GERMAN WAR 39 



amok, and we have to kill the maniac or he will kill 

 us. There is no great question of irreconcilable 

 principle involved, I mean in the sense that there 

 was in the great American Civil War, or that 

 was at issue when contending religions as the 

 Cross and the Crescent came to death -grips. 

 Before the war the Germans were our friends and 

 equals. We intermarried without social stigma 

 or disability. There are some nationalities the 

 Jews are an example which do not mix with 

 any other even after centuries of life together. 

 There are others the negro race of the United 

 States offer an example with whom, rather than 

 mix, a nation will break every law, human and 

 divine. Again there are others the British Empire 

 affords as good and as perplexing examples as 

 any against whom, for fear of being cheapened 

 economically and socially, preventive measures are 

 taken to forbid or hamper their free immigration 

 into our territories. 



These are a few examples of what for comparison 

 I will describe as racial causes of war. I indicate 

 them merely to show how very far from practical 

 politics any attempt to banish war and the thought 

 of war from the world at one step is likely for long 

 to remain, unless we are content to solve the simpler 

 problem first. 



But the present war does not come within their 

 category. Let us take Germany at her own valua- 

 tion, as a virile and expanding people, denied a place 

 in the sun, hemmed in on all sides by decadent and 

 stagnant populations in possession of the fairest 

 parts of the earth. Individually her people were 

 peculiarly capable of fighting for their own hands 

 according to the recognised, if lax, standards of 

 private law and commercial morality, and so they had 

 already peacefully penetrated far and wide into the 



