voice of the pacifist—that strangely constituted being to whom the person of the enemy is always sacred—is being heard in the land. We heard it in the Boer War from the writers and speakers paid by Germany. Already the plea is going up that Germany must not be "crushed"—that Germany, who has made Belgium a howling wilderness, who has massacred men, women, and even little children, in sheer cold-blooded lust, shall be treated with the mild consideration we extend to a brave and honourable opponent. Sure it is, therefore, that if Britain retires from this war with her avowed purpose unfulfilled, we shall have been guilty of muddling compared with which the worst we have ever done in the past will be the merest triviality.
If this war has proved one thing more clearly than another, it has proved that the German is utterly and absolutely unfit to exercise power, that he is restrained by no moral consideration from perpetuating the most shocking abominations in pursuit of his aims, that the most sacred obligations are as dust in the balance when they conflict with his supposed interests. It has proved too, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that England is the real object of Germany's foaming hate. We are the enemy! France and Russia are merely incidental foes. It is England that stands between Germany and the realisation of her insane dream of world dominion, and unless Great Britain to-day completes, with British thoroughness, the task to which she has set her hand, this generation, and the generations that are to come, will never be freed from the blighting shadow of Teutonic megalomania. It is quite conceivable that a peace which would be satisfactory to Russia and France would be profoundly unsatisfactory to us. Happily, the Allies are solemnly bound to make peace jointly or not at all, and I trust there will be no wavering on this point. For us there is but one line of safety: the Germanic power for mischief must be finally and irretrievably broken before Britain consents to sheathe the sword.
Against the prosecution of the war to its final and crushing end, the bleating pacifists are already beginning to raise their puny voices. I am not going to give these gentlemen the free advertisement that their hearts delight in by mentioning them by name: it is not my desire to assist, in the slightest degree, their pestilential activity. They form one of those insignificant minorities who are inherently and essentially unpatriotic. Their own country is invariably wrong, and other countries are invariably right. To-day they are bleating, in the few unimportant journals willing to publish their extraordinary views, that Germany ought to be spared the vengeance called for by her shameful neglect of all the laws of God and man.
Is there a reader of these lines who will heed them? Surely not.
Burke said it was impossible to draw up an indictment against a nation: Germany has given him the lie. Our pro-German apologists and pacifists are fond of laying the blame of every German atrocity, upon the shoulders of that mysterious individual—the "Prussian militarist." I reply—and my words are borne out by official evidence published in my recent book "German Atrocities"—that the most shameful and brutal deeds of the German Army, which, be it remembered, is the German people in arms, are cordially approved by the mass of that degenerate nation. The appalling record of German crime in Belgium, the entire policy of "frightfulness" by land and sea, the murder of women and children at Scarborough, the sack of Aerschot and of Louvain, the massacre of seven hundred men, women, and children in Dinant, the piratical exploits of the German submarines, are all hailed throughout Germany with shrieks of hysterical glee. And why? Because it is recognised that, in the long run and in the ultimate aim, they are a part and parcel of a policy which has for its end the destruction of our own beloved Empire. Hatred of Britain—the one foe—has been, for years, the mainspring that has driven the German machine. The Germans do not hate the French, they do not hate the Russians, they do not even hate the "beastly Belgians," whose country they have laid waste with fire and sword. The half-crazed Lissauer shrieks aloud that Germans "have but one hate, and one alone—England," and the mass of the German people applaud him to the echo.
Very well, let us accept, as we do accept, the situation. Are we going to neglect the plainest and most obvious warning ever given to a nation, and permit ourselves to muddle into a peace that would be no peace, but merely a truce in which Germany would bend her every energy to the preparation of another bitter war of revenge?
Here lies one of the gravest perils by which our country is to-day faced, and it is a peril immensely exaggerated by the foolish peace-talk in which a section of malevolent busybodies are already indulging. It is as certain as the rising of tomorrow's sun that, when this war is over, Germany would, if the power were left within her, embark at once on a new campaign of revenge. We have seen how, for forty-five long years, the French have cherished in their hearts the hope of recovering the fair provinces wrested from them in the war of 1870–1871. And the French, be it remembered, are not a nation capable of nourishing a long-continued national hatred. Generous, proud, and intensely patriotic they are; malicious and revengeful they emphatically are not. As patriotic in their own way as the French, the Germans have shown themselves capable of a paroxysm of national hatred to which history offers no parallel.
They have realised, with a sure instinct, that Britain, and Britain alone, has stood in the way of the realisation of their grandiose scheme of world-dominion, and it is certain that for long years to come, possibly for centuries, they will, if we give them the opportunity, plot our downfall and overthrow us. Are we to muddle the business of making peace as we muddled the preparations for war? If we do we shall, assuredly, deserve the worst fate that can be reserved for a nation which deliberately shuts its eyes to the logic of plain and demonstrable fact.
Germany can never be adequately punished for the crimes against God and man which she has committed in Belgium and France. The ancient law of "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" is the only one under which adequate punishment could be meted out, and whatever happens we know that the soldiers of the Allies will never be guilty of the unspeakable calendar of pillage and arson and murder which has made the very name of "German" a byword throughout civilisation throughout all the ages that are to come. However thoroughly she is humbled to the dust, Germany will never taste the unspeakable horror that she has brought upon the helpless and unoffending victims of her fury and lust in Belgium and in parts of France. It may be that if they fall into our hands we should hang, as they deserve to be hanged, the official instigators of atrocities whose complicity could be clearly proved—though we, to-day, give valets to the Huns at Donington Hall. We cannot lay the cities of Germany in ruin, and massacre the civilian population on the approved German plan. What we can do, and ought to do, is to make sure that, at whatever cost of blood and treasure to us, Germany is deprived of any further capacity to menace the peace of the world. It is the plain and obvious duty of the Allies to see that the hateful and purely German doctrine that might is the only right shall, once and for all, be swept from the earth. It is for us to make good the noble words of Mr. Asquith—that Britain will prosecute the war to the finish. It is for us to see that there shall be no "muddling through" when the treaty of peace is finally signed in Berlin.
When the war was forced upon us, the best business brains of this country recognised that one of the surest and speediest means of securing an efficient guarantee that Germany should not be able to injure us in the future would be a strenuous effort to capture her enormous foreign trade. Modern wars, it must be remembered, are not merely a matter of the clash of arms on the stricken field. The enormous ramifications of commercial undertakings, immeasurably greater to-day than at any time in history, mean that, in the conduct of a great campaign, economic weapons may be even more powerful than the sword of the big battalions. This unquestionable fact has been fully realised by our leading thinkers. Thoughtless people have been heard to say that, if France and Russia wish to conclude peace, England must necessarily join with them because she cannot carry on the war alone. There could be no greater mistake.
Just so long as the British Fleet holds the command of the sea, Germany's foreign trade is in the paralysing grip of an incubus which cannot be shaken off. In the meantime, all the seas of all the world are free to our ships and our commerce, and, though the volume of world-trade is necessarily diminished by the war, there remains open to British manufacturers an enormous field which has been tilled hitherto mainly by German firms.
