* * * More than ever our motto, "Pro patria per orbis concordiam," will be that of every good patriot who wishes to develop the internal prosperity of his country through friendly foreign relations. * * * More than a century ago you Americans condemned and executed British imperialism; subsequently Europe condemned and executed Napoleonic imperialism; Europe is now going to condemn and execute Germanic imperialism; profit by this threefold lesson to make an end of imperialism in your country, and by your good example to render to Europe an incalculable service.

Such an example will be more efficacious than overhasty or superficial intervention, however well intentioned it might be. Above all, beware of offering aid to Europe in a spirit of opportunism rather than of high principle. Especially, do not try to take advantage of some circumstances in order to urge a lame and ephemeral peace. Public opinion will be bitterly divided if the war is brought to an end merely by lassitude and a desire for comfort. Public opinion will accept only a peace inspired with high ideals, without needless humiliation for the conquered, and equally without sacrifice of any principles which have brought together the anti-German coalition.

The war itself, however atrocious it has been and still may be, will have been only a commencement, the beginning of continual wars into which the New World will be drawn, if we do not leave the desire of life and the means of living to Germany, conquered but still alive. It is possible to conquer and to exterminate armies, but it is not possible to exterminate a nation of 70,000,000 people. It will then be necessary to make a place for Germany which will permit the exercise of her fecund activity in the struggle of universal competition. If we yield to the temptation to make an end of German competition, we shall neither end the competition nor shall we end war.

For years I have repeated this to our English friends who were intoxicated with the theories of Chamberlain. I see without surprise but with sorrow that serious journals of London and Paris spread before the eyes of their readers the absurd idea that this war will kill the German foreign commerce, while the English and French production will be enriched without a rival, and consequently without effort. Place should be made for Germany from Berlin to Vienna in the organization of a general European confederation which will give full satisfaction to Italy at Trieste, will install the Turkish Government in Asia, will bring about an agreement between the Christian Balkan States, and give the free disposal of their destinies to Poland, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Rumania, and Alsace-Lorraine.

In this manner the worst problems on which general peace depends would be solved, and with these problems that of armaments, which it would no longer be dangerous nor humiliating to reduce if the general reduction, extending even to Japan and seconded by all the republics of the New World, were agreed to by all. Certainly such an agreement would be difficult to develop; it would terrify the diplomats, but outside of such an agreement I see in perspective nothing but perpetual war, internal revolution, and general ruin.

*Fifth Letter.*

PARIS, Sept. 18, 1914.

* * * The pride of an empire may not be crushed without a bitter struggle. The German Government has at its disposition the live force of a young and growing people. However, the day is coming when that people, aware that they have been deceived, will be able to repudiate their Government, just as the French people did after Sedan. Meanwhile the German armies have stopped their retreat in order to form a new line of resistance. But to what good? This line will be overthrown, and in the end the German Army will be obliged to retreat in disorder and again to cross the land which it has laid waste.

The true difficulties, in my opinion, are going to commence when the conquered Germans must submit to the conditions made by the conquerors. The victors will be able to agree, I believe, to stop the war and to dictate conditions. But will they agree to make these conditions moderate? That is the question. At that moment even France will be far from unanimous, as she has been unanimous in defending herself. France is of one opinion on these principal points:

1. Alsace-Lorraine ought to be liberated at last, free to return to France; her rights ought to be respected and recognized. Such liberation should extend as far as possible to every country in Europe whose right has been violated.

2. We must make an end of ruinous armed peace, invented, so it was said, to prevent war, but which has made war inevitable. German militarism must be crushed unless it is again to become a menace and give the signal for another competition of armaments. This peace will be only a truce, a sinister comedy, unless it is crowned by a general convention of disarmament, to which Germany must subscribe with all the others and before all the others.

3. Arbitration, conciliation, all the means already provided for amicable adjustment, and if possible for the prevention of international conflicts, should be organized on a more solid and more definite basis than in the past, with the sanction, or at least the maximum of necessary precautions, of a federated Europe. All which we have done at The Hague, far from being lost, will serve as a foundation for the building of a pacific federation.

On these three points one may prophesy a unanimity almost complete; but the division will begin when it comes to distinguishing between Germany and the empire, between the German people who have a right to live and the German Empire which opposed the right to live; the division will begin when some demand the humiliation of Germany, others the ruin of her colonies, and of her very life. France, who has defended peace, will, I am sure, also defend justice; but justice will not triumph without difficulty. And it is here that the United States will render great service, if the United States has preserved, as one can see so clearly in the Mexican crisis, her moral authority and disinterestedness.

In the cuttings from the American papers which you have sent me I have read with great disquietude an article which says that, after all, the United States "will be the beneficiary of the European war." This article claims that the United States may profit very easily by this war to take away from Germany her commerce in the three Americas, &c. It is a dangerous form of reasoning, which, however, is not new.

If war has attracted ardent partisans it is because it appeals to the temperament of many people, it flatters their self-pride, but also it serves their interests. I have never understood it as I do at present. I see, for example, the town of Mons enriching itself through the war; cafes, restaurants, the hotels, are unable to accommodate all who come to them; the farmers are seen disputing about their products. There are also the military requisitions by which one can profit in getting rid of an old horse, of a wagon, an automobile, &c.; there are the butchers, the bakers, the dealers in cutlery, &c., who have never had so many purchasers; the furnishers of materials for the hospitals, pharmacists, orthopedists, &c.

Add to these an immense number of furnishers of military supplies, not only those who sell cannon, arms, and ammunition, but the accessories, the uniforms, material for the transports, and for the administrative work, &c. They are legion. Add to these all the combatants who have been promised positions as officers, Colonels, Generals. * * * Napoleon I. gave titles and honors. * * * You will understand that after the war, if there is an infinite number of unfortunates who mourn and who are ruined by the war, there are others, on the contrary, who have profited very well, who have enriched themselves and been raised to a privileged, fortunate class, who will find it quite natural to demand war or whose children will demand it later; while the mass of unfortunates, without strength, without resources, without protection, will need years to reconquer in peace the rights which they legally enjoyed before the war, and which the war suddenly took from them.

If to this class, more powerful than numerous, of natural partisans of the war in Europe you are going to add the American partisans of the European war, you will commit a grave fault, for the Americans have more than ever everything to gain by peace and all to lose in war, which they will not be able to limit if it breaks out again in the world.

The truth is that the Americans evidently gain in the war, but they lose more. Europe is something else to them than a market over which to dispute, she is a reservoir of experiences, good and bad, but of experiences which you cannot do without. To wish for the continuation of the war in Europe or even to take sides with it as a sort of half evil is for the Americans a crime, a sort of suicide; that would be to applaud the destruction of models which civilization seems to have collected for your edification and for your development. Later, the United States can do without many of these lessons which she learns from Europe, but she will always have need of the inspiration of the masterpieces of our civilization. It is only a barbarous reasoning which allows one to see in the European war profit for the United States; it is a loss, a mourning, a shame for the whole world, and particularly for the free countries which are the guides of other peoples and which can only fulfill their mission in times of peace.

I have often heard the profits of war discussed. The undertakers of impressive funeral services can also congratulate themselves over catastrophes. A railroad accident which puts an entire country in mourning can enrich them. The most murderous battles bring profit in the final reckoning to somebody, if it is only to the jackals and the crows; but it is the whole of a country, and for the United States it is the whole world, which must be considered, and the more the whole world prospers the more will the United States find friends, collaborators, and clients. The more the world is troubled, on the contrary, the more commerce and general activities will suffer from it, without mention of the development of instruction and of the progress of human thought, which will be paralyzed.

I have been surprised to see a serious American paper bring up these old questions for discussion, and I conclude that we are going to feel in Europe the result of our errors. It is going to be necessary to find money to fill up the financial gulf which we dig each day under our feet without realizing it; a gulf twice made, by the billions which it has been necessary to spend for the war, by the billions of ordinary income which must now go by default. We cannot reasonably expect that Germany will be able to pay all the deficits in France, England, Russia, Belgium, and Japan; she will have no longer her foreign commerce; her misery is going to be frightful; it will be necessary then that each of the adversaries which she has so rashly provoked limit his demands; we must ourselves limit her ruin unless our own credit shall be ruined also.

In a word, there are two victories equally difficult for the Allies to win: the first over Germany, the second over themselves. Let us prepare ourselves to the uttermost and with all the authority which we can husband to facilitate the first here, and from your side as well as from ours, the second. To make war there is the first difficulty; but to finish well, that is what makes me anxious for the future.

*Sixth Letter.*

PARIS, Sept. 24, 1914.

In spite of all, unity of purpose is maintained among the Allies as well as among Frenchmen. I say in spite of all, because at Berlin this was hardly believed possible at the beginning of the war.

* * * All the men have left Creans; my farm is empty, and as I told you, the work is accomplished just the same. Means are found to feed the wounded English, becoming more and more numerous, the wounded Belgians and the prisoners. At the mill the miller's wife has four sons and a son-in-law in the army. I went to see her; not a tear, she looked straight before her absorbed in her work and said only "It is necessary." She continues her work as yesterday, as always, only with more energy and seriousness than formerly, with the purpose to accomplish double.

Meanwhile in spite of lack of news, we are beginning to learn that many sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers whom we saw go away will never return. Each day a few of the wounded are buried, and so it is in all the communities in the country which are not occupied by the Germans. In every town, village, home, and heart the national tribulations have their local echo.

If all France were victim of a catastrophe of nature, an earthquake, a conflagration, or a flood, the country would be crushed; but, no, the contrary is now true, for the present catastrophe has been brought about by an evil will and each one comprehends that this will, if left free to act, will continue to do evil until it has been crushed. We have neither the time nor the wish to complain; we fight. * * *

The people, all those who are now devoted to my policy, to our policy, remain more faithful than ever. They keep silent awaiting the end of the war and knowing well that in fact it is not so much a question of Germany as of German reaction, German imperialism, and German militarism. They know also that if the German reaction might have been crushed sooner, the war would not have broken out. Thus, far from being blind, public opinion is alive to the truth. The grandeur, and to speak the whole truth, alas, the beauty of the atrocious war is that it is a war of liberation. * * *

It is impossible that the New World should remain a simple spectator before the gigantic struggle which is progressing in Europe. I do not ask that the New World intervene by armed force, but that it shall not conceal its opinion, its aversion for that horror which is called reaction and which truly is only death; that it shall not conceal its indignation for the abominable calculation of that reaction which is incapable of comprehending anything of the life, the work, the science and the art of human genius. I ask that the New World shall not remain skeptical before the senile attacks of those armies which respect nothing, neither women, children, old men, unfortified cities, museums, nor cathedrals. * * *

It is impossible that the free United States, born out of the sacred struggle against European domination, enlarged, enriched, and ennobled by that struggle, and now in the front rank among nations as the fruit of that struggle, should hesitate between revolution and reaction, between right and conquest, between peace and war.

Americans are too generous to hesitate, too wise, also, for Prussian reaction is cracking and is going to crumble; even Americans of German origin would be acting against their own fatherland if they, by their sympathies, should sustain the regime of caporalism which is now destroying it.



*The Vital Energies of France*

*By Henri Bergson.*

*From The Bulletin des Armees, Nov. 5, 1914.*

The issue of the war is not doubtful: Germany will succumb. Material force and moral force, all that sustains her will end by failing her because she lives on provisions garnered once for all, because she wastes them and will not know how to renew them.

Everything has been said about her material resources. She has money, but her credit is sinking, and it is not apparent where she can borrow. She needs nitrates for her explosives, oil for her motors, bread for her sixty-five millions of inhabitants. For all this she has made provision, but the day will come when her granaries will be empty and her reservoirs dry. How will she fill them? War as she practices it consumes a frightful number of her men, and here, too, all revitalization is impossible; no aid will come from without, since an enterprise launched to impose German domination, German "culture," German products, does not and never will interest those who are not Germans. Such is the situation of Germany confronting a France who keeps her credit intact and her ports open, who procures provisions and ammunition according to her need, who reinforces her army with all that her Allies bring to her, and who can count—since her cause is that of humanity itself—upon the increasingly active sympathy of the civilized world.

But it is not merely a question of material force, of visible force. What of the moral force that cannot be seen and that is more important than the other—which to a certain degree can be supplied—that is essential, since without it nothing avails?

The moral energy of nations, like that of individuals, can only be sustained by some ideal superior to themselves, stronger than they are, to which they can cling with a strong grip when they feel their courage vacillate. Where lies the ideal of contemporary Germany? The time has past when her philosophers proclaimed the inviolability of justice, the eminent dignity of the person, (the individual?), the obligation laid upon nations to respect one another. Germany militarized by Prussia has thrust far from her those noble ideas which came to her formerly for the most part from the France of the eighteenth century and the Revolution. She has made for herself a new soul, or rather, she has docilely accepted that which Bismarck has given her. To that statesman has been attributed the famous phrase: "Might makes right." As a matter of fact Bismarck never said it, because he was unable to distinguish between might and right; in his eyes right was simply that which is desired by the strongest, that which is declared in the law imposed by the victor upon the vanquished. His whole moral philosophy is summed up in that. The Germany of the present knows no other. She also worships brute force. And as she believes herself strongest she is entirely absorbed in adoration of herself. Her energy has its origin in this pride. Her moral force is only the confidence by which her material force inspires her. That is to say, that here also she lives on her reserves, that she has no means of revitalization. Long before England was blockading her coasts she had blockaded herself, morally, by isolating herself from all ideals capable of revivifying her.

Therefore she will see her strength and her courage worn out. But the energy of our soldiers is linked to something which cannot be worn out, to an ideal of justice and liberty. Time has no hold on us. To a force nourished only by its own brutality we oppose one that seeks outside of itself, above itself, a principle of life and of renewal. While the former is little by little exhausted, the latter is constantly revived. The former already is tottering, the latter remains unshaken. Be without fear: the one will be destroyed by the other.



*France Through English Eyes*

With Rene Bazin's Appreciation.

Referring to the article printed below, which appeared in The London Times Literary Supplement of Oct. 1, and which the French Government ordered to be read in all Parisian schools, M. Rene Bazin writes in l'Echo de Paris:

Is not this language admirable? What full and flowing phrases. They are like a ship filled with grain sailing into port with her sails full. Preserve them, these fugitive lines written by a neighbor, and read them to your children. They will teach them the greatness of France and the greatness of England.

The whole world recognizes two qualities in the Englishman: his bravery and his common sense. We know that the Englishman is true to his given word, and that even in the antipodes he never changes his habits. As I write, the postman brings me a letter from the front, dated Oct. 17. The cavalryman who sends it tells of our Allies. "We are fighting the enemy's cavalry," he writes, "and for two days my brigade was in action with the British. They know how to fight and they astonish us by their marvelous powers of organization and their coolness."

Yes, we know that of old. We also know that England never closes her doors to liberty. We have a confused memory of the hospitality given to our priests in the times of the Revolution. Now England provides us with fresh proof of her kindness of heart. You have heard the news—the professors and students of the Catholic University of Louvain invited to Cambridge. The destroyed Belgian university reconstituted in the home of the celebrated English university. What a magnificent idea!

I do not know whether the author who has spoken so well of France in the great English newspaper has ever visited this country. But he has surely meditated on our history and has divined the reason of the very existence of France; why she merits love beyond her frontiers, and why she should be defended "like a treasure." England is not made up of traders, soldiers, sailors, politicians, but also—and that is what the French people will learn better every day—of poets, subtle philosophers, and of thoughtful and religious spirits.

In truth, the day which Joan of Arc foresaw has arrived. She did not hate the English. It was only their intolerable rule of the kingdom which was hateful to her. The good maid of Lorraine said that after having driven the English out of France she would reconcile them with the French and lead them together in a crusade. This has become true. Her dream is accomplished. The crusade is not against the Saracens, but it is a crusade all the same.



*France*

*From The London Times Literary Supplement*

Among all the sorrows of this war there is one joy for us in it: that it has made us brothers with the French as no other two nations have ever been brothers before. There has come to us, after ages of conflict, a kind of millennium of friendship; and in that we feel there is a hope for the world that outweighs all our fears, even at the height of the worldwide calamity. There were days and days, during the swift German advance, when we feared that the French armies were no match for the German, that Germany would be conquered on the seas and from her eastern frontier, that after the war France would remain a power only through the support of her Allies. For that fear we must now ask forgiveness; but at least we can plead in excuse that it was unselfish and free from all national vanity. If, in spite of ultimate victory, France had lost her high place among the nations, we should have felt that the victory itself was an irreparable loss for the world. And now we may speak frankly of that fear because, however unfounded it was, it reveals the nature of the friendship between France and England.

That is also revealed in the praise which the French have given to our army. There is no people that can praise as they can: for they enjoy praising others as much as some nations enjoy praising themselves, and they lose all the reserve of egotism in the pleasure of praising well. But in this case they have praised so generously because there was a great kindliness behind their praise, because they, like us, feel that this war means a new brotherhood stronger than all the hatreds it may provoke, a brotherhood not only of war but of the peace that is to come after it. That welcome of English soldiers in the villages of France, with food and wine and flowers, is only a foretaste of what is to be in both countries in a happier time. It is what we have desired in the past of silly wrangles and misunderstandings, and now we know that our desire is fulfilled.

*"That Sweet Enemy."*

For behind all those misunderstandings, and in spite of the difference of character between us, there was always an understanding which showed itself in the courtesies of Fontenoy and a hundred other battles. When Sir Philip Sidney spoke of France as that sweet enemy, he made a phrase for the English feeling of centuries past and centuries to be. We quarrelled bitterly and long; but it was like a man and woman who know that some day their love will be confessed and are angry with each other for the quarrels that delay the confession. We called each other ridiculous, and knew that we were talking nonsense; indeed, as in all quarrels without real hatred, we made charges against each other that were the opposite of the truth. We said that the French were frivolous; and they said that we were gloomy. Now they see the gayety of our soldiers and we see the deep seriousness of all France at this crisis of her fate. She, of all the nations at war, is fighting with the least help from illusion, with the least sense of glory and romance. To her the German invasion is like a pestilence; to defeat it is merely a necessity of her existence; and in defeating it she is showing the courage of doctors and nurses, that courage which is furthest removed from animal instinct and most secure from panic reaction. There is no sign in France now of the passionate hopes of the revolutionary wars; 1870 is between them and her; she has learned, like no other nation in Europe, the great lesson of defeat, which is not to mix material dreams with spiritual; she has passed beyond illusions, yet her spirit is as high as if it were drunk with all the illusions of Germany.

And that is why we admire her as we have never admired a nation before. We ourselves are an old and experienced people, who have, we hope, outlived gaudy and dangerous dreams; but we have not been tested like the French, and we do not know whether we or any other nation could endure the test they have endured. It is not merely that they have survived and kept their strength. It is that they have a kind of strength new to nations, such as we see in beautiful women who have endured great sorrows and outlived all the triumphs and passions of their youth, who smile where once they laughed; and yet they are more beautiful than ever, and seem to live with a purpose that is not only their own, but belongs to the whole of life. So now we feel that France is fighting not merely for her own honor and her own beautiful country, still less for a triumph over an arrogant rival, but for what she means to all the world; and that now she means far more than ever in the past.

*Furia Francese.*

This quarrel, as even the Germans confess, was not made by her. She saw it gathering, and she was as quiet as if she hoped to escape war by submission. The chance of revenge was offered as it had never been offered in forty years; yet she did not stir to grasp it. Her enemy gave every provocation, yet she stayed as still as if she were spiritless; and all the while she was the proudest nation on the earth, so proud that she did not need to threaten or boast. Then came the first failure, and she took it as if she had expected nothing better. She had to make war in a manner wholly contrary to her nature and genius, and she made it as if patience, not fire, were the main strength of her soul. Yet behind the new patience the old fire persisted; and the Furia Francese is only waiting for its chance. The Germans believe they have determined all the conditions of modern war, and, indeed of all modern competition between the nations to suit their own national character. It is their age, they think, an age in which the qualities of the old peoples, England and France, are obsolete. They make war, after their own pattern, and we have only to suffer it as long as we can. But France has learned what she needs from Germany so that she may fight the German idea as well as the German armies; and when the German armies were checked before Paris there was an equal check to the German idea. Then the world, which was holding its breath, knew that the old nations, the old faith and mind and conscience of Europe, were still standing fast and that science had not utterly betrayed them all to the new barbarism. Twice before, at Tours and in the Catalaunian fields, there had been such a fight upon the soil of France, and now for the third time it is the heavy fate and the glory of France to be the guardian nation. That is not an accident, for France is still the chief treasury of all that these conscious barbarians would destroy. They knew that while she stands unbroken there is a spirit in her that will make their Kultur seem unlovely to all the world. They know that in her, as in Athens long ago, thought remains passionate and disinterested and free. Their thought is German and exercised for German ends, like their army; but hers can forget France in the universe, and for that reason her armies and ours will fight for it as if the universe were at stake. Many forms has that thought taken, passing through disguises and errors, mocking at itself, mocking at the holiest things; and yet there has always been the holiness of freedom in it. The French blasphemer has never blasphemed against the idea of truth even when he mistook falsehood for it. In the Terror he said there was no God, because he believed there was none, but he never said that France was God so that he might encourage her to conquer the world. Voltaire was an imp of destruction perhaps, but with what a divine lightning of laughter would he have struck the Teutonic Antichrist, and how the everlasting soul of France would have risen in him if he could have seen her most sacred church, the visible sign of her faith and her genius, ruined by the German guns. Was there ever a stupidity so worthy of his scorn as this attempt to bombard the spirit? For, though the temple is ruined, the faith remains; and whatever war the Germans may make upon the glory of the past, it is the glory of the future that France fights for. Whatever wounds she suffers now she is suffering for all mankind; and now, more than ever before in her history, are those words become true which one poet who loved her gave to her in the Litany of Nations crying to the earth:

I am she that was thy sign and standard bearer, Thy voice and cry; She that washed thee with her blood and left thee fairer, The same am I. Are not these the hands that raised thee fallen, and fed thee, These hands defiled? Am not I thy tongue that spake, thine eye that led thee, Not I thy child?



*The Soldier of 1914*

*By Rene Doumic.*

In spite of the great European war, which struck France with the full force of its horrors, the Institute of France, which includes the world-famous French Academy, held its regular session on Oct. 26 last. The feature of this session, widely heralded beforehand, was the address of the celebrated critic, M. Rene Doumic of the Academy, on "The Soldier of 1914." "Every sentence, every word of it, was punctuated with acclamations from the audience," says Le Figaro in its report. Below is a translation of M. Doumic's address:

The soldier of 1914. We think only of him. We live only for him, just as we live only through him. I have not chosen this subject; it has forced itself upon me. My only regret is that I come here in academician's costume, with its useless sword, to speak to you about those whose uniforms are torn by bullets, whose rifles are black with powder.

And I am ashamed, above all, of placing so feeble a voice at the service of so great a cause. But what do words matter, when the most brilliant of them would pale before acts of which each day makes us the witnesses? For these acts we have only words, but let us hope that these, coming from the heart, may bring to those who are fighting for their country somewhere near the frontier the spirit of our gratitude and the fervor of our admiration.

Our history is nothing but the history of French valor, so ingenious in adopting new forms and adapting itself each time to the changing conditions of warfare. Soldiers of the King or of the republic, old "grognards" of Napoleon, who always growled yet followed just the same, youngsters who bit their cartridges with childish lips, veterans of fights in Africa, cuirassieurs of Reichshofen, gardes-mobiles of the Loire, all, at the moment of duty and sacrifice, did everything that France expected of her sons.

So, too, for this war, the soldier needed has arisen. After so many heroes he has invented a new form of heroism.

I say the soldier, for the soldier is what one must say. Here begins what is clearly expressed in one phrase only—the French miracle. This national union in which all opinions have become fused is merely a reflection of the unity which has been suddenly created in our army.

*When War Broke Out.*

When war broke out it found military France ready and armed; mere troopers, officers none of whom ever thought that he would one day lead his men under fire, and that admirable General Staff which, never allowing itself to be deflected from its purpose, did its work silent and aloof.

But there was beside this France another France, the France of civilians, accustomed by long years of peace to disbelieve in war; which, in conjuring up a picture of Europe delivered over to fire and blood, could not conceive that any human being in the world would assume the responsibility for such an act before history. War surprised the employe at his desk, the workman in his workshop, the peasant in his field. It snatched them from the intimacy of their hearths, from the amenities of family life which in France is sweeter than elsewhere. These men were obliged to leave behind beings whom they loved tenderly. For the last time they clasped in their arms the beloved partners of their lives, so deeply moved yet so proud, and their children, the eldest of whom have understood and will never forget. And all of them, artist and artisan, priest and teacher, those who dreamed of revenge and those who dreamed of the fraternity of nations, those of every mind, every profession, every age, as they stepped into their places, were endowed with the soul of the soldier of France, every one of them, and became thus the same soldier.

The war which lay in wait for these men, many of whom did not seem made for war, was a war of which nobody had ever seen the like. We have heard tell of wars of giants, of battles of nations, but nobody had ever seen a war extending from the Marne to the Vistula, nor battles with a front of hundreds of kilometers, lasting weeks without respite day or night, fought by millions of men. Never in its worst nightmares had hallucinated imagination conjured up the progress made in the art of mowing down human lives. The German Army, to which the German Nation has never refused anything, either moral support or money, the nerve of war, has been able to profit by all this progress, to reduce to a formula the violence which drives forward the attack, to prepare the spy system which watches over the unarmed foe, to organize even incendiarism, and to become thus, forged by forty-four years of hatred, the most formidable tool of destruction that has ever sown ruin and death.

*German Meets Belgian.*

The Germans arrived, with the irresistible impetus of their masses, with the fury of a tempest, with the roar of thunder, enraged at having been confronted on their road by that little Belgian Nation which has just inscribed its name among the first on the roster of heroism. Already the German chiefs imagined themselves lords of Paris, which they threatened to reduce to ashes—and which did not tremble.

It was to meet this colossus of war that our little soldier marched forth. And he made it fall back.

To this new war he brings his old qualities, the qualities of all time. Courage—let us not speak of that. Can one speak of courage? Just read the short sentences in the army orders.

Corporal Voituret of the Second Dragoons, mortally wounded on a reconnoissance, cries: "Vive la France! I die for her! I die happy!" Private Chabannes of the Eighteenth Chasseurs, unhorsed and wounded, replies to the Major who asks him why he had not surrendered: "We Frenchmen never surrender!" And remember those who, mortally wounded, stick to their posts so as to fight to the end with their men, and those wounded men who have but one desire—every one of us can vouch for this—to return to the firing line! And that one who, hopelessly mutilated, said to me: "It is not being crippled that hurts me; it is that I shall not be able to see the best part of the thing!" These, and the others, the thousands of others, shall we speak of their courage? —what would it mean to speak of their courage?

And the dash of them!—the only criticism to which they lay themselves open is that they are too fiery, that they do not wait the right moment for the charge, in order to drive back the enemy at the point of the bayonet. What spirit! What gayety! All the letters from our soldiers are overflowing with cheerfulness. Where, for instance, does that nickname come from applied by them to the enemy—the "Boches"? It comes from where so many more have come; its author is nobody and everybody; it is the spontaneous product of that Gallic humor which jokes at danger, takes liberities with it.

What pride! What sense of honor! Whereas the German officer, posted behind his men, drives them forward like a flock of sheep, revolver in his hand and insults on his lips, we, on our side, hear nothing but those beautiful, those radiant words: "Forward! For your country!"—the call of the French officer to his children, whom he impels forward by giving them the example, by plunging under fire first, before all of them, at their head.

*The Password: "Smile!"*

And—supreme adornment of all—with what grace they deck their gallantry! A few seconds before being killed by an exploding shell, Col. Doury, ordered to resist to the last gasp, replies: "All right! We will resist. And now, boys, here is the password: Smile!" It is like a flower thrown on the scientific brutality of modern war, that memory of the days when men went to war with lace on their sleeves. There we recognize the French soldier such as we have always known him through fifteen centuries of the history of France.

But now we look upon him in a form of which we did not suspect the existence, the form in which he has just revealed himself to us.

To go forward is all very well; but to fall back in good order, to understand that a retreat may be a masterpiece of strategy, to find in himself that other kind of courage which consists in not getting discouraged, to be able to wait without getting demoralized, to preserve unshaken the certainty of the final outcome—in these things lies a virtue which we did not know we possessed: the virtue of patience. It won us our victory of the Marne. One man is its personification today, that great chief, wise and prudent, who spares his men, who makes up his mind not to give battle except in his own time on his own ground, that chief toward whom at this moment the calm and confident eyes of the entire country are turned.

To carry a position by assault is one thing. But to stand impassive in a rain of shot, amid exploding shells, amid infernal din and blinding smoke; to fire at an invisible enemy, to dispute foot by foot ground covered with traps, to retake the same village ten times, to burrow into the soil and crouch there, to watch day after day for the moment when the beast at bay ventures from his lair—where have we acquired the phlegmatic coolness for such things? Has it come from the proximity of our English allies? It is in the English reports that we read the eulogies of our army for its endurance and tenacity.

We have always known how to pluck the laurels of the brave on fields of battle and to water them with our blood. We Frenchmen, all of us, are lovers of glory. The stories of war which we read in our childhood days—captures of redoubts, fiery charges, furious fights around the flag—made us thrill. And, like the Athenians who left the performance of a tragedy by Aeschylus thirsting to close their books and march on the enemy, we dreamed of combats in which we were to win fame.

But since those days military literature has undergone somewhat of a change, and the communiques which we devour twice a day, hungry for news, give us no such tales of prowess.

"On the left wing we have progressed. On the right wing we have repulsed violent counter-attacks. On the front the situation remains without change." Where are our men? What troops are meant? What Generals? Nothing is told of such things. The veil of anonymity shrouds great actions, a barrier of impenetrable mystery protects the secret of the operations.

*Great Things Done Simply.*

Our soldiers have endured every hardship, braved every danger, never knowing whether each dawning day was their last, yet the cleverest manoeuvring, the most gallant feats, are obliterated, effaced, lost, in the calculated colorlessness of an enigmatic report. But that sacrifice also have they made. To be at the post assigned to them, to play a great or infinitesimal role in the common work, is the only reward they desire. Can it be that the disease of individualism is a thing of yesterday? The soldier of 1914 has cured us of it. Never have disinterestedness and modesty been pushed so far.

Let us say it in a word: Never have great things been done so simply.

But he knows why he is fighting. It is not for the ambition of a sovereign or the impatience of his heir, for the arrogance of a caste of country squires or the profit of a firm of merchants. No; he fights for the land where he was born and where his dead sleep; he fights to free his invaded country and give her back her lost provinces, for her past, struck to the heart by the shells that bombarded the Cathedral of Rheims; he fights so that his children may have the right to think, speak, and feel in French, so that there may still be in the world a French race, which the world needs. For this war of destruction is aimed at the destruction of our race, and our race has been moved to its depths. It has risen as one man and assembled together; it has called up from its remotest history all its energy, in order to reincarnate them in the person of him whose duty is to defend the race today; it has inspired in him the valor of the knights of old, the endurance of the laborer bending over his furrow, the modesty of the old masters who made of our cathedrals masterpieces of anonymity, the honesty of the bourgeois, the patience of humble folk, the consciousness of duty which mothers teach to their children, all those virtues which, developed from one generation to another, become a tradition, the tradition of an industrious people, made strong by a long past and made to endure. It is these qualities, all of them together, which we admire in the soldier of 1914, the complete and superb type of the entire race.

*A Holy Intoxication.*

When it has such an aim, the noblest of all, war is sublime; all who go into it are as if transfigured. It exalts, expands, and purifies souls. On approaching the battlefield a holy intoxication, a holy happiness, takes possession of those for whom has been reserved the supreme joy of braving death for their country. Death is everywhere, but they do not believe in it any more. And when, on certain mornings, to the sound of cannon that mix their rumblings with mystic voices of bells, in the devastated church which cries to the heavens through every breach opened in its walls, the Chaplain blesses the regiment that he will accompany the next minute to the firing line, every head will be bent at the same time and all will feel on their brows the breath of God.

Alas! the beauty of the struggle does not hide from me its sadness. How many went away, full of youth and hope, to return no more. How many have fallen already without seeing realized what they so ardently desired; sowers they, who to make the land fertile have watered it with their blood, yet will not see the harvest.

But at least their sacrifice will not have been in vain. They have brought reconciliation to their divided country, they have made her become conscious of herself again, they have made her learn enthusiasm once again. They have not seen victory, but they have merited it. Honor to them, struck down first, and glory to those who will avenge them! We enfold them both in our devotion to the same sacred cause.

Would that a new era might dawn, thanks to them, that a new world might be born in which we might breathe more freely, where injustices centuries old might be made good, where France, arising from long humiliation, might resume her rank and destiny. Then, in that cured, vivified France, what an awakening, what a renewal, what a sap, what a magnificent flowering there would be! This will be thy work, soldier of 1914! To you we shall owe this resurrection of our beloved country. And later on, and always, in everything beautiful and good that may be done among us, in the creations of our poets and the discoveries of our savants, in the thousand forms of national activity, in the strength of our young men and the grace of our young women, in all that will be the France of tomorrow, there will be, soldier so brave and so simple in your greatness, a little of your heroic soul!



*Germany's Civilized Barbarism*

*By Emile Boutroux.*

*From the Revue des Deux Mondes.*

I sincerely thank M. Emile Boutroux for the letter he has been good enough to write to me; and the readers of the Revue will join me, for it is addressed to them also. No one could speak of Germany more authoritatively than M. Boutroux; no one, indeed, is better acquainted with the Germany of yesterday and that of today, or better equipped to draw a comparison between them, which for the Prussianized Germany of the present is a verdict and a condemnation. The violence, brutality, barbarism which she displays—a frightful spectacle—doubtless spring from the deepest instincts of race; but man always feels the need of justifying his conduct, and the Germans are too much philosophers not to seek justification for theirs in a scientific system in which these doctrinaires of a new sort are encouraged to persevere without the least scruple or pity. M. Boutroux explains to us the detestable sophism which has perverted the entire German soul and made of a nation which our grandfathers loved and admired, a monster whose implacable egotism weighs heavily on the world. But let M. Boutroux speak.

FRANCIS CHARMES.

* * * * *

PARIS, 28 September, 1914.

To the Director of the Revue des Deux Mondes:

Mr. Director and Dear Colleague: You have done me the honor to ask me, as I have lived in Germany and studied in part German philosophy and literature, whether I was not prepared to submit some observations touching the present war. I confess that at this moment words, and even thoughts, seem to me to amount to little. Like every Frenchman,



I am given up wholly to the task of the hour; all my interest is in our generous and admirable army, and my sole concern is to take part, however modestly, in the work of the nation. True, a thousand memories and reflections crowd my mind; the notion of pausing to express them in writing had not occurred to me, but it would be ungracious in me to decline your kind invitation. Please omit from the ideas I throw on paper whatever seems to you to be lacking in interest.

*Mephistopheles Appears.*

In the presence of such events as are passing before our eyes, how can we keep our minds free? We have to say to ourselves: "See what has come of that philosophic, artistic, scientific development whose grandeur and idealistic character all the world has proclaimed!" "That is what the infernal cur had in his belly," said Faust as he saw the dog which was playing at his side change into Mephistopheles. What! Having declared the morality of Plato and Aristotle inadequate and mediocre, having preached duty for duty's sake, having established the unconditioned supremacy of moral worth, the royalty of the intellect, to end by officially declaring that a signed engagement is but a scrap of paper, and that juridic or moral laws do not count if they incommode us and if we are the strongest! Having given to the world marvelous music, in which the purest and deepest aspirations seem to be heard; having raised art and poetry to a sort of religion, in which man communes with the Eternal by the worship of the ideal; having exalted the universities as the most sublime of human creations, temples of science and of intellectual freedom, to come to bombarding Louvain, Malines, and the Cathedral of Rheims! Having assumed the role of representative par excellence of culture, of civilization in its loftiest form, at the end to aim at the subjugation of the world and to strive toward that aim by the methodical letting loose of brute force, wickedness, and barbarism! To boast of having attained the highest plane of human nature, and to reveal themselves as survivors of the Huns and Vandals!

Only yesterday Germany was feared throughout the world because of her power, but esteemed for her science and her heritage of idealism. Today, on the contrary, there is a common cry of reprobation and horror raised against her from one end of the earth to the other. Fear is overcome by indignation. On every side it is asserted that the victory of German imperialism and militarism would be the triumph of despotism, brutality, and barbarism. These ideas are expressed to us by Americans of the North and South, by Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, Swiss, and Rumanians. The nation which burned the University of Louvain and the Cathedral of Rheims has brought dishonor upon itself.

What shall we think of the prodigious contrast which manifests itself between the high culture of Germany and the end at which she aims, the means which she employs in the present war? Is it enough to explain this contrast, to allege that in spite of all their science the Germans are but slightly civilized, that in the sixteenth century they were still boorish and uncultivated and that their science, an affair of specialists and pundits, has never penetrated their soul or influenced their character?

This explanation is justified. Consider the German professor in the beer garden, in the relations of everyday life, in his amusements. With certain notable exceptions he excels only in discovering and collecting materials for study and in drawing from them, by mechanical operations, solutions that rest wholly upon text and argument and make no appeal whatever to ordinary judgment and good sense. What a disproportion often between his science and his real education. What vulgarity of tastes and sentiments and language. What brutality of methods on the part of this man whose authority is indisputable in his specialty. Take this learned man from his university chair, place him on that scene of war where force can alone reign and where the gross appetites are unchained, it is not surprising that his conduct approaches that of savages.

*A Culture of Violence.*

That is the current judgment and not without reason. The savant and the man, among the Germans, are only too often strangers to each other. The German in war is inhuman not merely because of an explosion of his true nature, gross and violent, but by order. His brutality is calculated and systematized. It justifies the words of La Harpe, "There is such a thing as a scientific barbarity." In 1900 the German Emperor haranguing his soldiers about to set sail for China, exhorted them to leave nothing living in their path and to bear themselves like Huns.

If, then, in this war, in the manner in which they have prepared and provoked it and now conduct it, they violate without scruple the laws of the civilized world, it is not despite their superior culture, it is in consequence of that very culture. They are barbarous because they are more civilized. How can such a combination of contradictory elements, such a synthesis, be possible?

Fichte in the famous discourses to the German Nation which he delivered at the University of Berlin during the Winter of 1807 and 1808, had one object: to arouse the German Nation by kindling its self-consciousness, that is to say, its pure Germanic essence, Deutschheit, in order to realize that essence when possible beyond its borders and to make it dominate the world. The general idea which must guide Germany in the accomplishment of this double task is: Germany is to all the rest of the world as good is to evil.

The appeal of Fichte was heard. During the century which followed, Germany in the most precise and practical manner, on the one hand built up the theory of Germanism or Deutschtum, on the other hand prepared the domination of Germanism in the world. This notion of Germanism furnishes, if I am not mistaken, the principle of the inference which I wish to indicate, the explanation of the surprising solidarity which Germans have created between culture and barbarism.

It would be interesting to probe this notion and follow its development.

In the first place how can a people come to claim for its ideas, its virtue, its achievements, not only the right to exist and to be respected by other people, but the privilege of being the sole expression of the true and the good while everything which emanates from other peoples represents nothing but error and evil?

The philosopher Fichte after having built up his system under the influence of Kant and of French ideas, notably under the influence of Rousseau—of whom he said "peace to his ashes, for he has done things"—could think of nothing better to reinforce the German soul after Jena than to persuade it that in itself and itself alone there was to be found the sense of the ideal combined with power to realize that ideal in the world.

*The Power to Realize.*

Starting from a certain notion of the absolute he found after Jena that this very notion constituted the foundation of the German genius. Soon this mystic method was merged in a more concrete method better adapted to the positive spirit of modern generations. The one science where all knowledge and ideas which concern human life are concentrated is history. To this science our epoch has devoted a veritable worship. Now the Germans have drawn from history two lessons of the highest importance. One is that history is not only the succession of events, which mark the life of humanity, it is the judgment of God upon the rivalries of peoples. Everything which is wishes to be, and to endure, struggle, and impose itself. History tells us which are the men and the things Providence has elected. The sign of that election is success. To subsist, grow, conquer, dominate is to prove that one is the confidant of the thought of Providence, the dispenser of the power of Providence. If one people appears designated by history to dominate the others then that people is the vicegerent of God upon earth, is God Himself, visible and tangible for His creatures.

The second lesson which German erudition has drawn from the study of history is that the actual existence of a people charged with representing God is not a myth, that such a people exists and that the German people is that people. From the victory of Hermann (Arminius) over Varus in the forest of Teutoburg in the year 9 A.D., the will of God is evident. The Middle Ages show it, and if in modern times Germany has appeared to efface herself it is because she was reposing to collect her force and strike more heavily. When she was not obviously the first, she was so virtually. It was in 1844 that Hoffmann von Fallersleben composed the national song, Deutschland ueber alles, ueber alles in der Welt. Germany over all, Germany over all the world, Germany extending from the Meuse to the Niemen, from the Adige to the Belt.

Not only is Germany the elect of Providence but the sole elect, and other nations are rejected. The sign of her election is the annihilation of the three legions of Quinctilius Varus, and her eternal task is to revenge herself for the insolence of the Roman General. "We shall give battle to Hermann and we shall avenge ourselves, "und wollen Rache haben." Thus ran the celebrated national song. Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen liess.

*Germanism and God.*

German civilization has developed in antagonism with the Greco-Roman civilization. To adopt the former was on the part of God to reject the latter. Therefore German consciousness, realized without hindrance in all its force, is but the Divine consciousness. Deutschtum = God and God = Deutschtum. In practice it is enough that an idea is authentically German in order that we may and must conclude that it is true, that it is just, and that it ought to prevail.

What are the essential dogmas of this truth, which is German because it is true and which is true because it is German? German metaphysicians explain that to us more clearly than is usual by thought. The first quality of this truth is that it is in opposition to what classic or Greco-Latin thought would recognize as true. The latter has sought to discover what in man is essentially human, to render man superior to other beings, and to substitute more and more the superior elements for the inferior elements in human life—reason for blind impulse, justice for force, good for wickedness. It has undertaken to create in the world a moral force capable of controlling and humanizing material forces. To this doctrine, which rests upon man as its centre and which was essentially human, German thought opposes itself as the infinite opposes the finite, the absolute the relative, the whole the part. The disciples of the Greeks had at their disposition no light except that of human reason; the German genius possesses a transcendent reason which pierces the mysteries of the absolute, of the Divine. What would light be without the shadow from which it is detached? How could the ego exist if there was not somewhere a non ego to which it is opposed? Evil is not less indispensable than good in the transcendent symphony of the whole.

There is something more. It may be a satisfaction for a Greco-Latin, impelled by his mediocre logic to say that good is good, evil is evil, but these simple formulas are contrary to the truth per se. Good by itself is absolutely impotent to realize itself. It is only an idea, an abstraction. The power and faculty of creation belong to evil alone. So that if good is to be realized it can only be by means of evil, and by means of evil left entirely to itself. God could not exist if He were not created by the devil, and thus, in a sense, evil is good and good is bad. Evil is good because it creates. Good is bad because it is impotent. The supreme and true divine law is just this: That evil left to itself, evil as evil, gives birth to good, which, by itself, would never be able to advance from the ideal to the real. "I am," said Mephistopheles, "part of that force which always wishes evil and always creates the good." Such is the divine order. He who undertakes to do good by good will only do evil. It is only in unchaining the power of evil that one has a chance to realize any good.

From these metaphysical principles questions raised by the idea of civilization receive most remarkable solutions.

*The Essence of Civilization.*

What is civilization in the German and true sense of the word?

Nations in general, especially the Latin nations, put the essence of civilization in the moral element of human life, in the softening of human manners. To those who understand human culture in this way the Germans will apply the words of Ibsen's Brand, "You wish to do great things but you lack energy. You expect success from mildness and goodness." According to the German thought, mildness and goodness are only weakness and impotence. Force alone is strong and force par excellence is science, which puts at our disposal the powers of nature and indefinitely multiplies our strength. Science, then, should be the principal object of our efforts. From science and from the culture of scientific intelligence there will necessarily result, by the effect of Divine grace, the progress of the will and of the conscience which is called moral progress. It is in this sense that Bismarck said, "Imagination and sentiment are to science and intelligence what the tares are to the wheat. The tares threaten to stifle the wheat; that is why they are cut down and burned." True civilization is a virile education, aiming at force and implying force. A civilization which under pretext of humanity and of courtesy enervates and softens man is fit only for women and for slaves.

Is that to say that the notion of right which men invoke against force has in reality no meaning, and that a highly civilized people would disregard it? We must clearly understand the relation which exists between the notion of right and the notion of force. Force is not the right. All existing forces do not have an equal right to exist; mediocre forces in reality have but a feeble share in the Divine force; but in proportion as a force becomes greater it is more noble. A universally victorious and all-powerful force would be identical with Divine force and should, therefore, be obeyed and honored in the same degree. Justice and force, moreover, belong to two different worlds—the natural and the spiritual. The former is the phenomenon and symbol of the latter. We live in a world of symbols; and so preponderant force is for us the visible and practical equivalent of right.

It is, then, puerile to admit the existence of a natural right inherent in individuals or in nations, and manifested in their aspirations, their powers, their sympathies, their wills. The right of peoples should be determined by a purely objective method.

Now in this sense people should be divided into Naturvoelker, Halbkulturvoelker, and Kulturvoelker—people in the state of nature, half-cultivated people, and cultivated people. This is not all. There are people who are simply cultivated—Naturvoelker—and people who are wholly cultivated—Vollkulturvoelker. Now the degree of right depends on the degree of culture. As compared with the Kulturvoelker the Naturvoelker have no rights. They have only duties—submission, docility, obedience. And if there exists a people which deserves more than all others the title of Vollkulturvoelker—completely cultured people—to this people the earth belongs and the supremacy thereof. Its mission is to bend all other peoples beneath the yoke of its omnipotence co-ordinated with its supreme culture.

*The Master Nation.*

Such is the idea of the master nation. This nation must not be simply an abstract type, it must necessarily be able to realize itself in our world. In effect the spirit is the supreme form of being; it necessarily wishes to be; and as it is infinite, it can be realized only by means of an infinite force. A nation capable of imposing its will upon everybody is the necessary instrument of the Divine will which can grant the prayer: "Our Father, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven."

As a master nation is necessary in the world there must be subordinate nations. There can be no efficient "yes" without a decided "no." The ego, says Fichte, is effort. Therefore it presupposes something that resists it, namely, that which we call matter. The master nation commands. Therefore nations must exist who are made to obey it. It is needful even that these nations, which are to the master nation what the non ego is to the ego, should resist the action of this superior nation. For this resistance is necessary to enable the latter to develop and employ its force and to become fully itself; that is, to become the whole, enriching itself by the spoils of its enemies.

The ideal nation is thus defined by a transcendental deduction, and this same deduction leads us to affirm that the master nation must be not merely an idea but a reality. Now, it is plain that this realization of the ideal nation is going on under our eyes in the German Nation, which represents the highest created race and which surpasses all other nations in science and in power. It is to her, and to her alone, that the task of accomplishing the will of God upon earth is consigned.

*Means of Success.*

To succeed in it, what means must she employ?

In the first place she must acquire complete consciousness of her superiority and of her own genius. Nothing German is found in the same degree of excellence in other nations. German women, German fidelity, German wine, the German song, hold the first rank in the world. To combat Satan, that is to say, enemies of Germany, the Germans have at their service the ancient god, the German god, der alte, der deutsche Gott, who identifies His cause with theirs. And as everything which is German is by that very fact unique and inimitable, so it is correspondingly true that everything which the world has of excellence belongs to Germany in fact and in right. Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Ibsen, are Germans. A German brain alone could understand them and has a right to admire them. It is doubtful if even Joan of Arc, that sublime heroine, is French. German savants have maintained her German nationality. If the people of Alsace and Lorraine are faithful to France that only proves that they ought to be German subjects, because fidelity is a German virtue.

As Germany possesses, in principle, all the virtues, all the perfections, she suffices to herself and can learn nothing from other people. By still stronger reason she owes them no duty of respect or good-will. What is called humanity has no meaning for the German. The mot of William II., "Humanity for me stops at the Vosges," is not merely an instance of national egoism. The German Emperor feels that what is for the present beyond his empire can only acquire value when it shall be annexed to it.

How, then, ought Germany to behave to other nations?

There are people who wish to be loved, who believe that among nations as between individuals, courtesy may have a place and that it would be an advance for humanity to admit that justice and equity may rule international relations. But Germany, as regards other nations, makes no account of justice. She has nothing but scorn for that feminine sentiment which particularly characterizes the Latin races. The sentiment of justice and humanity is weakness and Germany is and ought to be force. Wo Preussens Macht in Frage kommt, kenne ich kein Gesetz, said Bismarck—"When the power of Prussia is in question I know no law."

*Enemies Most Welcome.*

The German does not ask to be loved. He prefers to be hated provided he is feared. Oderint, dum metuant. He does not mind being surrounded by enemies. He knows with satisfaction that in the very heart of the empire certain annexed provinces constantly protest against the violence which has been done to them. The ego cannot work without opposition. The German needs enemies to keep himself in that state of tension and of struggle which is the condition of vigor. He willingly applies to himself what the Lord God said of man in general in the prologue of Goethe's "Faust":

Man's activity has only too great a propensity to relax. Left by himself man seeks repose. That is why I give him a devil for a companion. He will excite him and keep him from getting sleepy.

Germany has a certain satisfaction in recognizing in the neighbors whom she menaces, in the subjects whom she oppresses, these providential devils whose mischief will stimulate her activity and her virtue.

Not that Germany rejects, as regards other nations, every regime except that of hostility. Her aim is domination, the only role which suits the people of God. Now, to attain that, two means are offered to her. The first plainly is intimidation which must never flag. The feeble quickly become insolent if their feebleness is not recalled to them. Other nations must feel themselves constantly threatened with the worst catastrophes if they resist Germany. But it being well understood that Germany is the strongest, that she will never give up what she possesses, however unjustly, then bargains advantageous not only for herself but occasionally for the other party, may be the more direct and less onerous means than violence to attain her end. So Germany will be, by turns, or both at once, threatening and amiable. Amiability itself can be effective when it rests on hatred, contempt, and omnipotence.

Now power counts before all. Germany must possess armaments superior to those of all other nations. The reason is plain. The German Empire is a rock of peace, der Hort des Friedens. The force which it accumulates is directed toward imposing upon mankind the German peace, the divine peace. Since Germany represents peace, whoever opposes Germany intends war. Now it is legitimate that Germany should arm to the teeth because she is the incarnation of peace, but the adversaries of Germany, who, in opposing Germany oppose peace, cannot have the same right. It is the duty of Germany to carry her armaments to the maximum; other peoples have the right to arm only as Germany may permit.

Germany does not seek war. On the contrary, she tries by inspiring terror to render it impossible. But if some nation should profit or be capable of profiting by her love of peace to pretend to rights which offend her she will consent to punish that nation. She will be pained by the violence she has to do to that nation and the severity which she has to use toward the guilty. But soldier of God as she is, she cannot fail to her mission. Any nation which refuses to do the will of Germany proves by that very fact its cultural inferiority and becomes guilty. It must be chastised.

The method according to which Germany will make war is determined by these premises. War is a return to the state of nature. Germany yields to this temporary retrogression because she has to do with people of an inferior culture who must be taught a lesson, and must be spoken to in a language which they understand. Now a characteristic of a state of nature is that force reigns undisputed. In this very trait resides the sublime beauty of that state, its grandeur and its fecundity. Don't talk of that romantic chivalry which pretends in time of war to temper the violence of savage instincts by the intervention of feminine sensibility. War is war. Krieg ist Krieg. It isn't child's play, it isn't sport where it is necessary to blend barbarity and humanity so as to conciliate and humanize them. It is barbarity itself let loose as widely and fully as possible. This is not perversity. Man as man suffers in becoming barbarous, but the man who replaces God suppresses the feebleness of the creature. He submits himself to the mysterious and sublime law in virtue of which evil is by so much more beneficent as it is achieved with resolution and completeness. Pecca fortiter.

*The Nature of War.*

The first article of the code of war is then the suppression of all sensibility, pity, humanity. The nature of war is to kill and destroy. The more it destroys and kills the sooner it comes to its ideal form. Moreover, it is at bottom more humane the more inhuman it is, because the very terrors which its excesses inspire shorten it and make it less murderous.

In the second place, war necessarily ignores moral laws. Respect for laws, treaties, conventions, loyalty, good faith, sentiment and honor, scruples, nobility of soul generosity—these are mere fetters. The God-people do not recognize them. It will then, without hesitation, violate the rights of neutrals if it is to its interest. It will use falsehood, perfidy, treachery. It will justify itself by futile pretexts in committing the most atrocious acts—bombardment of undefended cities, massacre of old men, women and children; barbarous torture, pillage and assassination; bestiality to women; organized incendiarism; methodical destruction of monuments which, by their history and their antiquity and by the admiration of the world, would seem to be inviolable. "I am told: I must avenge myself." This reason suffices. We are told that some inhabitant of one city or another has been wanting in respect toward one of our men. Therefore we must burn the city and show the inhabitants what we have. Definitively, our duty is to let loose the elementary energies of nature as far as possible to attain the maximum force and the maximum of result.

The effect should, moreover, be psychological as well as material. Actions which seem horrible to man and which spread terror are commendable means, because they break the spirit even if they have no value from a military point of view. Moreover, what offends common morality is conformed to transcendent morality. The mission of the Germans at war is to punish. They work Divine vengeance. They compel their enemies to expiate the crime of resisting them. After they have taken a city, if the enemy has the insolence to take it back, it is just that they shall sack that city if possible, killing its inhabitants and burning its finest monuments.

*Barbarity Multiplied by Science.*

Given this problem, how to let loose most widely the powers of evil, it is clear that a people of superior culture is better equipped than any other to resolve that problem. In fact, science, where it excels, can work destruction and evil with the very forces which nature employs only to create light, heat, life, and beauty. The God-people therefore unites the maximum of science to the maximum of barbarity. The formula of its action may be thus written: "Barbarity multiplied by science."

This is the last word of the famous doctrine of Germanism. Now the identity of the ultimate consequences of the doctrine and the features which the present war presents is evident. The problem which we undertook is, therefore, solved. If, contrary to all likelihood, barbarity co-exists with culture in the Germans; if in the present war it appears to be absolutely bound up in that culture, the reason is that German culture differs profoundly from what humanity understands by culture and civilization. Human civilization tries to humanize war. German culture tends indefinitely to increase its primitive brutality by science.

In everything the Germans must be unique—in their women, their God, their wine, their loyalty. The war which the Germans wage against us strikes the world with horror and terror, because it is in the full force of the term "the German way, die deutsche Art, the German war."

As the world recognizes this astonishing proposition it asks with anxiety, what may be its future relations to Germany? Knowingly and systematically, Germany opposes to all Hellenic, Christian, humane civilizations the devastating theory of the Huns. True, after the war she will claim that she has done nothing but conform, often with pain, to the conditions of ideal and divine war, and she will appear willing to pardon to her enemies the cruelties she has had to inflict upon them. Decidedly, the world will refuse to admire this horrible magnanimity which on the first impulse of resistance becomes savagery. Today the veil is torn away. German culture is shown to be a scientific barbarity. The world, which means in the future to rid itself of all despotism, will not compromise with the despotism of barbarity.

But what a disappointment and what a grief! Formerly, Germany was held to be a great nation. Its praises were sounded in many a land of solid and high culture. The German tradition once held other doctrines than those we have now seen devolop under the hands of Prussia. Germanism, as the Prussians formulate it, consists essentially in contempt for all other nations and in the pretension of domination. But Leibnitz—as highly esteemed in the Latin world as in the German—professed a philosophy which valued unity only under the form of harmony between free and autonomous forces. Leibnitz exalted the multiple, the diverse, the spontaneous. Between rival powers he sought to establish relations which would reconcile them without changing or diminishing the value or independence of any of them. Witness his effort at the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. After Leibnitz came Kant. He certainly was very much of a German. He owned, nevertheless, that he had learned from Rousseau to honor the common man who, not being a savant, possesses moral value far above the savant, who has no merit but science. And, starting from the principle that every person, so far as he is capable of moral value, is entitled to respect, he urged men to create not a universal and despotic monarchy but a republic of nations in which each should possess a free and independent personality.

This willingness to put liberty before unity, and respect and honor the dignity of other nations while at the same time serving its own, was not extinguished in Germany with Leibnitz and Kant. Permit me, my dear Director, on this subject to indulge in some personal reminiscences.

*Treitschke Versus Bluntschli.*

In January, 1869, I was sent to Heidelberg by the Minister of Public Instruction, Victor Duruy, to study the organization of German universities. Germany was for me the land of metaphysics, music, and poetry. I was greatly astonished to find that outside of the lecture courses the only thing discussed was the war which Prussia was about to make on France. Invited to a soiree, I heard it whispered behind me, Vielleicht ist er ein franzoesischer Spion—"Perhaps he is a French spy." Such were the words as I caught them. At the beer garden a student seated himself near me. He said to me, "We are going to war with you. We shall take Alsace and Lorraine." That night I could see from my window, looking out on the Neckar, the students clad in their club costumes floating down the river on an illuminated raft singing the famous song in honor of Bluecher, who "taught the Welches the way of the Germans." And at the university itself the lectures of Treitschke, attended by excited crowds, were heated harangues against the French, inciting to hatred and to war. Seeing that nothing was thought of but the preparation for war, I came back at the Easter vacation of 1869 convinced that hostilities would ensue. I returned to Heidelberg some time later and became acquainted with other persons, other centres of ideas. I understood then that opinion in Germany was divided between two opposite doctrines. The general aspiration was for the unity of Germany, but there was no agreement as to the way of conceiving and realizing this unity. The thesis of Treitschke was, Freiheit durch Einheit, "liberty through unity," that is to say, unity first, unity before all; liberty later, when circumstances should permit. And to realize at once this unity, which really was the only thing that mattered, the enrollment of all Germany under the command of Prussia for a war against France.

Now the formula of Treitschke was opposed by that of Bluntschli, Einheit durch Freiheit—"Unity through liberty." This doctrine, which counted at that time some eminent advocates, aimed first to safeguard the independence and unity of the German States and then to establish between them on that basis a federated union. And as it contemplated in the heart of Germany a union without hegemony, so it conceived of German unity as something to be realized without harm to other nations, and especially without harm to France. It was to be a free Germany in a free world.

Germany at that epoch was at the parting of the ways. Should she follow a tendency still living in many and noble minds or should she abandon it entirely, to march head down in the ways in which Prussia had entangled her? That was the question. The party of war, the party of unity as a means of attacking and despoiling France, the Prussian party, gained the day. And its success rendered its preponderance definitive. Since then those who have undertaken to remain faithful to an ideal of liberty and humanity have been annihilated.

Is it still possible that Germany may some day regain the parting of the ways where she was before 1870 and this time take the other road, the road of the Leibnitzes, the Kants, the Bluntschlis, which leads first to the liberty of individuals and of peoples and afterward—- and only afterward—a form of harmony where the rights of all are equally respected? A word of the Scotch professor, William Knight, comes back to my memory at this moment: "The best things have to die and be reborn." The Germany which the world respected and admired, the Germany of Leibnitz, appears indeed dead. Can it be reborn?

Accept, I beg, my dear Director, the assurance of my cordial devotion.

EMILE BOUTROUX.



*The German Religion of Duty*

*By Gabriele Reuter.*[B]

On various occasions in the past I have been reproached by my friends for not showing the proper spirit of patriotism.

I have merely smiled at their criticism, for it was my opinion that true patriotism does not consist of flowery speeches and assertions, but in the effort dutifully to accomplish that for which one is best qualified.

It seemed to me that I was truly showing my love for the Fatherland by writing my books to the best of my ability.

But the source of this reproach was very evident to me. The cause could be traced to a quality which I share with many of my compatriots. It must, in truth, be called a particularly characteristic trait. This is a very earnest desire for and love of justice, which is not satisfied simply to "recognize," but endeavors thoroughly to understand the material and spiritual points of view of the other nations in order to show them the proper appreciation.

It is natural to develop affection for that which one earnestly desires to understand.

Many Germans have had the experience that they have rather overzealously commenced by weighing the good of a foreign people in the balance with the good of their own, and with well-nigh fanatic honesty they have ended by acknowledging their own shortcomings compared to the merits and advantages of the foreign nation. There have been instances when some foreigner has drawn our attention to this or that particular weakness and immediately innumerable of my countrymen assented, saying, "Certainly it is true, the criticism is just, matters are probably even worse than they have been represented."

Many of us, and I acknowledge I am one of the many, have developed a form of ascetic mania for self-abasement, a desire for truth which knows no limits in the dissection of its own condition and the disclosure of social and personal shortcomings and disadvantages. This tendency may be easily discerned in much of the German literature of the past twenty years; also, in my books.

The individual is really always the symbol of the whole, and the thoughts and feelings of one person are but the expression of strong forces in national life and culture. It was not want of patriotism, but an unbounded love for the universality of European culture which drove us, drove many thousand people with German souls, to reach out over the boundaries of our own Fatherland for intellectual conquests, for permeation and coalescence with all the world's riches, goodness, and beauty.

We loved the others; and believing ourselves among friends we were candid and disclosed our weaknesses.

*Germans Trusted Too Well.*

We permitted criticism and criticised ourselves, because we were convinced that those others had our welfare at heart, and also because we were convinced that only by unsparing self-knowledge can the heights be scaled which lead to superior and more refined development. It is therefore probable that we ourselves have delivered the weapons into our enemies' hands.

Confiding and harmless as children, we were blind to the enigmatical hatred which has to an appalling extent developed all around us. This hate which has been nourished systematically and with satanic cleverness probably originated in a slight feeling of jealousy, and the tendency of my countrymen to criticise each other led our enemies to believe that they might look for internal discord in the Fatherland and that our humiliation could therefore be more easily accomplished.

If we had recognized the danger in time, we might have prevented this hatred, to which they at the beginning were hardly prone, from taking root in the souls of nations. But only very few among us were aware of it and they received little credence from the others. There were times when each one of us sensed the antipathy which we encountered beyond the boundary lines of our own country. But we never realized how deeply it had taken root and how widely it had spread. We loved our enemies! We loved this French nation for its high development of etiquette, language, and taste; a culture which seemed well adapted to serve as a complement to our own. How much misery France might have been spared had she but understood this unfortunate love of the German people for the "Hereditary Enemy!"

We loved the deep, mystically religious soul of the Russians in their anguished struggles for freedom! How many Germans have looked upon Tolstoy as a new savior!

Above all, though, the German admired the Englishman, in the role of the "royal merchant," the far-seeing colonizer, the master of the seas. Without envy Germany gave England credit for all these qualities. And when during the Boer war voices were raised to warn against the English character, even then to most of us our Anglo-Saxon cousin remained the "Gentleman beyond reproach."

Then there is the great German love for Holland, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries; here we may find the Germanic race less adulterated than in our own country. Scandinavian poets have become our poets and we are as proud of the works of the Swedish artist as we are of those of our people.