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were Swabians; Beethoven was a Rhinelander of Belgian ancestry; Bach, a Thuringian. The best of Germany is non-Prussian.

In 1893, Prince Bismarck said: "There are many who are glad to be citizens of the German Empire who will not be Prussians," and as late as 1914, his successor, von Bethmann-Hollweg, said that the Bavarian, Swabian, and the Badener "regard men and matters with other eyes than the Prussian and the North German." Again he said, on the eve of the present war:

The hostility against Prussia has steadily increased since the memories of the national struggles and of what the Empire owes to Prussia have been pressed into the background by the material interest of the present.

This condition of internal disunion, which preceded the war, will be infinitely increased when the bitter chalice of defeat is commended to their lips, and they fully realize that this calamity, which has lost them the respect and goodwill of the world, was caused by a wholly unnecessary and unjust war brought by their imperial government upon the falsest of false premises.

Here, then, is an opportunity for constructive statesmanship.

The victorious Allies, not merely as an act of

retributive justice, but as a measure of common safety and for the general welfare of the world, should, on the conclusion of the war and as a part of the peace conference, invite the German states, other than Prussia, to form their own. government in their own way, and should promise such new government of the better Germany such preferential terms in the treaty of peace, as compared with the punitive terms reserved for Prussia, as would constitute a powerful incentive to historic Germany to emancipate herself from the destructive dominance of Prussia. The Allies could guarantee her existence as a separate state against the future aggressions of Prussia and could promise her a restored standing in the fellowship of nations, with commercial reciprocity.

This would make Prussia a petty principality, such as it originally was in the days of the Elector of Brandenburg. Its great industry, war, would end. Its poverty without Germany would reduce it to impotence. It deserves a fate which will satisfy the craving for retributive justice that the wisest statesman must take into account.

This is a war of peoples and their will must prevail. What their swords win, opportunists must not lose to mankind.

The folly of statesmen in all ages has been to

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CHAPTER III

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF GERMANY

Is a new and nobler Germany a possibility? On the threshold of this inquiry lies the question so often discussed in the last four years as to whether there is any distinction between Prussia and historic Germany, or between the Imperial Government and the German people. If there be none, as now commonly assumed, then all Germany must go down in a common ruin.

But is this complete identity quite so clear? At the beginning of the World War, the Allies generously assumed that in degree, if not in kind, a distinction did exist. It was recognized that by reason of a censorship, which stifled knowledge, the German people went to war in partial ignorance of the cause of the conflict. Servia's conciliatory reply to Austria had been largely suppressed in the German press, and the Imperial Government through its press agencies had inflamed the people with the monstrous fiction that

regard justice as a mere abstraction of impracticable idealists. They and we must realize that it is the dominating factor in human progress. To sacrifice uncounted billions of treasure and uncounted millions of lives for a lame and impotent conclusion, such as a peace by compromise and shifty accommodation, would mark the high tide of human folly. It would be to crucify the cause of justice afresh and to put it to an open shame.

All other considerations must be subordinated to the primal requisite of retributive justice. Only thus will the nations "rise to the height of the great argument, vindicate eternal Providence, and justify the ways of God to man."

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