Emile Joseph Dillon

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Co-ordination of effort, the combination of politics with economics, and unity of direction were among Germany’s methods in the contest, and she adopted them in the grounded belief that commerce and industry lie at the nethermost roots of the vast political movements of the new era.
This is a century of co-operation, of joint efforts for common interests, of union in trade, industry, labour, politics and war. To stand aloof is to be isolated, and isolation means helplessness against danger. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Great Britain is the classic land of strikes. Strikers are sacred among us. Industrial compulsion is rank heresy.
That is one of our difficulties, and by no means the least formidable. The nation, despite the superb example of patriotic heroism given by all classes, parties, provinces and colonies of the Empire, is still deficient in cohesiveness. No fire of enthusiasm has yet burned fiercely enough among all sections of the Empire and all members of the race to fuse them in such a compact unified organism as we behold in the Teuton’s Fatherland. ”

“ The shifting of landmarks, political and social, is going steadily if stealthily forward; and the nation waking up one day will note with amazement the vast distance it has imperceptibly traversed. If only we could realize at present how rapidly and irrevocably we are drifting away from our old-world moorings, we should feel in a more congenial mood for adjusting ourselves to the new and unpopular requirements of the era now dawning. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And to negotiate peace abroad and give an impulse to politics at home, with that comforting prospect in mind, is to lead the nation into a Serbonian bog whence no escape is possible. The leaders of Great Britain are so permeated with the duties, the rights, the hopes and the strivings of parliamentary parties, that they involuntarily think in terms of home politics and have no chord in their being responsive to the emotions that sway the German soul and nerve the German arm. ”

“ By Great Britain’s declaration of war, for which Germany was unprepared until the last days of July, nearly all these threads were snapped asunder, and the industrial and economic life of the Empire had to be swiftly readjusted to the new conditions. And here it was that the nation rose as one man to the unparalleled occasion, faced the tremendous ordeal, and, contrary to the expectations of its adversaries—ever prone to judge others by themselves—has continued not merely to exist, but to extend its conquests ever since. ”

“ It is not to be wondered at that countries like Italy and Russia, poor in capital and industry, fell an easy prey to the ruthless German invader, who, with the help of British, French, and even Italian and Russian savings, suffocated the nascent industries of the respective nations, killed foreign competition, earned large profits, obtained control of the country’s resources and an intimate knowledge of the political secrets of their respective Governments. ”

“ For all these firms and enterprises and individuals from the Fatherland scattered over the length and breadth of the Tsardom were welded together in one vast organism by far-seeing politicians who canalized every important current of the nation’s life and imparted to it the direction which German interests required. No enterprise was too vast, no detail too trivial, for the attention of these moulders of Germany’s destinies. ”

“ It is equally clear, to those who have eyes to see, that the present clash of nations, despite its appalling effects on civilization, is but an acuter phase of that campaign, a series of incidents in a mighty struggle which neither began in July 1914 nor will end with the close of hostilities, but will rage on for years to come in less sanguinary but more decisive forms. For the future peace—whatever its terms—which will silence the cannon’s boom, will but transfer the war theatre without ending the war. The methods will be changed from military to economic. ”

“ It has its tentacles everywhere, high up and low down, in Italy and abroad, in peace time and in war time, when our native land is elated with good fortune and when it is cast down with bad. Its hand lies heavy upon everything and everybody. It is the arbitress in the choice of good and evil and is under no obligation to render an account of its doings to any one.... In war time we are certain to feel greatly hampered by the meshes of such a firmly woven net. ”

“ At any rate, it is no secret that from the latter half of the year 1915 Germany and Austria were far ahead of Great Britain, France, Russia, the United States and Japan combined in the amount of munitions they turned out every week. And they are still ahead of them to-day. This fact, which can be verified, has an ominous ring. What it connotes is that our enemies have no strikes, no conscientious objectors, no fiddling with obligatory service, industrial or military. Each man is at his country’s beck and call. Germany is free from strikers, slackers and such-like anti-social types. ”

“ One belligerent may regard the campaign as a temporary calamity to be endured until it can be conveniently got rid of, while another may gird his loins and go forth to battle exultant like the fanaticized warriors of Cromwell. The former will contemplate the struggle and regulate the conduct of it in the light of immediate expediency, while the latter will treat the war as a life-task and boldly throw the weight of everything he has, and is, and hopes for into the blows he deals his adversary. Now in this struggle the Teuton is the fanaticized warrior. ”

“ The British and their allies are being overcome less by German skill and cleverness than by their own sluggishness, narrowness of outlook and love of ease. As the German professor, whose utterances I have already quoted, tersely put it: “My confidence is founded above all else on our enemies’ incapacity for organization.” In truth, it is not inborn incapacity to which we owe our unquestioned inferiority, but to the atrophy of will-power which is one of the consequences of years of egotism, overweening confidence, self-indulgence and the loss of an inspiring social faith. ”

“ I tremble at the thought that our own civilized and chivalrous people may at any moment be confronted with this lava flood of savagery and destructiveness. Now, if ever, the opportune moment has come for all civilized nations to join in protest, stiffened with a unanimous threat, against the continuance of such crimes against the human race. Europe ought surely to have the line drawn at the poisoning of wells, the persecution of prisoners, and the massacre of women and children. ”

“ Our aims are impoverished, our creative energies are clogged by prejudice, our political vision is narrowed by party goals, and the forces inherent in the nation which should be employed in readjusting its life to the new conditions are being frittered away in abortive efforts to neutralize dissolvent ideas that are sapping only those organs of our social and political system which are already vicious or decayed. The waste of the empire’s resources has no parallel in history. ”

“ And the living force of Germany requires us to rise to the very fulness of our powers; for as the champions of truth and right we must prove ourselves physically and morally stronger than the champions of soulless might. ”

“ Patriotism has never been systematically inculcated among us as in Germany, France and Russia. Parochial or at most party interests still mark the loftiest heights to which certain sections of the population can soar above the dead level of individual egotism. In Germany and Austria strikes during war are unthinkable. Every railway official, every tram-conductor, every artisan there is a soldier subject to military discipline and is expected to give the fullest measure of his productive powers to the nation. ”

“ Unfortunately the extraordinary enlargement of interest which marks the latter-day political conceptions, and inspires the fateful action of Germany’s acknowledged leaders, breeds in the allied peoples not so much a stern resolve to tame that revolutionary nation at all costs, as a sentimental longing for the return of the idyllic past, and an illusive hope that by dint of mild Christian charity it may yet be brought back. ”

“ The hopes and dreams of the leaders of the nation have been communicated to the individual citizen, who, having lived for them, is ready to die for them. Our people, on the other hand, have never enjoyed that education in patriotism which is bestowed on every Teuton, and they are wanting in the strength of imagination, the spirit of cohesion and the energizing social faith which might have made up for the deficiency.
Then, again, over against the Allies’ inexhaustible resources we must put the marvellous capacity for organization which intensifies those of our enemy. ”

“ We feed upon the hope that in a few brief years the British nation will have got safely back to its old beaten grooves, and not only business and sport but everything else will go on as usual. Yet all the salient facts which force themselves on our attention to-day, all the decisive events of the past thirty years are cogent proofs of the unbroken sequence of a trial of strength which the future historian and the present statesman, if there be one, must characterize as a life-and-death struggle between the champions of the new Teuton politico-social ordering and the partisans of the old. ”

“ Shortage of labour is pleaded as the reason why effective measures have not been adopted to fill the gaps made by the enemy submarines. And labour is inadequate because the Government eschewes industrial as well as military compulsion. It possesses the power, but shrinks from wielding it. To my thinking, this is one of the symptoms of that madness with which the gods strike a nation before destroying it. ”

“ And co-operation means organization. Organization, then, is the Alpha and Omega of the new era. That is the mysterious radium which has enabled a single race to assail and hold its own against a group of powers whose territory and population are many times greater than its own. That race has demonstrated the quasi-omnipotence of organized labour, and has thereby itself become almost omnipotent. On the success or failure of its adversaries to create a like force and rise to the same height depends the future of Europe and the British Empire. ”

“ The present stands by itself with a history that goes no further back than the month of July 1914, and will convulsively come to an end with the truce that ushers in the future treaty of peace. For that diplomatic instrument will put an end to the struggle and inaugurate an era of international tranquillity. Such is the theory on which their entire policy is based.
We must fight on now to a finish, but the upshot is sure to be a finish. ”

“ The old-world social conceptions still prevalent in Great Britain afford no standard by which to gauge the significance of the crisis through which Europe is passing, nor do they provide efficacious means of satisfying the pressing needs which it has created. Yet the nation’s guides perceive nothing to change in those conceptions; on the contrary, they uphold them zealously. No event has occurred in modern times of greater concern to Europe than the unleashing of disruptive forces which threaten when the war is over to break up the politico-social fabric. ”