January 25, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
5 
something like a certilude that the war can end in no 
other fashion. . ^ i_ r 
We mnst clearly en\-isage both those points before we 
can proceed a step in the work before us. 
I propose first to show how each of these judgments 
have -been arrived at ; secondly, to show (directing my 
arguments only to neutrals) that they are both of them 
erroneous : Of the two belligerents one has a clear moral 
claim -of enormous importance to the future of the whole 
world, and therefore to that of neutrals. 
The confusion or indifference now undoubtedly existing 
ill the mind of neutrals, and especially in the United 
States with regard to the moral issue of the war, is due 
to three things : The length of time through which the 
war has dragged on ; the active propaganda of the enemy 
contrasting with our \-erv sluggish one ; and, lastly, the 
patent fact that Germany is now fighting for her life. 
Of these three the first has the most weight. Great 
length of time has alwavs, of course, the effect of 
modifying indignation ; so has to some extent great 
di'^tances' in space ; but in the case of this war with its 
ra}Mdly succeeding and tremendous events even two years 
has had a modifving effect. 
The surprise with which the world, including the 
neutrals (and especiallv the United States) obser\-ed the 
llr'^t crimes and atrocities of the enemy has long ceased. 
Things at first thought impossible have now come 
to be taken for granted— it is the way with all evil until 
it is punished— the details ha\c become blurred and 
overlaid and many of the most salient points have 
actually been forgotten. 
There are two ways, however, in which any neutral 
who honestly examines the question can recover a just 
judgment. 
Prussian Doctrine 
The lirst is the reading, if he has leisure, of the typical 
North German speaking and writing in the period, before 
the war. It was one mass of assertion that the old 
international morality of Europe was negligible, and 
a nation having the-power to offend and even to destroy 
should exercise that power if the exercise led to its own 
aggrandisement. It is no more possible to question this 
attitude of Prussia than it is possible to question 
the democratic theory of the French Revolution. When 
the French Revolut'ionary armies and later those of 
Napoleon set out to conquer they acted upon a political 
theory which some hate, and which others love, but which 
is at "any rate perfectly clear. Everywhere they went 
they destroyed the old institutions and as best they could 
the old inequality. They gloried in this and regarded 
their victories as not only their own victories, but as the 
victories of the new democratic ideas. That the North 
German philosophy was narrower than this and more 
muddled is no dim'inishment of its existence. It existed 
and was proclaimed openly to the whole world over and 
over again in books of history,, in lectures, in speeches, in 
books of philosophy, and it showed itself in every form of 
what passes in North German}- for art. 
Now either one has a creed and doctrine of inter- 
national morality (in which case this North-German 
attitude was the "negation of it), or one has not. If one 
has, one cannot possibly deny that this anarchist attitude 
on the part of one nation is not only wrong but 
necessarily is warred down by those whose liberty it 
threatens and whose ancient comity it denies. For 
cither such a claimant destroys the commonwealth of 
nations in which he Imds himself, by destroying its 
public law: or he is broken to a respect for that law. 
But the second test is more practical and can be 
applied by a much larger number of people. Let any 
neutral watching the increasing cruelty of this great 
war as it proceeds, ask himself who first introduced its 
various steps. I can well imagine the horror of a neutral 
who reads from German sources the terrible details of an 
air raid over a German town. But who compelled the 
Allies to such methods ? Who first broke this elementary 
rule in our European code ? It was the German : and he 
did it in the very first hours of the 'war when he believed 
himself to be certain of victory. Within a yard 
of the Belgian frontier he already began massacring 
innocent men, women and children in order to create 
terror. Such a thing was quite unknown in modern 
Europe with all its long and usually splendid military 
record. There have been massacres indeed, the results 
of exasperation, and especially strongholds stormed have 
suffered abominable things at the hands of the soldiery. 
But no one has defended these things. Still less has 
anyone undertaken them in cold blood until the modern 
Prussian deliberately undertook them as a policy and 
openly defined them as his own private and succfessful 
receipt for victory and his own way of attaining the 
military character. It is exactly the same (to mcntiori 
them in their order) with the deliberate destruction of 
\-enerable and beautiful monuments; with the use of 
burning oil against men's flesh ; with the introduction of 
poisonous gases ; and with the murder of non-com- 
batants upon the high seas. The matter is simply one 
of plain arithmetic in dates and of amdenied because 
undeniable truth. Every step in the public story of the 
degradation of war has been deliberately taken first 
by Prussia— down to the poisoning of water supphes. 
" The neutral should also note that in at least two very 
important departments the AUies have disdained to 
follow the Prussian model. They have refused to enslave 
and they have refused to torture prisoners. The Germans 
have done both those things openly and have argued in 
fa\-our of both as part of the spirit of modern war. A 
man has only to refresh his memory upon these things 
to recover that indignation which, at the beginning of 
the war, was uni\-ersal among neutrals and ought still 
to be uni\-ersal to-day. 
It would be waste of time to linger upon the second 
case : Contrast between the German propaganda in the 
United States and our own. We had the enormous 
advantage of a common language and of many common 
institutions. We lost that advantage through the 
inability of politicians to grasp things as a whole and 
through their wretched habit of personal quarrels and 
personal ad\ancements. It is too late to recover the 
lost ground. But, at any rate, every intelligent neutral 
can at least ask himself the sources from which his_ in- 
formation proceeds and can guard himself against 
swallowing whole the story of the only party he hears. 
The third cause I have said to be the obivous fact that 
the Germanic Powers, and particularly Prussia, are now 
fighting for their lives. When a man or a nation is iii 
that situation it is very natural, if we do not recall the 
circumstances of their original crime, to desu-e their 
salvation, and to regard their suffering as a tragedy with 
which we ought to interfere. 
We have examples of this when a criminal is in peri] . 
of his life or liberty. The immediate drama moves men 
so strongly that they often forget its original cause 
Some years ago a man who murdered and mutilated a 
little child under the most shocking circumstances, was 
reprieved on account of a pubhc agitation, supported 
by an immense number of signatures to a petition. Not 
one of those signatories perhaps would have put down 
his name if, just before doing so, the horrible crime had 
been presented to him pictorially so that it should be 
fixed in his imagination. The criminal deserved, indeed, 
something far worse than death ; but when his crime was 
half forgotten the horror of his agony prevailed and . 
was alone impressive. 
Here the remedy against misjudgmcnt is again to go 
back to the original sources of the affair. 
Civilised Europe is occupied in the execution of Prussia. 
You may give the criminal abstract names such as 
" Prussian "Militarism " or the " Frederician tradition," 
but it all comes to the same thing. Civilised Europe is 
getting rid of a criminal with whom it cannot live. It is 
puerile to translate this process into a general process of 
extermination. It is a process of exterminating not a 
people (there is no such thing as a distinct Prussian 
people — not even as a separate German tribe), but a 
hitherto unbroken, successful and abominable tradition : 
that of the dynasty and army called " Prussian." 
When the thugs were put down in India, or when the 
Romans put down piracy in the Mediterranean, the 
thing was not done by killing all the pirates. It was 
sufticiont to break the organisation and to make examples 
of a few. We shall break the Prussian organisation, and 
we shall certainly make examples, and we shall do so 
because civilised" Eirrope cannot live with a poison ot 
that kind in its midst. If a member of the European 
community will not observe treaties ; proclaims hif 
