Emile Joseph Dillon

“ When I read the smooth-tongued, plausible panegyrics on Germany’s politics, which are served up to us here in England every year, and contrast them with the systematic aggressiveness which everybody with open eyes and ears sees and hears in Berlin, I behold Germany rise before me in the form of a cuttlefish, with many lasso-like arms, ever ready to seize their unsuspecting prey, and also ready, when itself is in danger, to shed an ink-like fluid which blackens the water and hinders effective pursuit. ”

“ The sights and sounds of the universe are the only materials upon which the human intellect can work; and they are all alike empty, shadowy, unreal. They are the creation of the mind itself, the web it weaves from its own gossamer substance; and beyond this are nothing. Space and time, or, as Koheleth expresses it, the universe and eternity, were placed in our consciousness from the very first, and are as deceptive as the mirage of the desert. ”

“ One can readily imagine the painful kind of questions that will arise in the mind of an intelligent ally who realizes for the first time how great are the inventive and organizing talents of the Teuton, how unswerving his resolve, how tenacious he is of purpose, and how unconscious most of us still are of the need of bestirring ourselves to compete with him on terms of equality. The German’s striving is one, but all-embracing. His means are countless, for they are restricted by no limitations. In his search for tools and agents he enters into human nature, but not in its entire compass ”

“ Beef-eating Britons are the incarnation of base hypocrisy and crass self-indulgence, and their Empire, like a hollow tree, still stands only because no storm has yet assailed it. To set youthful, healthy, idealistic Germany in the high places now occupied by those inert masses that once were progressive nations is but to adjust obsolete conditions to the pressing requirements of the present time—to execute the wise decrees of a just God. And in order to bring this task to a satisfactory issue, militarism must reign as the paramount power before culture can ascend the throne. ”

“ But although socialism is likewise spreading fast, I feel inclined to think that in Japan a high grade of instruction and of social development on latter-day lines will be found compatible with that extraordinary cohesiveness to which the race owes the position which it occupies among the communities of the world. The soul of the individual Japanese may be said to float in an atmosphere of collectivity, which, while leaving his intellect intact, sways his sentiments and modifies his character by rendering him impressible to motives of an order which has the weal of the race for its object. ”

“ Existence is a futile beating of the air, a clutching of the wind. The living make way for the unborn, the dead nourish the living; no one possesses ought that was not torn from some other being; strife and hate, evil and pain are the commonplaces of existence; life and death follow each other everlastingly. All striving is want and therefore suffering, until it is satisfied, when it assumes the form of disappointment ”

“ We descant upon the turpitude of the Teuton who from the regions of idealism in which Goethe, Herder and their contemporaries dwelt has sunk into shift, treason and murder, and we proclaim our faith in the ultimate triumph of right, justice and of the democracy in which alone they flourish. But this frame of mind, which moves us to identify ourselves with all that is best in humanity, if cultivated will prove fatal. It accustoms us to dangerous hallucinations. We assume that we are the chosen people, and we neglect the virtues which alone would justify our election. ”

“ In every such surrender to the Great Powers, as in every stern enforcement of his principles on the lesser states, the same practical spirit of the professional politician visibly asserted itself. One can hardly acquit him of having lacked the moral courage to disregard the veto of interested statesmen and governments and to appeal directly to the peoples when the consequence of this attitude would have been the sacrifice of the makeshift of a Covenant which he was ultimately content to accept as a substitute for the complete reinstatement of nations in their rights and dignity. ”

“ France (it was argued) is in the last phase of political decadence. Comfort, luxury, self-indulgence, and the financial means to procure these are the goal of her latter-day strivings. She has no faith, no moral or religious ideals, no lofty aspirations, no generous ambitions. Her enthusiasms are burnt out, her thirst for military glory is stilled by historic memories. She possesses territory enough to absorb whatever energies she may still have left. Contented to live as she now is, her one desire is to be undisturbed. ”

“ All the ills and sorrows of life, merited and unmerited alike, Job is prepared for. They are the commonplaces of human existence and as inseparable from it as shadow from light. But what he cannot endure is the thought that his good name, the sole comfort left him in his misery, shall be sacrificed to a theological theory which runs counter to every fact of public history and private experience. This is an injustice which seems to strike at the root of all morality, and he passionately attacks all who uphold it, even though God Himself be of the number. ”

“ Germany is wholly alive; but she is alive for evil. We whose purpose is good, whose cause is justice and whose triumph is indispensable if honest industry and human right are not to disappear from mankind, are as yet not fully alive to the immensity and necessity of our task. We must awaken, or be awakened, ere it be too late.
Germany is living in the present and in the future. It is a present of determined effort, of unlimited sacrifice, of colossal hope. The future for which she strives and suffers is a [x] future incompatible with those ideals which our race cherishes and reveres. ”

“ Has the Conference or the League the right or power to dictate to them the persons or the people with whom alone they may have dealings? Can it narrow the field of Russia's political activities? Some people flatter themselves that it can. In this case the League of Nations must transform itself into an alliance for the suppression of the German race.
Burning indignation and moral reprobation were the sentiments aroused among the high-minded Allies by the infamous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. For that mockery of a peace, even coming from an enemy, transcended the bounds of human vengeance. ”

“ In the name of freedom England, with might and with the most recklessly egotistic policy, has founded her mighty Colonial Empire, in the name of freedom she has destroyed for a century the independence of the Boer Republics, in the name of freedom she now treats Egypt as an English colony and thereby violates international treaties and solemn promises, in the name of freedom one after another of the Malay States is losing its independence for England’s benefit, in the name of freedom she tries, by cutting German cables, to prevent the truth being spread in the world. ”

“ Truth, however bitter, must take the place of fancy. Ideas and institutions incongruous with the new social and political conditions must be displaced. The nation’s aims and policy should be stated boldly and clearly, and adequate machinery set up to achieve them. In a word, system will have to be substituted for confusion, method for haphazard. Destitute of a great or strong man, it behoves us to imitate our enemy and create a vast organization with branches all over the empire. But the influence of the government ever since the outbreak of the war has militated against all those reforms. ”

“ For individuality in the human race is identical with character, and as individuality is the work of our own free will exercised outside the realm of time and space, we are responsible for it, and conscious of the responsibility, although not of the manner in which it was incurred.
Our acts, therefore, and they only, show us what we really are; our sufferings what we deserve. The former are the necessary outcome of our character which external circumstances, in the guise of motives, call into play; just as gravitation is acted upon when we shake an apple off the tree. ”

“ Wilson, will follow. You have the Empire behind you. Voice its aspirations. They coincide with those of the English-speaking peoples of the world. Mr. Wilson has lost his elections, therefore he does not stand for as much as you imagine. You have won your elections, so you are the spokesman of a vast community and the champion of a noble cause. You can knead the Conference at your will. Assert your will. But even if you decide to act in harmony with the United States, that does not mean subordinating British interests to the President's views, which are not those of the majority of his people. ”

“ It is the one rule of right living. Whatever is done for Germany or for the German army abroad or at home, be it a misdemeanour or a crime in the eyes of other peoples, is well done and meritorious. A young midshipman, going home at night in a state of semi-intoxication, slays a civilian because he imagines—and, as it turns out, mistakenly imagines—that he has been slighted, and feels bound in duty to vindicate the honour of the Kaiser’s navy. ”

“ The blind striving to live, the will that craves existence at all costs, is absolutely the same in both, as complete in the former as in the latter, and the perpetuity of the race is, so to say, but the symbol of the indestructibility of the individual—i.e., of will.
Now this all-important fact is exemplified quite as clearly by the phenomenon of generation as by the process of decay and death. In both we behold the opposition between the appearance and the essence of the being, between the world as it exists in our intellect as representation, and the world as it really is, as will. ”

“ But as the action and reaction of alliances may thwart our efforts and force us into war against each other, we hereby undertake that that war shall be but a simulacrum of the struggle that we are at present waging against all our other adversaries. We shall respect each other’s property religiously, for we shall both stand in need of each other when the exhausting struggle is ended and the wounds it inflicted have to be dressed and healed. We Germans have invested thousands of millions of francs in Italy, the one foreign country for which we feel genuine affection. ”

“ To sum up, the broad maxim underlying Japan's policy as defined by her own representatives is that in the resettlement of the world the principle adopted, whether the old or the new, shall be applied fairly and impartially at least to all the Great Powers.
Every world conflict has marked the close of one epoch and the opening of another. Into the melting-pot on the fire kindled by the war many momentous problems have been flung, any one of which would have sufficed to bring about a new political, economic, and social constellation. ”

“ Was France fully alive to the issues which Russia’s intervention would raise? Where was the love of peace so lately and so loudly professed by the Tsar and M. Poincaré?
I had not the faintest doubt as to how Russia111 would behave under the provocation to which she was being subjected by the Teutonic States. There are some considerations of an altruistic nature which nations, like individuals, set above their own vital interests—considerations that engage all that is deepest and noblest in their feelings, that fire their imagination and call forth all the energies of their will. ”

“ This is why I call them Sceptics.
"Job" and "Koheleth" emphatically deny that there is any proof to be found of the so-called moral order in the universe, and they unhesitatingly declare that existence is an evil. They would have us therefore exchange our hopes for insight, and warn us that even this is very circumscribed at best. For not only is happiness a mockery, but knowledge is a will-o'-the-wisp. Mankind resembles the bricklayer and the hodman who help to raise an imposing edifice without any knowledge of the general plan. And yet the structure is the outcome of their labour. ”

“ Those German colonists abroad are the eyes and arms and tongues of the monster organism of which the brain-centre is Berlin. They endeavoured to stir up dissension between class and class in Russia, France, Britain, Belgium, to plant suspicion in the breast of Bulgaria and Roumania, to create a prussophile atmosphere in Greece, Switzerland and Sweden, and to bring pressure to bear on the Government of the United States in the hope of fomenting discord between the American and British peoples. ”

“ But if liberty of defense be one of the rights of two or three Powers, by what law is it confined to them and denied to the others? Why should the other communities be constrained to remain open to attack? Surely they, too, deserve to live and thrive, and make the most of their opportunities. Now if in lieu of a misnamed League of Nations we had an Anglo-Saxon board for the better government of the world, these unequal weights and measures would be intelligible on the principle that special obligations and responsibilities warrant exceptional rights. ”

“ After such a guarantee and all the proofs which Russia had given of her love of peace, Germany had no right to doubt our declaration that we would accept with joy any peaceful issue compatible with the dignity and independence of Servia. Any other course, while completely incompatible with our own dignity, would have shaken the European equilibrium and assured the hegemony of Germany. The European, even world-wide, character of the conflict is infinitely more important than the pretext on which it has been commenced. ”

“ In truth, Agur gives utterance to a natural sentiment of awe and wonder at the greatest and darkest of all mysteries whose roots lie buried in the depths of the two worlds we conceive of. What could be more awe-inspiring than the instantaneous metamorphosis of pure immaterial will into concrete flesh and blood, throbbing with life hastening to decay, the incarnation in the sphere of appearances of an act of the one being which is not an appearance only, but the denizen of the world of reality? Will is primary, real, enduring; intellect secondary, accidental, fleeting ”

“ The social ordering of Great Britain must be not merely modified but remodelled and rebuilt from the groundwork to the coping-stone. One of the first needs of the nation is the education, physical and spiritual, of the new generation. Patriotic sentiment must be engrafted on the receptive soul of the child, and its range of sympathy widened and deepened. The duty of self-abnegation for the welfare of the community must be inculcated, together with new conceptions of personal dignity and worth. ”

“ Whatever the tests one applies to the work of the Conference—ethical, social, or political—they reveal it as a factor eminently calculated to sap high interests, to weaken the moral nerve of the present generation, to fan the flames of national and racial hatred, to dig an abyss between the classes and the masses, and to throw open the sluice-gates to the inrush of the waves of anarchist internationalities. ”

“ Germany’s necessity, of which her own Kaiser, statesmen, diplomatists, and generals are the best judges, knows no law. Every treaty, every obligation, every duty has to vanish before it: the Treaty of Bucharest, establishing equilibrium in the Balkans, as well as the Treaty of 1839, safeguarding the neutrality of Belgium. Hence nobody conversant with the nature, growth, and spread of this new militant race-worship was in the least surprised at the Chancellor’s contempt for the scrap of paper and for the simple-minded statesmen who proclaimed its binding force. ”

“ Individual existence with its tantalising mirage of pleasures being the root of all evil, the first step towards finding a remedy is to recognise this truth, to obtain insight into the heart of things athwart the veil of Maya or delusion. The conviction that all beings are not merely brothers but one and the same essence, is the death of egotistic desire, of the pernicious distinction between me and thee, and the birth of pity, love and sympathy for all men. ”

“ Thus between the old order of things and the new yawns an abyss which has to be crossed before we can worst our enemies even in the military campaign which is but one phase of the world-struggle. Our resources for the purpose of bridging it are ample, but our first difficulty is the circumstance that we are chained to the old system and are still unwilling to burst the bonds that hold us. And until efficacious means of effecting this are adopted the end must remain unattainable. Victory will not descend on our camp like a manna from on high. ”

“ A decade is but a twinkling in the history of a nation. Within a few years Russia may once more be united. The army that will have achieved this feat will constitute a formidable weapon in the hands of the state that wields it. As everything, even military strength, is relative, and as the armies of the rest of Europe will not be impatient to fight in the East, and will therefore count for considerably less than their numbers, there will be no real danger of an invasion. ”

“ This superficial observer is bereft of a sense for the soul-manifestations of a people, for the multitudinous energies and enthusiasms stored up in its inner recesses, for those hidden sources of strength which the wanton violation of truth and justice set free, and which steel a nation to the wrenches of real life and nerve it for a titanic struggle for the right. ”

“ For he has unshaken faith in eternal justice as something independent even of the deity. Its manifestations may be imperceptible and incomprehensible to us, but it governs the universe all the same, and faith in this fact was his lodestar when sun and moon had gone out and the aimless tornado raged around and ghastly horrors issued from the womb of Night. The wicked may prosper and the just man die on a dunghill, scorned by all and seemingly forsaken by God Himself, but it is none the less true that sin and suffering, virtue and reward are fruits of the same tree, one and indivisible. ”

“ Great Britain has achieved wonders in the financial sphere during this war, as the Allies and certain neutrals can testify. Our budgets are monuments of the nation’s spirit of self-sacrifice. But we have not come scathless out of the ordeal. And besides our inevitable losses we are suffering from criminal waste. No other country is so thriftless as ours. In this respect we are a byword among the peoples of the world. ”

“ And above all things else I could have inquired how it came to pass that the architect-in-chief of the society of nations which is to bestow a stable peace on mankind should invoke the argument of force, of militarism, against the pacific peoples who voluntarily made the supreme sacrifice for the cause of humanity and now only ask for a hearing. Twelve million fighting-men is an argument to be employed against the Teutons, not against the peace-loving, law-abiding peoples of Europe. ”

“ One is puzzled and amused by the solemn statement that if Germany has ridden rough shod over the rights of Belgium, she has committed no such breach of law against Holland, Denmark, and other small states. “We have firmly respected the neutrality of Holland and Switzerland.” It is as though an assassin should say: “True, I killed Brown, whose money I needed sorely. But at least give me credit for not having murdered Jones and Smith, who possess nothing that I could carry away at present, and whose goodwill was essential to the success of my stroke”! ”

“ On the contrary, Jahveh confirms the terrible facts alleged by His servant; He admits that pleasure and pain are not the meed of deeds done upon earth, and that the explanation we seek, the light we so wistfully long for, will never come; for human existence is not a dark spot in an ocean of dazzling splendour, but a will'-o'-the-wisp that merely intensifies the murkiness of everlasting Night. ”