted in the centuries and incarnate in the law and the custom of the land, the new American Republic was free to advance unhindered in the path of history ; it stood primarily and essentially for liberty and democracy ; it would attempt the great experiment within its own borders, with- out interfering with the development of other nations on the continent. There was one fundamental limitation to that policy of isola- tion which, within a few years, it became imperative to proclaim to the European Powers, namely, that any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of the American hemisphere would be viewed by the United States as ** dangerous to their peace and safety." 198 GERMANISM IN AMERICA The danger signalled was of an international character, that is to say, from one nation to another ; only as such could it cross the seas and seek to penetrate the sacred precincts of the Republic. Human foresight, however, in this case, has been proved wanting by the test of time ; human vision, even when lit by a spark of prophecy, seldom, if ever, divines the possi- bilities of the future beyond the elements, actual or potential, within its ken. Napoleon himself could not have framed hypothetical plans of strategy to meet wireless telegraphy or the submarine. The luckiest of prophets, at best, but gropes in the vagueness of possi- bilities, such as he can conceive. That baneful foreign influence could only emanate from Parliaments, Cabinets, Courts, or Governments, and, naturally, from the castes, classes, and institutions acting through their medium. The transformations which occurred during the nineteenth century would appear to re- quire a revision of the safeguards devised after the warning of the great ancestors. Humanity had waxed restless; the old homes had be- come narrow. Like the birds of heaven men betook themselves away from their native soil in quest of other skies ; they went forth, not 199 GERMANISM IN AMERICA as conquerors, but as pilgrims ; they sought solely to better their condition ; they brought with them to the new lands, empty of humanity and bountiful in resources, from which wealth incalculable would flow, if only touched by the hand of man, the training of an old civilisa- tion, and the purpose of a new life. Such a peaceful migration of humanity, decade after decade, swelling into millions, had never before occurred in the history of the human race. It started at the appointed hour of destiny, for the fulfilment on the new continent of that experiment in liberty, as if it were a poem on a blank page of history, which had been lying dormant in the lap of the Gods since the beginning of Time. During those decades of expansion, seething with prosperity, did it occur to any of the watchers on the high towers of statesmanship, or to the sentinels of public vigilance in the Press or on the rostrum, to scrutinise the irrepressible influx of humanity flowing into the land ? Did any one of them see in that new manifestation of the forces of life aught that might require a new adjustment of the estabUshed principles, so that, for humanity, the ship of the nation '* strong and great '* 200 GERMANISM IN AMERICA might still sail on "with all the hopes of future years " ? Or were the seers and the watchers, proud and placid in the sunshine of power, content to see that, as the goblet of empire grew, Fate poured into it ever new streams of alien wine? Have "the insidious wiles of foreign influence " penetrated into the national organism, and if so, do they menace and endanger those ideals, luminous with hope, for which the nation was founded, and for which it stands in the conscience of men ? The question is apposite to the conflict of the present hour ; it is open to every man, what- ever may be the place of his birth ; the issues are not local, nor even limited to the Ameri- can continent ; they affect the destinies of the world. Of the neutrals the United States are the only nation that matters. Their attitude was to Germany a surprise, which grew into bitter disappointment; bitterness has turned to anger akin to hatred, that brooks no passivity. It was bad enough that Irishmen — after all Celts, and unreliable — should have put their feuds aside ; that Italy left her Allies in the lurch ; that the Boers should fight for and not against Britain; that India should send 201 GERMANISM IN AMERICA her legions to swell the British armies ; that the spell of the Crescent should have failed to kindle the Holy War; that Belgium and Serbia — ah, those small nations, may they all be accursed for ever ! — should have proved ada- mant instead of clay ; but that after such fond nursing the United States should yield merely a harvest of thorns, is something beyond en- durance, which must be resented and remedied at any cost. And a voice from Berlin sweeps across the ocean like a trumpet blast ; it is the command of the Master ; it strikes the atavistic idiosyn- crasies of submission; the Master instantly reconquers the fealty of his wanderers ; one, two, three generations in the atmosphere of liberty will not remould the character kneaded into blind obedience throughout the countless centuries. The guileless Republic, so trusting in the love of the weary, footsore, and hungry outcasts whom she crowned with the rights of citizenship, and to whom she threw open the gates of power and of wealth, is thrust aside as an empty shell. The Vaterland re- asserts her supremacy : Ueutschland uher Alles in der Welt, such is the cry of the re- awakened German soul after a short dream of freedom . . . Bah 1 Such nonsense. 202 GERMANISM IN AMERICA Thus the Voice : — '*Your numbers are millions. You are neither intruders nor idlers in the land. Your brain and your muscle have helped to erect the mighty structure of its pros- perity. You have trekked the desert, climbed the summits, explored the rivers and the lakes, felled the forests, built the cities, and in the hour of strife shed your blood on a thousand battlefields. You have paid for your rights with the sweat of your brow and the blood of your veins, than which no better right exists. You are the forerunners of Empire — of the German Empire. You carry in your very bones the glorious Teutonic tradi- tions, the undying spark of Teutonic virtue, fidelity, and loyalty — Deutsche Treue, Deutsche Ehre, the stamp of our superior race. The world belongs to us. The hour has struck when you must do your duty to the Fatherland. "You have the vote. It is Thor's hammer. Furthermore, remember that you are dealing with an inferior people. The Anglo-American is nothing but a transplanted Englishman, only more so. Did he not risk his very national exist- 203 GERMANISM IN AMERICA ence to 'free the negro'? Does the admixture of Irish, Russian, ItaUan, Dago, and the rest, and of the self- same negro, improve the woeful con- glomerate ? Ply the vote like a weapon ; impose submission on the recalcitrant Executive. After victory, we shall Germanise the continent and crush to atoms under our mailed fist the alleged Monroe talisman, so long and so irritat- ingly in our way. Vorwdrts viarsch ! " The founders of the Republic did not pro- vide against the attack from the enemy inside the walls ; their foresight did not encompass the possibility that the very right of the vote, wherein lies the consecration of human dignity and the safeguard of justice, should come to prove a dagger with which to stab the Republic in the back. The laws of the Republic have limitations not expressed in their written clauses, but inherent in their spirit and inviolable, if the constitution and the laws are to stand. Liberty and democracy, "the Government of the people, for the people, and by the people," are the essential and unalterable foundations of the nation's life. 204 GERMANISM IN AMERICA The present world conflict involves the issues of liberty and democracy as against privilege and despotism. Prussia and her satellites stand for a privileged military caste, and for a system of government and administration hostile to all the conceptions of the founders of the Republic. Prussianism is the very negation of all their hopes and ideals. The vote as a birthright, or acquired at a later period, is rigidly restricted within the fundamental principles of the institutions. It has solely the welfare of the nation for its scope. To foster or to promote the interests of a foreign despotism by means of the vote granted, in honour, by the Republic for the defence of liberty, is a work of treason ; to use that vote as a weapon of coercion to make traitors of others, is to adopt the tactics of blackmail. The present upheaval that stirs the world to its foundations has revealed an internal danger for the United States compared to which the War of Secession was as harmless as a peal of thunder in the distance, for even if the nation had been rent in twain the funda- mental orientations would have survived in the sections. But to-day Prussianism has 205 GERMANISM IN AMERICA its servants inside the temple of the Republic. They wear the garb of priests of the nation, and they take their orders from Berlin. The people of the United States will certainly prove to the world in this hour of trial, fraught with the issues of life and death to the cause of liberty, that *' the in- sidious wiles of foreign influence" will not prevail. They will not be overawed or cajoled by the Teutons in their midst ; they will not bend the submissive knee to Potsdam, and they will show themselves worthy of the trust which Providence placed in their hands. Humanity is hanging breathless on the issue. 206 XVIIl THE SETTLEMENT OF PEACE Political geography is a convention, forever ebbing and flowing in the tide of history. It is always remodelled after every great war. If the present conflict achieves no deeper transformations, it will have been waged in vain, and it will also unavoidably foster the recrudescence of the very evils of which this hideous conflagration is the result. The problems of war, which are the problems of victory, are indeed arduous and intricate, yet they have the concrete finality of things material. Countless armies, heavy artillery, super- Dreadnoughts and submarines and air- craft in profusion, credit and cash inexhaus- tible, together with the modicum of ability that seems to be the average dispensation of all the strugglers, will, in the end, spell victory, on the principle of the weight that works the scales. The problem of immediate peace itself, that is, of submission, should 207 THE SETTLEMENT OF PEACE present no great difficulty. The will of the victor being the supreme and only law, and the vanquished being helpless, acquiescence is bound to supervene with edifying prompt- ness. Time, however, blunts the edge of victory; submission turns to rancour and to a longing for revanche, culminating in a new cycle of violence and bloodshed, and so on ad infinitum, as long as each settlement of peace is so concluded that the evolution of the injustice it incarnates will beget war, at the appointed time, as sure to come round as the seasons of the year. The really arduous problem lies in the framing of a peace that time will consolidate, and will not transform into a hotbed of discontent, with armed violence as the sole issue. Could social problems be analysed like compounds in a laboratory, it would be possible to discern the actions and reactions of any combination of elements, and effectively to seek a given objective. Neither is it beyond human sagacity to grasp, even in the complex and troubled conditions of the hour, the solutions that would ensure peace — as far as aught human may be sure — and those that would mean only a truce, before yet more ruthless commotions, fatally progressive in intensity of disaster. 208 THE SETTLEMENT OF PEACE Men have plunged headlong and with open eyes into the abyss wherein Europe now lies writhing, and which threatens to engulf the entire world. Even so, when the lull comes, and the morrow's course is shaped, will they be in a position to know whither they are steering. During the last quarter of a century — and indeed long before — the air has resounded with the note of warning : reactionaries and liberals, monarchs, statesmen of all opinions, bluest-blooded aristocrats and uncompromising Socialists, all have pointed to the competition in armaments — in itself the culmination of the system — as a race towards a catastrophe. The goal that has been reached, therefore, is no surprise. Whoever is victorious, the question to-morrow will be, whether the seeds of peace or those of war are to be planted in the red furrows of the human conscience. Again, as in the past, will it happen that men will know exactly what seed they are sowing and what harvest it will yield. Do all men want peace, that is to say, justice, not quietude and submission ? Are not war and the preparation for war the very breath of life of institutions, castes, and systems, which would perish in the atmosphere of democracy, o 209 THE SETTLEMENT OF PEACE of the greatest good for the greatest possible number? If the counsels of such as these prevail, the settlement of peace will only be a makeshift : the name of the victor and the changes in the map will have no real significance for humanity, and the wave of human misery, bitterer and blacker still than yesterday, will flow on in ever deeper channels. The spirit incarnate in war as the supreme aim of life, is known in our day as Prussianism. It assumes the form of militarism; it is the irreconcilable foe of democracy and liberty; it is as old as crime; it hails from all lands, taking its name from its most powerful nerve- centre at the present time. Beyond and above the death-grapple of nationalities, whose very disappearance is con- ceivable, as far as is compatible with the endur- ing of a people, lies the fate of liberty, for all men ; beyond the holiest of conventions lies the fundamental and the essential; the real belligerents, in the final issue, are liberty and Prussianism. The AUies — through Britain and France — represent liberty. Prussianism, however, is in all the lands. There are Prussians untold in Britain and in France, who know not a word of German and who 210 THE SETTLEMENT OF PEACE never trod on German soil, yet for whom Treitsehke and Bernhardi — whom they don't know — have preached the gospel of life. If they prevail when the Allies dictate the terms of peace, say at Potsdam, in the Castle of Old Frederick itself, the triumphant flags of Britain and of France, whilst humiliating local Kaiserdom and Junkerdom, will conse- crate the victory of Prussianism universal. Prussianism, throughout the world, dreads democracy. Inveterate abuse and privilege succumb irredeemably if democracy is left full play. Militarism serves a purpose ; it blocks the way, and in its periodical upheavals it weakens democracy by actual destruction of human life. The competition in armaments achieves many objects. Coupled with con- scription and a fairly long period of actual training, it is almost ideal in its results. It drains the public treasury and justifies excessive taxation, thus keeping the masses close to the life-limit, with neither leisure nor means even to dream of rebellion; it drills body and mind, to the incredible degree, as shown in Prussia, that the war-lord could lay down as their duty, to his soldiers, that they must shoot down their fathers and their mothers at his command ; and, making force 211 THE SETTLEMENT OF PEACE the only rule of life, it at once dispenses with all the endeavours to redress the wrongs of the people, and to improve their condition. Historically, the Prussians of all the belliger- ent nations are allies ; they will not tolerate a settlement that may mean a lasting peace, if they can prevent it. Hatreds must be fanned, misconceptions must be fostered, the lie that man is irrevocably the enemy of man, must survive as the one great truth of inter- national life; the settlement of peace must contain, from the very start, the germ of war, since war is the foundation of that very system of abuse and privilege, so ominously threatened by democracy. Victory in war — a helpless Germany pros- trate before the Allies — can mean no lasting consummation. Let it be supposed that the Empire is dismembered, the Provinces re- turned to France, and the war indemnity apportioned amongst the various States. How long will it be before the conflict reappears ? Why should the ferment of injustice prove innocuous after 1915 and mortal as after 1870 ? To the Prussians, of all nations, this is as it should be. Not so, however, for the peoples who pay the toll of death in war, and the cost of war and of the armed peace, or latent war, 212 THE SETTLEMENT OF PEACE all the time. Where are they to find their allies and fellow-workers in the cause of peace? The answer is not difficult to give, though in this hour of blind fury it may sound akin to blasphemy. Help and co-oper- ation, to establish peace upon a solid basis, can only be found, and must be found, in Germany. Surely the five million Socialist votes cast at the last German elections, which are a sonorous inarticulate protest against the evils of militarism, warned the leaders of the Empire of the menace at home which must be choked in blood. Once the war was aflame, men could be stirred to battle for the Fatherland, for the glorious traditions of the race, and for all the shibboleths so empty of meaning for the masses, yet so resounding and irresistible at the hour of collective emotion. The passing days chasten enthusiasm. The army, after all, is not invincible as a whirlwind ; it is capable of failure, of retreat ; the navy is kept in seclusion, as a thing of glass, behind the forts, whilst the enemy rules the sea ; the prodigious promises of the Zeppelins and the like are unfulfilled, and starvation looms on the horizon. After all, these booted and spurred war-lords are not the children of 213 THE SETTLEMENT OF PEACE victory, and their only justification is a sham. Those war-lords and their following must cease to guide the State. Counsels of fairness must replace their methods of injustice and oppression. The millions who voted yester- day and the millions who will vote like them to-morrow, are the natural and the only possible collaborators in Germany in the work of peace, which will be a task of liberation for that country. But such a course is not acceptable to the Prussian, whatever may be the land of his birth. He will want the maintenance of hatred by every possible means, for to him peace has its horrors, whilst war is his foster- mother and the source of his wealth, his power and his very political and social exist- ence. What if, through retaliation beyond the requirements of unavoidable compensation, the millions ready for liberty are pressed into the service of their tyrants of yesterday? What if they are forced, for elementary defence, to seek refuge in the old despotism ? Such a possibility to the Prussian-minded would complete the harmony of things as they should be ; war must ever be on the horizon ; it must at all times oppress the souls 214 THE SETTLEMENT OF PEACE of men ; it must keep them — when not carry- ing arms and driUing — bent to the plough or in the workshop, to eke out a scant livelihood, ready to march to battle at the first bugle- call; so that no hope of liberty may dazzle his eyes and lead him to ask a larger ration of food and air than his wise masters graciously allow. Who will write the solution on the ex- pectant page? The ubiquitous Prussian, or the men of liberty ? Certain it is that the great battle, the battle of lasting results, will not be waged and won in the fields of Europe, or on the waves of the ocean, but in the con- sciences of men, when the thunder of the cannon shall have died away. 215 XIX HOW TO ENFORCE THE LAWS OF WAR The " Times;' Thursday/, September 17, 1914 The War and the Law of Nations Sir, — In the preamble to Convention IV of the Second Peace Conference, on the laws and regulations of warfare on land, it is stated that "it does not enter into the intention of the High Contracting Parties that cases not therein provided for should be left to the arbitrary appreciation of the chiefs in command of the armies owing to their not having been stipulated in writing." It is furthermore stated that, ** pending the enactment of a complete code of the laws of war, the said High Contracting Parties consider it opportune to place it on record that in the cases 216 HOW TO ENFORCE LAWS OF WAR which should not have been included in the regulations adopted, the populations and the belligerents remain under the safeguard and the empire of the prin- ciples of the Law of Nations, as estab- lished by the practices and usages of civilised nations, by the laws of humanity, and by the demands of the public conscience." Article 50 of the Regulations of Convention IV expressly enacts that ** no general penalty, pecuniary or other- wise, may be inflicted on the population on account of the acts of individuals for which it cannot be regarded as collec- tively responsible." Article 44 of the same regulations *' forbids the belligerents to force the population of occupied territory to give information about the other belligerent army or about its means of defence." Both Germany and Austria-Hungary have refused their assent to Article 44. '* Forcing " may include anything from terrorising and torturing to killing ; it is indeed an ominous reservation. 217 HOW TO ENFORCE LAWS OF WAR Since the invasion of Belgium by Prussian troops the air is heavy with the burden of complaint; it has stirred the conscience of mankind throughout the world into a feeling of questioning, awe-stricken indignation. Are these horrors possible in our days ? Can nothing be done to stop them, or to mitigate them, and to avenge them, so as to cleanse contemporary humanity from the stain of infamy ? Where action is possible, no matter how forlorn, inaction becomes complicity. And in the present circumstances all the high roads of redemption are not barred. An effort may be attempted which would also serve the interest of the German people, as it would help to place responsibilities where they belong. It is the law of war, throughout the ages, that the will of the victor is supreme. The Allies have covenanted that no peace shall be signed separately by any one of them. They may, and surely will, demand and impose pecuniary indemnities, territorial remodel- lings, and political reconstructions ; let them also notify the enemy now that they will exact the delivery into their hands, when concluding peace, of all the military commanders and 218 HOW TO ENFORCE LAWS OF WAR officers and any other functionaries that may- have been in power, in occupied territory, at the time of alleged outrages against the ele- mentary laws of humanity, to be tried by special Courts, according to the law of the outraged land, the Courts to be so constituted as fully to protect the accused in all their rights, and the condition of war to constitute no extenuating circumstances for wanton cruelty or infamous inhumanity, even as drunkenness is not an excuse for breaking the law. The neutral nations should demand the application of this principle to all the belli- gerents, and the Allies should bind themselves to mete the same treatment to any trans- gressors of their own, should any such arise in the course of the war. It should also be enacted that fugitives from these regulations should be subject to the laws of extradition at the request of the injured Government. Reprisals in the wake of victory, like all vicarious retribution, are fundamentally im- moral, and their possibility is no salutary deterrent of criminals in the abuse of power. But the shadow of punishment may, in some measure at least, accomplish such a consum- mation. 219 HOW TO ENFORCE LAWS OF WAR This war, Sir, recognises no neutrals in its consequences. *' The continuity of civilisa- tion" is indeed at stake. The fate of small nationalities the world over is being fought for on the battlefields of Central Europe. As a citizen of a small Republic I do not have to justify this letter, which is no intrusion. Furthermore, it was the privilege of Colombia, my country, to propose at the Second Peace Conference the limitation of the use of auto- matic contact mines to purposes of defence. The proposition was supported by Great Britain and rejected by Germany. I had the honour to submit it as Colombian delegate. Had it passed thousands of innocent lives would have been spared. I am, Sir, yours truly, S. Perez Triana. The " Daily News and Leader,^'' Tuesday, October 20, 1914 Sir E. Fry and Germany {To the Editor) Sir, — The difficulty of giving effect to Senor Triana's suggestion, which Sir Edward 220 HOW TO ENFORCE LAWS OF WAR Fry warmly commends, for the trial of in- dividual officers implicated in the murder and outrages committed in Belgium and France, lies in the almost insuperable obstacles to arraignment before a competent international tribunal. They were clearly acting under superior orders. It is true that their acts were such that the horrors of Dahomey appear trivial in comparison. It will be for the German people, when they are permitted to know the truth, to deal with their own Government. For the moment no pacifist will be satisfied to relax the efforts of the Allied Armies until the Krupp factories of Essen have been blotted out of existence. No sane person can surely any longer doubt that France and England are bound in honour to expel Germany from Belgium even if it takes years to do it ; but Sir Edward Fry — always a safe and welcome mentor — will certainly command the atten- tion of those who desire a permanent and just end of the campaign. Edward Atkin. Pump Court, Temple, E.G. October 19. 221 HOW TO ENFORCE LAWS OF WAR The Daily News and Leader^'' Thursday^ October 22, 1914 The Inhumanities of the War {To the Editor) Sir, — In your issue of to-day Mr. Edward Atkin writes : " The difficulty of giving effect to Senor Triana's suggestion, which Sir E. Fry warmly commends, for the trial of in- dividual officers implicated in the murders and outrages committed in Belgium and France, lies in the almost insuperable obstacles to arraignment before a com- petent international tribunal. They were clearly acting under superior orders. It is true that their acts were such that the horrors of Dahomey appear trivial in comparison." My suggestion is primarily predicated on victory, which makes supreme the will of the victor. The International Court for the pur- pose is already in existence ; there would be no reason against applying to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, extend- ing the scope of its functions. 222 HOW TO ENFORCE LAWS OF WAR The question arises : Is military discipline, that is to say, obedience to a superior com- mand, adequate reason for perpetrating crime or rendering criminal acts unpunishable be- cause the agent was simply obeying orders? No law of discipline should cover crime. And where or when it does, such a law is in- famous and should be stamped out, and the harmony of logic and justice re-established. If " superior orders " are alleged, the quest for the criminal should follow those orders to their source, even if that source happen to be a general in command, a military governor, a general staff, or a reigning mon- arch. Neither numbers nor pre-eminence of station should be allowed to stand in the way. Why should a criminal general staff, for in- stance, responsible for inhuman acts and heinous breaches of the laws of war, enjoy the privilege of impunity ? If a monarch may be dethroned after defeat, why should he not be tried, if accused of crimes in comparison with which " the horrors of Dahomey appear trivial " ? At the root of the general appreciation of these matters lies a monstrous misconception of morals, advocated by Bernhardi to-day, and by all the great criminals of history, ex- 223 HOW TO ENFORCE LAWS OF WAR plicitly or otherwise. It is maintained that the collectivity — i.e» the nation — can legiti- mately perform acts which in the individual would be criminal. Responsibility is thus diluted by means of complicity: all that is needed for crime to become virtue is that it should be perpetrated by millions of men acting as a nation. It may be safely assumed that even a half- demented monarch would pause before order- ing a series of strategical atrocities intended to terrorise a doomed region, if the shadow of ignominy, no matter how remote, loomed personally for himself in the ever possible contingency of defeat. The task of bringing the responsibility home to the real culprits is an arduous, not an impossible, one ; it cannot be prepared nor achieved by a pusillanimous spirit of reverence for established routine, behind which lurk reaction and the tyrannies of life. The Belgian Committee is collecting evi- dence ; doubtless the French will do, or are doing, likewise. The information thus ob- tained should serve the high moral purpose, beneficial to all belligerents alike, of placing the awful responsibilities where they belong ; the mere *' shocking" of the public conscience, 224 HOW TO ENFORCE LAWS OF WAR bound to be short-lived in the overburdened history of the present hour, would indeed represent an incomplete endeavour — nay, even a culpable omission. I am, Sir, yours truly, S. Perez Triana. The " Daily News and Leader,^'' Thursday, October 22, 1914 The Inhumanities of the War (To the Editor) Sir, — Senor Triana, being a neutral, is in an exceptionally strong position in seeking to punish criminals; and every one who claims kinship with the human race will passionately desire that a way may be found of giving effect to his most reasonable and just demands. Could our "alien friends" put their heads together with a view, when the proper time arrives, of enforcing the admirable scheme propounded by Senor Triana ? Edward Atkin. October 22. 225 Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &• Co. Edinburgh and London UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY