Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“ If there were an Imperialist Primer or a Grammar of Land-Grabbing, the first and simplest exercise in the encouragement of the art would be this example of the refusal of the provinces to France. It is an exercise in the encouragement of territorial theft; it is annexation made easy; it is a military model for invasion. But it is, from the standpoint of a democrat and Anti-Imperialist, something yet more than that. It not only smooths the path of invaders, but it quite specially smooths the path of despotic invaders. ”

“ The worst version of the South African War will only make it a mere sample of the sort of claim which the more plutocratic powers will always be ready to push, where there is any sort of cosmopolitan confusion. What the principle would have meant touching Asiatic immigrations into Europe in the past, that alone it will mean touching European immigrations into America in the future. It will mean simply the final superiority of the master of many slaves.
There is only one way to arrest annexation; only one way in which such a stampede of sophistry and spoliation can be stopped. ”

“ It will not only be to the interest of a prince to seize a province by war, but it will also be to his interest to oppress it when he has got it. For, supposing for the sake of argument that there is now a German majority in Alsace, how was that majority attained? Even German citizens are not sufficiently tame to troop into a strange country in sufficient numbers for that. Even German officials are not sufficiently numerous to overbalance a population without assistance. ”

“ But Prussia can always command a type of tame population which will go anywhere to which the route is officially organised. She will never lack colonists equipped with every convenience, except the capacity to colonise. It is, therefore, simply as plain as a pikestaff (a very appropriate figure for the staff of the Teutonic pilgrim) that if we accept a Teutonic transformation in Alsace as settling the matter, we simply hoist a signal to say that such matters can always be settled by annexation, so long as it is annexation by an autocracy. ”

“ Everyone will know that henceforward even successful land-grabbing will not ultimately succeed. No one will steal what he will know that he cannot keep; no one will again commit the crime first and make up the excuses afterwards, if he knows that those excuses will not be heard.
But there is a final and farcical fact which crowns the argument. It is equally obvious that this Pacifist compromise about Alsace not only gives a special advantage to external aggression, but also gives a special advantage to internal misgovernment. ”

“ They will naturally believe that a Germany evacuating Belgium will be a Germany as chastened, sobered and reminded of her own weakness as was the army of Moltke when it marched out of France. But those who do not think that a repetition of 1870 can be regarded merely as a lesson to the Germans, will be equally logical if they draw the opposite deduction. ”

“ The commonsense of the crux would remain what it is; and it is that, in this particular position, it is obviously better policy to set up a bad government than a good one. Make the lives of the old inhabitants intolerable, and they will not remain to resist the new inhabitants; anybody can see that and (by all accounts) the German rulers have seen it very clearly.
To sum up, therefore, these are the three consequences of testing the claims to Alsace by an official counting of heads at the moment. First, it will quite obviously set up a principle which is a permanent provocation to war. ”

“ The best man will always be the aggressor; the best aggressor will be the autocrat; the best autocrat will be the tyrant. Such is the goal, or golden age of republican idealism, towards which we apparently travel.
All this is the plainest rationality and policy, and applies to all the politics of all the peoples; in that sense it does not matter to what particular nation this disastrous policy is applied. ”

“ If she had not so stood, England would never have had time to create an army, and most certainly Russia would never have had time to create a revolution. Now that England is at leisure to elaborate discipline, and Russia at leisure to enjoy liberty, it is pleasantly proposed that they should desert their first line of defence; that they should throw away the broken shield behind which they have done all things.
It is an agreeable proposal that England, having thus been able to increase her own armies, should throw over that historic army of which she at first formed a small part. ”

“ We offer a permanent prize and provocation to conquerors, so long as they are also despots. The military ruler has only to send in one body of his slaves in uniform and then another body of his slaves in mufti; and lands will be perpetually added to the possessions of pure despotism, amid Pacifist cheers for the principle of pure democracy.
To take a working model: suppose the Germans landed in Essex and succeeded in annexing that county. The justification of the act, by the recognised German philosophy of history, would, of course, be the easiest part of the matter ”

“ Now anybody who will look at the modern world with his eyes open will know perfectly well that this sort of expansion and progress is one to which the modern world is especially prone. In every quarter of the globe, especially in South America and Africa, there is a perpetual pressure of colonial ambition which would at any moment take advantage of this principle. ”

“ The Essex country folk are proverbially slow and conservative; and few of the rustics have any close acquaintance with anthropological and ethnological hypotheses. It is probable that an almost ineradicable prejudice, to the effect that they are an English and not a German population, will lead nearly all of them to assert the English character of Essex, and even lead many of them to migrate into Middlesex. A despotic German officialism has then only to send a crowd of official colonists in the track of her official armies ”

“ Large masses of them, having expressed their feelings thus, expressed the same feelings further by leaving the country at great sacrifice, that they might continue to live under the French flag. For the last forty years a continuous stream of them has poured over the frontier: men who deliberately left their native province in order to live in their native land. ”

“ Second, it will provoke quarrels in which a rigid despotism will always have a better chance than a free country. Third, it will actually make a malevolent despotism more probable and practical than a benevolent despotism. ”