Various

“ Our power shall create new law in Europe. Germany strikes. If it conquers new realms for its genius, the priesthood of all the gods will sing songs of praise to the good war.
Only he who is specially trained for a race of troops may go along into the field. Only the man versed in statecraft should be allowed to participate in the talk about the results of war. Not he who has out yonder proved an unworthy diplomat, nor the dilettante loafer sprayed with the perfume of volatile emotions. Manhood liability to military service requires manhood suffrage? ”

“ Every foreign office has its ugly, evil elements, and probably every foreign office dreads those elements. There are certainly Russian fools who dream about India, German fools who dream about Canada and South America, British fools who dream about Africa and the East; aggressionists in the blood, people who can no more let nations live in peace than kleptomaniacs can keep their hands in their own pockets. ”

“ On the other hand, Great Britain and France must already realize that they cannot drive the German armies out of France and Belgium without a sacrifice of blood and treasure from which the stoutest hearts may well shrink.
Has not the war already demonstrated that jealous and hostile coalitions armed to the teeth will surely bring on Europe not peace and advancing civilization, but savage war and an arrest of civilization? Has it not already proved that Europe needs one comprehensive union or federation competent to procure and keep for Europe peace through justice? ”

“ If war can change its character as much as it has done it can change it altogether; if peace can be kept indefinitely in India or North America, it can be kept throughout the world. It is not I who dream, but Mr. George and his like who are not yet fully awake, and it is their somnolence that I dread more than anything else when I think of the great task of settlement before the world. ”

“ It is not being suggested that the making of arms should cease in the world, but only that in every country it should become a State monopoly and so completely under Government control. If the State can monopolize the manufacture and sale of spirits, as Russia has done, if it can, after the manner of Great Britain, control the making and sale of such a small, elusive substance as saccharin, it is ridiculous to suppose that it cannot keep itself fully informed of the existence of such elaborated machinery as is needed to make a modern rifle barrel. ”

“ From then until the end of the verse, when her voice again rang out over the renewed efforts of the orchestra, one seemed to live through all the glorious history of France. At the very end, when Chenal drew a short jeweled sword from the folds of her gown and stood, silent and superb, with the folds of the flag draped about her, while the curtain rang slowly down, she seemed to typify both Empire and Republic throughout all time. All the best of the past seemed concentrated there as that glorious woman, with head raised high, looked into the future. ”

“ That the country and its inhabitants have forfeited all claims to trust? That no one, in future, should make a bargain with a German, knowing that he is a dishonorable and dishonored man?... Germany has made many blunders—an almost inconceivable number of blunders; but this blundering crime is surely the culminating point of blunder. Did any nation ever before deliberately throw away its political, commercial, financial, and social credit to no purpose? ”

“ This nation, however, strengthened by 15,000,000 Germans in Austria, would be the greatest bearers of culture in the wide world—the nation with the best technical equipment of all others, glowing with ambition, with military training second to none, and gifted with an immense rate of increase as regards population. This nation would be forced to lay down her arms, lying as it does between the overbearing gigantic realm in the east and the warlike French to the west. The idea is incomprehensible. The universe would behold a competition in armaments such as it had never seen. ”

“ Spain and the Netherlands, Rome and Hapsburg, France and England, possessed and settled and ruled great stretches of the most fruitful soil. Now strikes the hour for Germany's rising power. The terms of a peace treaty that does not insure this would leave the great effort unrewarded. Even if it brought dozens of shining billions into the National Treasury, the fate of Europe would be dependent upon the United States of America.
We are waging war for ourselves alone; and still we are convinced that all who desire the good would soon be able to rejoice in the result. ”

“ Thus Britain has acted on the assumption that if one power dominated the Continent, British independence, more truly perhaps British predominance in the world would be threatened.
Now, how has a society of individuals—the community within the frontiers of a nation—met this difficulty which now confronts the society of nations, the difficulty that is of the danger of the power of an individual or a group? They have met it by determining that no individual or group shall exercise physical power or predominance over others; that the community alone shall be predominant. ”

“ The terrible war can not and must not end otherwise than victoriously for us and our allies. We will fight till our foes submit to the conditions and demands which the victors dictate to them. We are weary of the incessant brandishing of the sword, the menaces to Slavdom, and the obstacles to its natural growth. We will fight till the end, till we win a lasting peace worthy of the great sacrifices we have offered to our fatherland. In the name of our electorate, we here declare, "So wishes all Russia." ”

“ And what the spirit created once again serves the spirit. It shall not lay waste, nor banish us free men into slavery, but rather it shall call forth to the light of heaven a new, richer soul of life out of the ruins of a storm-tossed civilization. It shall, it must, it will conquer new provinces for the majesty of the noble German spirit (Deutschheit) that never will grow chill and numb, as the Roman did. Otherwise—and even though unnumbered billions flowed into the Rhine—the expense of this war would be shamefully wasted.
Our army did not set out to conquer Belgian territory. ”

“ The democracy of America would have done something which the despots and the conquerors of all time, from Alexander and Caesar to Napoleon and the Kaiser, have found to be impossible. Dangerous as I believe national vanity to be, America would, I think, find in the pride of this achievement—this American leadership of the human race—a glory that would not be vain, a world victory which the world would welcome. ”

“ We love our country. For centuries we have fought to maintain our individual civilization against the large neighbors who surround us. We try to live up to our good reputation as a home for all those who suffer. The people who are made homeless by Germany come to us and we try to feed them on such grain as the British Government allows to pass through the Channel. We try to continue in our duty toward all our neighbors, even when they declare the entire North Sea (in which we also have a certain interest) as a place of battle and blow up our ships with their mines. ”

“ And there has been much in America, much said and much done, since the war broke out that has surprised the world. I may confess for myself, and I believe that I shall speak for many other Europeans in this matter, that what we feared most in the United States was levity. We expected mere excitement, violent fluctuations of opinion, a confused irresponsibility, and possibly mischievous and disastrous interventions. It is no good hiding an open secret. We judged America by the peace headline. It is time we began to offer our apologies to America and democracy. ”

“ We are waging this war not in order to punish those who have sinned, nor in order to free enslaved peoples and thereafter to comfort ourselves with the unselfish and useless consciousness of our own righteousness. We wage it from the lofty point of view and with the conviction that Germany, as a result of her achievements and in proportion to them, is justified in asking, and must obtain, wider room on earth for development and for working out the possibilities that are in her. ”

“ Trade and credit are holding their breath. How long can they do it? Germany may have food enough; but how long can the stoppage of industry go on?
Moreover, attention must be called to one momentous thing. We are seeing today, under military law, the greatest experiment in socialism ever witnessed. All wealth, income, industry, capital, and labor are in the direct control and use of a military State. Food, everything, may be taken and distributed in common. I think never before in history have we had such a gigantic, full-fledged illustration of socialism in actual operation. ”

“ As soon as this proposition is accepted by all the combatants, this war, and perhaps all war between civilized nations, will cease. It is obvious that in the interest of mankind the war ought not to cease until Germany is convinced that her ambition for empire in Europe and the world cannot be gratified. Deutschland über alles can survive as a shout of patriotic enthusiasm; but as a maxim of international policy it is dead already, and should be buried out of the sight and memory of men. ”

“ At the bottom of this moral hesitation is an unconscious realization of the extent of each nation's dependence upon the world partnership. It is not a fear of physical chastisement; any nation will go to war against desperate odds if a foreign nation talks of chastising it. It is not that consideration which operates, as a thousand examples in history prove to us. There are forces outside military power more visible and ponderable than these.
There exists, of course, already a world State which has no formal recognition in our paper constitutions at all, and no sanction in physical force. ”

“ Those who are thoroughly convinced of the benefits of free trade should welcome this suggestion, unless, indeed, they think that such a blessing is not deserved by Germany. On the other hand, they may comfort themselves with the certain knowledge that no possible punishment inflicted on the Germans could possibly be more galling and repulsive to them. Doubtless, too, it would suit the books of our allies very well, who could impose on German goods any duty they thought fit, and deposit their surplus and inferior goods in Germany at a price which would defy competition. ”

“ Only, never again a withered Reichsland! (imperial territory.) From Calais to Antwerp, Flanders, Limburg, Brabant, to behind the line of the Meuse forts, Prussian! (German Princes no longer haggle, German tribes no longer envy one another;) the Southern triangle with Alsace and Lorraine—and Luxemburg, too, if it desires—is to be an independent federated State, intrusted to a Catholic noble house. Then Germany would know for what it shed its blood. ”

“ To read Froude upon Ireland or Carlyle upon the Franco-German War is to savor this hate-dripping temperament in its perfection.
Much of this literary bellicosity is pathological. Men overmuch in studies and universities get ill in their livers and sluggish in their circulations; they suffer from shyness, from a persuasion of excessive and neglected merit, old maid's melancholy, and a detestation of all the levities of life. And their suffering finds its vent in ferocious thoughts. ”

“ Because our statemen failed to discover and foil shrewd plans of deception is no reason why we may hoist the flag of most pious morality. Not as weak-willed blunderers have we undertaken the fearful risk of this war. We wanted it. Because we had to wish it and could wish it. May the Teuton devil throttle those whiners whose pleas for excuses make us ludicrous in these hours of lofty experience. We do not stand, and shall not place ourselves, before the court of Europe. ”

“ The situation today is not that of a tiny power not yet solidified, remote from the main currents of the world's life, out-matched in resources by any one of the greater powers of Europe. America is no longer so remote as to have little practical concern with Europe. Its contacts with Europe are instantaneous, daily, intimate, innumerable—so much so indeed that our own civilization will be intimately affected and modified by certain changes which threaten in the older world. ”

“ And so there is no other way of safeguarding our economic independence against England and Russia than by an economic alliance with the States that are our allies in this war, or at least that do not make common cause with our enemies. Aside from the fact, which I shall not discuss here, that only such an alliance can insure a firm position for us on the Atlantic Ocean, which in the next decades is bound to be the area of competition for the world powers.
Politics are not a matter of emotion, but of calm, intelligent deliberation. Let us leave emotional politics to our enemies. ”

“ You are in such perfect sympathy with your people that you will always be their symbol. Their courage, their tenacity, their stifled grief, their pride, their future greatness, their immortality all live in you. Our hearts are yours to their very depths. Being yourself, you are all of us. And this you will remain.
Later on, when you return to your recaptured and glorious Belgium, you will only have to say the word, Sire, and all disputes will lose their bitterness and all antagonisms fade away. After being our strength and defender, you will become our peacemaker and reconciler. ”

“ Cease, you publicists, your wordy war against hostile brothers in the profession, whose superiority you cannot scold away, and who merely smile while they pick up, out of your laboriously stirred porridge slowly warmed over a flame of borrowed alcohol, the crumbs on which their "selfishness" is to choke! That national selfishness does not seem a duty to you, but a sin, is something you must conceal from foreign eyes. ”

“ The ultimate lethal weapon for every form of stupidity is ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war. ”

“ Then we discover suddenly—as the art and social development, the industry and pleasant living, the cultivation of the civil enterprise of England, France, Germany, and Russia have discovered—that everything must be pushed aside when the war thinkers have decided upon their game. And until we of the pacific majority contrive some satisfactory organization to watch the war-makers we shall never end war, any more than a country can end crime and robbery without a police. ”

“ This suggestion is not to be regarded as in any sense a proposal made by this Government, for it of course fully recognizes that it is not its privilege to propose terms of agreement between Great Britain and Germany, even though the matter be one in which it and the people of the United States are directly and deeply interested. It is merely venturing to take the liberty, which it hopes may be accorded a sincere friend desirous of embarrassing neither nation involved, and of serving, if it may, the common interests of humanity. ”

“ For if America really is independent of the rest of the world, little concerned with what goes on therein, if she is in a position to build a sort of Chinese wall about herself, and, secure in her own strength, to develop a civilization and future of her own, still more if the weakness and disintegration of foreign nations, however unfortunate for them, is for America an opportunity of expanding trade and opportunities, why then, of course, it would be the height of folly for the United States to incur all the risks and uncertainties of an adventure into the sea of foreign politics. ”

“ Great is the magic of a word! He was quite oblivious to the fact that war has changed completely in its character half a dozen times in half a dozen centuries; that the war we fought in South Africa and the present war and the wars of mediaeval Italy and the wars of the Red Indians have about as much in common as a cat and a man and a pair of scissors and a motor car—namely, that they may all be the means of death. ”