That was the answer. That conflict was fought in the valleys of Scotland and the rich plains and market-places of England, where candles were lighted which will never be put out, and on the plains, too, of Bohemia, and on the fields and walled cities of Germany. There Europe suffered unendurable agonies and miseries, but at the end of it humanity took a great leap forward towards the dawn. Then came a conflict of the eighteenth century, the great fight for the right of men as men, and Europe again was drenched with blood. But at the end of it the peasantry were free, and democracy became a reality. Now we are faced with the greatest and grimmest struggle of all — liberty, equality, fraternity, not amongst men but amongst nations; great, yea small; powerful, yea weak; exalted, yea humblest; Germany, yea Belgium; Austria, yea Serbia - equality, fraternity, amongst peoples as well as amongst men. That is the challenge which has been thrown to us.

Europe is again drenched with the blood of its bravest and best, but do not forget these are the great successions of hallowed causes. They are the stations of the cross on the road to the emancipation of mankind. Let us endure as our fathers did. Every birth is an agony, and the new world is born out of the agony of the old world. My appeal to the people of this country, and, if my appeal can reach, beyond it is this that we should continue to fight for the great goal of international right and international justice, so that never again shall brute force sit on the throne of justice, nor barbaric strength wield the scepter of right.

THE INVASION OF BELGIUM

THEOBALD T. F. A. VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG

[Theobald Theodore Frederic Alfred von Bethmann-Hollweg (1856-), German Chancellor at the outbreak of the World War in 1914, was born in the province of Brandenburg. After a university education he entered the Prussian civil service and became from early manhood the friend and adviser of William II. In 1909 he succeeded Prince von Bülow as German Chancellor, a position he held until 1917. His speech in the Reichstag on August 4, 1914, from which the following selection is an extract, is one of the frankest and clearest expressions of German thought in regard to international obligations.]

Gentlemen, we are now in a state of necessity, and necessity knows no law! Our troops have occupied Luxemburg, and perhaps are already on Belgian soil. Gentlemen, that is contrary to the dictates of international law. It is true that the French Government has declared at Brussels that France is willing to respect the neutrality of Belgium as long as her opponent respects it. We know, however, that France stood ready for the invasion. France could wait, but we could not wait. A French movement upon our flank upon the Lower Rhine might have been disastrous. So we were compelled to override the just protests of the Luxemburg and Belgian Governments. The wrong I speak openly that we are committing we will endeavor to make good as soon as our military goal has been reached. Anybody who is threatened, as we are threatened, and is fighting for his highest possessions, can have only one thought - how to hack his way through.

THE PRINCIPLES AT WAR 1

H. G. DWIGHT

66

[Harrison G. Dwight (1875- ) is an American who has spent much of his life in Turkey and Persia and belongs to a family which has been engaged in missionary work in the Ottoman Empire for several generations. At the present time he is perhaps the best authority in the United States on the life of the Near East. His best books are Constantinople, Old and New" (1915) and "Persian Miniatures" (1917). This article, from which a number of the later paragraphs have been omitted, shows the natural reaction of the American mind intimately acquainted with the oppressed nationalities of the Near East to the "old imperialism of conquest."]

Il n'y a rien de plus grand qu'une force dévastatrice qui se règle.

ANDRÉ SUARÈS; "Sur La Vie"

To many of those for whom history is more than a stirring of dry bones, who have — at least in a geographical sense seen something of the world, or whose destiny has given them to live in countries other than their own, nothing can be more incomprehensible than the pacifist movement in America. The present writer by no means proposes to go on record as standing for the continuance of hostile relations between peoples, rather than that state of harmony out of which alone can come the happiest fruits of civilization. But the doctrine of peace at any price is one which he confesses himself unable to understand. He cannot but marvel how that ideal of a Sybaritic ease can prevail, even in the most timid mind, above the sterner and loftier one implied by a war of national defense. And least of all can he account for the fact that a politician of the experience of Mr. Bryan, who may be all his critics claim, but who nevertheless was permitted to make his

1 From Unpopular Review, April, 1916. Copyright, Henry Holt &

way to one of the highest public posts in a great country, that an educator such as Dr. David Starr Jordan, that a successful and presumably not illiterate man of affairs like Mr. Henry Ford, that a woman of the personality and intelligence of Miss Jane Addams, who are four very conspicuous representatives of a considerable public, can seriously believe, as apparently they do, that there is no reason for the war which is now shaking the world, and that its immediate discontinuance could only further the happiness of all concerned.

What, the pacifists ask, is the war about? What common cause could unite such totally different civilizations as the English, the Japanese, the Latin, and the Slav, and as the Teuton and the Turkish, and array one group against the other? The question is an extremely pertinent one- and extremely complex. So many personal sympathies are involved in it, so many selfish interests, so many political loyalties, so many inconsistencies of all kinds, that no one can hope to dispose of them one by one and emerge triumphant with a shining theory which pacifist and belligerent alike will at once recognize as incontrovertible. Yet to more than one witness of that terrific conflict it seems obvious that a cause is at stake which is dearer than life. It also seems obvious enough that the forces for and against that cause had grown into an antagonism too acute for them to go on living at peace on the same continent. And I venture to add that if this war does not result in the victory of that cause, other wars must inevitably follow until men finally acknowledge the reasonableness and justice of the cause.

In a quarter of the globe where the modest locution "God's country" is understood among friends to refer to certain territories between the Arctic Circle and the Tropic of Cancer, separating the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the word empire is one to be used with circumspection. And it is true that certain ideas implied by that word flourish more luxuriantly in other soils than ours. But so far as the word connotes a

general idea of preponderance, rather than a particular one of hereditary monarchy, the most democratic American is often at one with the most autocratic Asian or European. While the American's opinion of imperial regalia is emphatic enough, he is less decided when it comes to offering the benefits of military protection to dark and distant peoples, or those of a great commercial or political monopoly to his own; and he speaks with perfect equanimity of capturing the trade of a continent, or of subverting its religion. He willingly entertains, furthermore, the possibility that his language may in time supplant certain others. Nor have there lacked Americans who looked forward to a day when their country should so extend its sway as to rule the entire continent, if not the entire hemisphere. If this notion be more freely uttered in commercial, philological, or religious circles than in political ones, it nevertheless underlies most popular discussion of international affairs. In another domain Buddhism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity have been simplifying and unifying forces of a remarkable kind. Then the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expressed an impulse of much the same nature, in the new form of democracy. And the statement of the Darwinian theory, with its corollary of the survival of the fittest, had a profound effect in awakening a more general consciousness of the process, in investing it with a new sanction, and in stimulating men's imaginations with regard to the destiny of races. What more natural, then, than that we should conceive of the process as continuing to its logical conclusion?

It would, of course, be claiming too much to assert that any such program has been definitely proposed. When it comes to logical conclusions, we are of a saving vagueness. Men are too divided as to which religion, which language, which race, will enjoy the ultimate supremacy; too unwilling to consider a possible transformation of their own. Yet certain pacifists, on the one hand, and certain imperialists, on the other, have evolved the thesis that the world, through the