A scrap of paper

“Just for neutrality—a word which in war-time had so often been disregarded—just for a scrap of paper, Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation.”

The frame of mind which generated this supreme unconcern for the feelings of the Belgians, this matter-of-fact contempt for the inviolability of a country’s plighted word, gives us the measure of the abyss which sunders the old-world civilization, based on all that is loftiest in Christianity, from modern German culture. From this revolutionary principle, the right to apply which, however, is reserved to Germany alone, radiate wholly new conceptions of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, plain and double dealing, which are destructive of the very groundwork of all organized society. Some forty or fifty years ago it was a doctrine confined to Prussia of the Hohenzollerns: to-day it is the creed of the Prussianized German Empire.

Frederic the Great practised it without scruple or shame. It was he who, having given Maria Theresa profuse assurances of help should her title to the Habsburg throne ever be questioned by any other State, got together a powerful army as secretly as he could, invaded her territory, and precipitated a sanguinary European war. Yet he had guaranteed the integrity of the Austrian Empire. What were his motives? He himself has avowed them openly: “ambition, interest, and a yearning to move people to talk about me were the mainsprings of my action.” And this wanton war was made without any formal declaration, without any quarrel, without any grievance. He was soon joined by other Powers, with whom he entered into binding engagements. But as soon as he was able to conclude an advantageous peace with the Austrian Empress, he abandoned his allies and signed a treaty. This document, like the former one, he soon afterwards treated as a mere scrap of paper, and again attacked the Austrian Empire. And this was the man who wrote a laboured refutation of the pernicious teachings of Machiavelli, under the title of “Anti-Machiavel”!

Now, Frederic the Great is the latter-day Germans’ ideal of a monarch. His infamous practices were the concrete nucleus around which the subversive Pan-Germanic doctrines of to-day gathered and hardened into the political creed of a race. What the Hohenzollerns did for Prussia, Prussia under the same Hohenzollerns has effected for Germany, where not merely the Kaiser and his Government, or the officials, or the officers of the army and navy, or the professors and the journalists, but the clergy, the socialists, nay, all thinking classes of the population, are infected with the virus of the fell Prussian disease which threatens the old-world civilization with decomposition.

To this danger humanity cannot afford to be either indifferent or lenient. It may and will be extremely difficult to extirpate the malady, but the Powers now arrayed against aggressive and subversive Teutonism should see to it that the nations affected shall be made powerless to spread it.

The sheet-anchor of new Germany’s faith is her own exclusive right to tear up treaties, violate agreements, and trample the laws of humanity underfoot. To no other Power, however great its temptation, however pressing its needs, is this privilege to be extended. Belgian neutrality is but a word to be disregarded—by Germany; a solemn treaty is but a scrap of paper to be flung into the basket—by Germany; but woe betide any other Power who should venture to turn Germany’s methods against herself! Now that Japan has begun operations against German Tsingtao, the Kaiser’s Minister in Pekin promptly protested against the alleged violation of Chinese neutrality which it involved. Sacred are all those engagements by which Germany stands to gain some advantage, and it is the duty of the civilized world to enforce them. All others which are inconvenient to the Teuton he may toss aside as scraps of paper.

To the threats that China would be held responsible for injury to German property following on the Japanese operations, unless she withstood the Japanese by force, the Pekin Government administered a neatly worded lesson. If the Pekin Government, the Foreign Minister replied, were to oppose the landing of the Japanese on the ground that the territory in question belongs to China, it would likewise be her duty to drive out the Germans for the same reason, Tsingtao also being Chinese. Moreover, Tsingtao had only been leased to Germany for a term of years, and, according to the scrap of paper, ought never to have been fortified, seeing that this constituted a flagrant violation of China’s neutrality. These arguments are unanswerable, even from Germany’s point of view. But the Kaiser still maintains that he has right on his side! Deutschland über Alles!

With a people whose reasoning powers show as little respect for the laws of logic as their armies evince for the laws of humanity or their press for truth, it would be idle to argue. Psychologically, however, it is curious to observe the attitude of the body of German theologians towards the scrap of paper. Psychologically, but also for a more direct reason: because of the unwarranted faith which the British people are so apt to place in the German people’s sense of truth and justice, and more particularly in the fairmindedness of their clergy. Well, this clergy, in its most eminent representatives, does indeed expend strong adjectives in its condemnation—not of the Kaiser’s crime, but of Belgian atrocities!

This is how German divines propound the rights and wrongs of the Belgian episode to Evangelical Christians abroad:

If Ministers of the Gospel thus tamper with truth and ignore elementary justice and humanity, can one affect surprise at the mischievous inventions of professional journalists?

This strange blending of religion with mendacity, of culture with humanity, of scientific truth with political subterfuge, reads like a chapter in cerebral pathology. The savage military organism against which a veritable crusade is now being carried on by the peace-loving, law-abiding nations of Europe has been aptly characterized as “the thing which all free civilization has learned to loathe like a vampire: the conscienceless, ruthless, godless might of a self-centred militarism, to which honour is a word, chivalry a weakness, and bullying aggression the breath of life.”37

It is a relief to turn from the quibbles, subterfuges, and downright falsehoods that characterize the campaign of German diplomacy to the dignified message which the King-Emperor recently addressed to the Princes and Peoples of that India which our enemies hoped would rise up in arms against British rule.

The history of the Kaiser’s dealings with Belgium is but a single episode in the long series of lessons taught us by German militarism, with its two sets of weights and measures and its Asiatic maxims of foreign policy. The paramount interest of this incident is to be ascribed to the circumstance that it marks the central moment of the collision between Germany and Britain. It also struck a keynote of difference between the new Pan-Germanic code of morals and the old one still common to the remainder of the human race. Lastly, it opened the eyes of the purblind in this country and made them see at last.

Belgium and Luxemburg are neutral States, and all Europe is bound to respect their neutrality. But this obligation in the case of Prussia is made more sacred and more stringent still by the circumstance that she herself is one of the guarantors of that neutrality. Not only is she obliged to refrain from violating Belgian territory, but it is her duty to hinder, with force if necessary, a breach by other nations. This twofold obligation Germany set at naught, and then affected wonder at the surprise of her neighbours. “By necessity we have occupied Luxemburg, and perhaps have already entered Belgian territory,” the Chancellor said calmly. “This is an infraction of international law.... We are ... compelled to overrule the legitimate protest of the Luxemburg and Belgian Governments. We shall repair the wrong we are doing as soon as our military aims have been achieved.” Military aims annul treaties, military necessities know no law, and the slaughter of tens of thousands of peaceable citizens and the destruction of their mediæval monuments constitute a wrong which “we Germans shall repair as soon as our military aims are achieved.”

In such matter-of-fact way this German Bayard, as he once was called by his English admirers, undertakes, if he be allowed to break two promises, that he will make a third by way of compensation.

Not content with having brought six Powers into line against her destructive doctrines and savage practices, Germany would fain throw the blame for the war now on Great Britain, now on Russia. Here, again, it is the Imperial Chancellor who propounds the thesis. On September 12th he sent the following curious statement to the Danish Press Bureau for publication:—

The Germanistic conceptions of veracity and common honesty which this plea reveals makes one feel the new air that breathes over every department of the national cult—the air blowing from the borderland between the sphere of high scientific achievement and primeval barbarism. One is puzzled and amused by the solemn statement that if Germany has ridden rough shod over the rights of Belgium, she has committed no such breach of law against Holland, Denmark, and other small states. “We have firmly respected the neutrality of Holland and Switzerland.” It is as though an assassin should say: “True, I killed Brown, whose money I needed sorely. But at least give me credit for not having murdered Jones and Smith, who possess nothing that I could carry away at present, and whose goodwill was essential to the success of my stroke”!

The violation of Belgium’s neutrality was part of Germany’s plan of campaign against France. This fact was known long ago. It was implicitly confessed in the official answer given to Sir Edward Goschen’s question on the subject. Yet on Sunday, August 2nd, the German military Attaché in Brussels, in conversation with the Belgian War Minister, exclaimed: “I cannot, for the life of me, understand what you mean by mobilizing. Have you anything to fear? Is not your neutrality guaranteed?” It was, but only by a scrap of paper. For a few hours later the Belgian Government received the German ultimatum.38 On the following day Germany had begun to “hack her way” through treaty rights and the laws of humanity. The document published by the Chancellor is the mirror of German moral teaching and practice.

The reply to it, issued by the British Press Bureau, with the authority of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, is worth reproducing:

Passing summarily in review the causes of the war touched upon in the foregoing pages, the reader will have discerned that the true interest of the story of the scrap of paper lies in the insight it affords the world into the growth, spread, and popularization of the greatest of human conceptions possible to a gifted people, whose religious faith has been diverted to the wildest of political ideals and whose national conscience has been fatally warped. For the Germans are a highly dowered, virile race, capable, under favourable conditions, of materially furthering the progress of humanity. In every walk of science, art, and literature they have been in the van. Their poetry is part of the world’s inheritance. Their philosophy at its highest level touches that of ancient Greece. Their music is unmatched. In chemistry and medicine they have laboured unceasingly and with results which will never be forgotten. Into the dry bones of theology they have infused the spirit of life and movement. In the pursuit of commerce they have deployed a degree of ingenuity, suppleness, and enterprise which was rewarded and may be summarized by the result that, during the twelve years ending in 1906, their imports and exports increased by nearly one hundred per cent.

But the national genius, of which those splendid achievements are the fruits, has been yoked to the chariot of war in a cause which is dissolvent of culture, trust, humanity, and of all the foundations of organized society. That cause is the paramountcy of their race, the elevation of Teutonism to the height occupied among mortals by Nietzsche’s Over-man, whose will is the one reality, and whose necessities and desires are above all law. Around this root-idea a vast politico-racial system, partaking of the nature of a new religion, has been elaborately built up by the non-German Prussians, and accepted and assimilated by a docile people which was sadly deficient in the political sense. And it is for the purpose of forcing this poisonous creed and its corollaries upon Europe and the world that the most tremendous war of history is now being waged. This remarkable movement had long ago been studied and described by a few well-informed and courageous British observers, but the true issues have been for the first time revealed to the dullest apprehension by the historic episode of the scrap of paper.

It is only fair to own that the Prussianized Germans have fallen from their high estate, and become what they are solely in consequence of the shifting of their faith from the spiritual to the political and military sphere. Imbued with the new spirit, which is impatient of truth when truth becomes an obstacle to success, as it is of law when law becomes a hindrance to national aims, they have parted company with morality to enlist in the service of a racial revival based on race hatred. Pan-Germanism is a quasi-religious cult, and its upholders are fanatics, persuaded of the righteousness of their cause, and resolved, irrespective of the cost, to help it to triumph.

The non-German State, Prussia, was the bearer of this exclusively Germanic “culture.” It fitted in with the set of the national mind, which lacked political ideals. Austria, however, occupied a position apart in this newest and most grandiose of latter-day religions. She was but a tool in the hands of her mighty co-partner. “The future,” wrote the national historian Treitschke, “belongs to Germany, with whom Austria, if she desires to survive, must link herself.” And the instinct of self-preservation determined her to throw in her lot with Prussianized Germany. But even then, it is only fair to say that Austria’s conception of her functions differed widely from that of her overbearing Mentor. Composed of a medley of nationalities, she eschewed the odious practice of denationalizing her Slav, Italian, and Roumanian peoples in the interests of Teutondom. One and all they were allowed to retain their language, cultivate their nationality, and, when feasible, to govern themselves. But, congruously with the subordinate rôle that fell to her, she played but a secondary part in the preliminaries to the present conflict. Germany, who at first acted as the unseen adviser, emerged at the second stage as principal.

We cannot too constantly remember the mise en scène of the present world-drama. Germany and Austria were dissatisfied with the Treaty of Bucharest, and resolved to treat it as a contemptible scrap of paper. They were to effect such a redistribution of territory as would enable them to organize a Balkan Federation under their own auspices and virtual suzerainty. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand offered them a splendid opening. On pretext of punishing the real assassins and eradicating the causes of the evil, Austria was to mutilate Servia and wedge her in among Germanophile Balkan States. The plan was kept secret from every other Power, even from the Italian ally—so secret, indeed, that the Russian Ambassador in Vienna was encouraged to take leave of absence, just when the ultimatum was about to be presented, which he did. The German Kaiser, while claiming to be a mere outsider, as uninitiated as everybody else, was a party to the drafting of the ultimatum, which, according to his own Ministers, went the length of demanding of Servia the impossible. That document was avowedly intended to provoke armed resistance, and when it was rumoured that the Serbs were about to accept it integrally, Austrians and Germans were dismayed. It was the Kaiser himself who had the time-limit for an answer cut down to forty-eight hours in order to hinder diplomatic negociations; and it was the Kaiser’s Ministers who, having had Sir Edward Grey’s conciliatory proposals rejected, expressed their sincere regret that, owing to the shortness of the time-limit, they had come too late.

When the Belgrade Government returned a reply which was fitted to serve as a basis for an arrangement, it was rejected by the Austrian Minister almost before he could have read it through. While the Kaiser in his letter to the Tsar, and the Imperial Chancellor in his talks with our Ambassador, were lavishing assurances that they were working hard to hold Austria back, the German Ambassador in Vienna, through whom they were thus claiming to put pressure on their ally, was openly advocating war with Servia, and emphatically declaring that Russia would have to stand aside. At the same moment Germany’s military preparations were secretly being pushed forward. But Austria, perceiving at last that the Germans’ estimate of Russia’s weakness was unfounded, and she herself faced with the nearing perils of an awful conflict with the great Slav Empire, drew back and agreed to submit the contentious points to mediation. Thereupon Germany sprang forward, and, without taking the slightest account of the Servian question, presented twelve-hour ultimatums to Russia and to France. Thus the thin pretension that she was but an ally, bound by the sacredness of treaty obligations to help her assailed co-partner, was cynically thrown aside, and she stood forth in her true colours as the real aggressor.

In her forecast of the war which she had thus deliberately brought about the sheet-anchor of her hope of success was Great Britain’s neutrality. And on this she had built her scheme. Hence her solicitude that, at any rate, this postulate should not be shaken. Her infamous offer to secure it was one of the many expedients to which her Kaiser and his statesmen had recourse. But they had misread the British character. Their fatal misjudgment marks the fundamental divergence in ethical thought and feeling between the “culture” of Teutonism and the old-world civilization represented by Great Britain. They lack the ethical sense with which to perceive the motives which inspired the attitude of this country. They are able to understand and appreciate a war of revenge or a war of conquest, but they are incapable of conceiving the workings of a national mind which can undertake a costly and bloody war merely to uphold the sacredness of a treaty—a war for a mere scrap of paper.

In engineering this war of wanton aggression Germany committed one capital mistake—a result of the atrophy of her moral sense: she failed to gauge the ethical soul of the British people. She neither anticipated nor adequately prepared for the adhesion of Great Britain to France and Russia. And to ward off this peril when it became visible she was ready to make heavy sacrifices—for the moment. One of these was embodied in the promise not to annex any portion of French territory. But here, again, this undertaking would not have hindered her from encouraging Italy to incorporate Nice and Savoy, as an inducement to lend a hand in the campaign. Her assumption that England would not budge was based largely on the impending civil war in Ireland, the trouble caused by the suffragettes, the spread of disaffection in India and Egypt, and above all on the paramountcy of a Radical peace party in Great Britain which was firmly opposed to war, loathed Russian autocracy, and contemplated with dismay the prospect of Russian victories. These favourable influences were then reinforced by the vague promise to conclude a convention of neutrality with Great Britain at some future time on lines to be worked out later, by the undertaking to abstain from annexing French territory in Europe, and at last by the German Ambassador’s suggestion that the British Government should itself name the price at which Britain’s neutrality during the present war and her connivance at a deliberate breach of treaty could be purchased.

That all these promises and promises of promises should have proved abortive, and that Austria and Germany should have to take on France, Russia, and Great Britain when they hoped to be able to confine their attentions to little Servia, was gall and wormwood to the Kaiser’s shifty advisers. For it constituted a superlatively bad start for the vaster campaign, of which the Servian Expedition was meant to be but the early overture. A new start already seems desirable, and overtures for the purpose of obtaining it were made by the German Ambassador at Washington, who suggested that the war should be called a draw and terms of peace suggested by Great Britain. But the allies had already bound themselves to make no separate peace, and their own interests oblige them to continue the campaign until Prussian militarism and all that it stands for have been annihilated. None the less, it is nowise improbable that as soon as the allies have scored such successes as may seem to bar Germany’s way to final and decisive victory, she may endeavour, through the good offices of the United States, to obtain peace on such terms as would allow her to recommence her preparations on a vaster scale than ever before, amend her schemes, correct her mistakes, and make a fresh start when her resources become adequate to the magnitude of her undertaking. And if the allies were ill-advised or sluggish enough to close with any such offers, they would be endeavouring to overtake their Fate and to deserve it. What would a peace treaty be worth, one may ask, as an instrument of moral obligation if the nation which is expected to abide by it treats it on principle as a scrap of paper? There can be no peace except a permanent peace, and that can be bought only by demolishing the organization which compelled all Europe to live in a state of latent warfare. As Mr. Lloyd George tersely put it: “If there are nations that say they will only respect treaties when it is to their interests to do so, we must make it to their interests to do so.” And until we have accomplished this there can be no thought of slackening our military and naval activity.

One word more about German methods. Intelligent co-ordination of all endeavours and their concentration on one and the same object is the essence of their method and the secret of their success. German diplomacy is cleverly and continuously aided by German journalism, finance, industry, commerce, literature, art, and—religion. Thus, when the Government think it necessary, and therefore right, to break an international convention, violate the laws of war, or declare a treaty a mere scrap of paper, they charge the State on whose rights they are preparing to trespass with some offence which would explain and palliate, if not justify, their illegality. It was thus that the German Secretary of State, when asked by our Ambassador whether the neutrality of Belgium would be respected, said evasively that certain hostile acts had already been committed by Belgium—i.e. before the end of July! In the same way, tales of Belgian cruelty towards German soldiers and German women—as though these, too, had invaded King Albert’s dominions—were disseminated to palliate the crimes against Louvain, Malines, and Termonde. And now Great Britain is accused of employing dum-dum bullets by the Kaiser, whose soldiers take hostages and execute them, put Belgian women and children in the first firing line, whose sailors are laying mines in the high seas, and whose most honest statesmen are industriously disseminating deliberate forgeries among neutral peoples. Prince Bülow, the ex-Chancellor, in an appeal to civilized peoples for their sympathy with Germany in this iniquitous war, operates with the forged speech mendaciously attributed to Mr. John Burns, in which England is accused of having assailed Germany from behind out of brutal jealousy and perpetrated the crime of high treason against the white races!

The present Imperial Chancellor, von Bethmann Hollweg, reputed to be the most veracious public man in Germany, has quite recently issued a memorial for the purpose of substantiating the charges of atrocity levelled against Belgians as a set-off to German savagery in Louvain, Malines, and elsewhere. The Chancellor relies upon the evidence of one Hermann Consten, a Swiss subject and a member of the Swiss Red Cross Society, a gentleman, therefore, whose political disinterestedness entitles him to be heard, and whose presence at Liége during the siege is an adequate voucher for his excellent source of information.

But inquiry has elicited the facts that the description of this witness given by the honest Chancellor is wholly untrue. The Chief of Police at Basle, in Switzerland, has since testified that Consten is a German, that he conducted a German agency in Basle which is believed to have been an espionage concern, that he was charged with fraud, and after a judicial inquiry expelled from Switzerland on September 10th, that he was under police surveillance for two years, that he is not a Swiss subject, nor a member of the Red Cross Society, and that, as he resided in Switzerland during all the time that the siege of Liége was going on, he could not have seen any of the atrocities he alleges.39

When the Chief of a Government descends to slippery expedients like these to find extenuating circumstances for acts of fiendish savagery that have staggered the world, he is unwittingly endorsing the judgment against which he would fain appeal. And if Germany’s most veracious statesman has no scruple to palm off barefaced lies on American and European neutrals, what is one to think of the less truth-loving apostles of Prussian culture?

What we in Great Britain have to expect from Germany, if now or at any future time the anti-Christian cultural religion and inhuman maxims on which her military creed rests get the upper hand, has been depicted in vivid colours by Germans of all professions and political parties. Delenda est Carthago. But the very mildest and fairest of all these writers may be quoted to put us on our guard. Professor Ostwald, the well-known German chemist, is a pacifist, a man opposed on principle to war. In a document addressed to American pacifists for their enlightenment as to the aims and scope of the present contest, this bitter adversary of all militarism makes an exception in favour of that of his own country. An enthusiast for civilization, he would gladly see that of the British Empire destroyed. He writes:

The peace which this distinguished pacifist is so eager to establish on a stable basis can only be attained by the “mailed fist,” fortified on one side by its military superiority, and on the other by the eminently peaceful sentiment of the German Emperor. And the means to be employed are the utter destruction of the British Empire and the break-up of Russia into small States under German suzerainty. This is a powerful wrench, but it is not all. The “absolute sovereignty of the individual nations is to be made subordinate to Germany in Europe, and, lest Americans should find fault with the arrangements, to the United States on the new Continent.”41

No peace treaty with a nation which openly avows and cynically pursues such aims as these by methods, too, which have been universally branded as infamous, would be of any avail. It is essential to the well being of Europe and the continuity of human progress that the political Antichrist, who is waging war against both, shall be vanquished, and that peace shall be concluded only when Prussianized Germany has been reduced to a state of political, military, and naval impotency.