Anonymous

“ They must be ready to lay the foundations of Europe anew in freedom and justice to all peoples, before they can hope to build any enduring structure of Public Right. And Germany must speak the word “restitution,” before we pay any heed to her exposition of the new internationalism. It is strange to see how some who call themselves “Liberals” are prepared to accept Count Czernin as a friend and to forget the historic task of the Western World in seeing justice done to the little nations rightly struggling to be free. ”

“ A war on two fronts was always a gamble for Germany, for in it the objectives could not be limited solely by the will of the German High Command: but a war on three fronts—the third being the naval front to Great Britain, which bears the increasing pressure of the blockade and is therefore, in the long run, the most vulnerable—is not a gamble, it is the sure road to German defeat. ”

“ Having utterly forsaken the sound Bismarckian maxim that he who pursues Realpolitik must know clearly his objects and limit them strictly to what is possible, the German Government is now at a loss which way to turn. The mistakes of the political strategy of the past twenty years are now coming home to roost beside the colossal blunders of military strategy of the last three years, and there is no man in Germany big enough to find a safe way out of the threatening danger. ”

“ The motive which prompts every manœuvre in Berlin and Vienna is the desire to escape the doom which now hangs over the Central Empires in the last stage of the war. Through every argument in the German Press and every official speech in the Reichstag, there runs a thread woven of the two strands of anxiety and cunning: anxiety for the future which daily grows darker, and cunning fruitlessly exercised on the task of casting dissension into the ranks of the enemy. ”

“ There are some who believe that the modern British supporters of national rights in Eastern Europe are merely diverting themselves with exotic toys, and that the question of nationality has received unmerited importance. ”

“ Despite the transparency of German motive we cannot afford to be taken off our guard. It would be unnecessary to lay emphasis on this truism were it not that the strategy of the new German “peace offensive” is designed to create the impression in Western minds that the enemy is prepared to subscribe to the principles laid down by Entente statesmen. Two sentences from the diary of “Wayfarer” in the Nation show that the process is already at work. “Czernin,” says “Wayfarer,” “has accepted the Liberal solution of the war in language which European Liberalism can recognise as its own. ”