THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



221 



RELAXATION OF MIND IS AS NECESSARY AS GOOD FOOD 



ship of its enemy or of a neutral on the 

 high seas, to secure the safety of the 

 ship's company of the destroyed vessel. 

 I pointed out that Germany left no course 

 to a government of honor, which pro- 

 fessed to defend the rights of its citizens 

 to life against murderous invasion, to do 

 other than to declare war. 



THE CASE OE THE WORIT) AGAINST 

 GERMANY 



The second part of the argument was 

 devoted to presenting the case of the 

 world against Germany, and involved a 

 tracing of the history of the German 

 people from the time when they were 28 

 divided States, in the nineteenth century, 

 to recent periods, when, through the edu- 

 cation of Bismarck and the Prussian mili- 

 tary regime, the people, following the law 

 of William and the Potsdam gang, had 

 become obsessed with the conviction that 

 they were supermen in war and in peace, 

 and were charged with what they called 

 a divine destiny, and which was nothing 

 but a lust for world power, in spreading 

 German kultur over the world ; and I at- 



tempted to enforce as strongly as possible 

 the view that, having abolished in her 

 rules of national living international mo- 

 rality, Germany, under her present lead- 

 ership, was a perpetual threat to the in- 

 tegrity of every nation, and especially of 

 democracies, and made a permanent peace 

 impossible ; that we must bring Germany 

 to her knees by defeating her, which 

 would necessarily turn the people against 

 their leaders and their former false ideals 

 and make them an amenable member of 

 the family of nations ; that if we made 

 an inconclusive peace with her, only two 

 alternatives were open to us : One was 

 that of submission to the suzerainty of 

 Germany ; the other was the maintenance 

 of our nation as an armed camp to re- 

 sist German aggression in the future, 

 with a certain prospect of another war 

 with Germany as soon as opportunity 

 seemed to her at hand. 



I tried to make my statement of inter- 

 national law and the course of the argu- 

 ment as simple as I could, and if I can 

 trust the expressed judgment of others 

 and separate it from the promptings of 



