Western Allies

“ Let us not forget, either, in our farewell compliments, and our wishes for a safe return, those of our Allies who have been represented here by the Missions—Americans, Italians, and Belgians. It is more than desirable, it is necessary, that the great union of the West should outlast the war. ”

“ It is France, it is liberty, it is the right to live as we wish for which we fight, against the oppression of a people who look upon might as right, and who, if they could, would deprive France and Britain and all the Allies of their liberty. So, murder! Yes, my comrade, but, as you observe, necessary. If the Kaiser, seeking for some great event, casts his hosts of men at us, our duty is plain; not an inch of ground of the sacred soil of France must be rendered up unless absolutely necessary; while the enemy, if they advance, must advance over the corpses of their comrades. ”

“ We have enforced peace in the East and are strong enough to do it in the West, notwithstanding the Americans; but we must be strong and united; that is what the enemy is fighting against with these leaflets and rumours. He wishes to deprive us of faith and confidence, will and force.
Why is the enemy continually seeking new allies in the struggle against us? Why does he try to press nations still neutral into the struggle against us? Because in strength we are his equals.
Why does he incite black and other coloured men against German soldiers? Because his will is to destroy us. ”

“ Though they would have to go warily, and would find it essential to remain at peace with the nations whose commerce they thus hampered and in some sense controlled, the Allies in the West could in some measure, greater or less, embarrass the enemy in these matters. ”

“ Why should you, chiefly a Continental and Asiatic power, whose principal interest lies, according to us Germans, in the Far East, why should you fight for British predominance on the seas?"
Well, ladies and gentlemen, what is the best means to parry and to refute such arguments, based chiefly on the idea of the incongruity of interest between the allies? ”

“ Moreover, it has been possible for German writers to misrepresent our war aims as dictated by Imperialistic ambitions, similar in kind to those by which they are themselves actuated, and involving 'annexations and indemnities,' such as have in the past been too often the result of victory in war. I take it that the real object of the Allies is, after defeating Germany, to establish such a world peace as shall, within the limits of human foresight, preclude another conflagration. ”

“ The gods of Egypt were blended with the long renown of the Nile-land, with every Egyptian custom, with the beginning and the end of life. Not less had the gods of Syria and Western Asia occupied their respective lands. These deities struck their root into the home of man, into the union of the sexes, into the loves of parent and child, of brother and sister. ”

“ The protection of the eastern emperor, Leo I., helped them in this resistance to Ricimer. The national party in Rome itself called on the Greek emperor for support. The utter dissolution of the western empire, when German tribes, Burgundians, Franks, Visigoths, and Vandals, had taken permanent possession of its provinces outside of Italy, while the violated dignity of Rome sank daily into greater impotence, now made Byzantium come forth as the true head of the empire. ”

“ And so, with their backs to the wall, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Turkey and Bulgaria faced Servia, Russia, France, Belgium, Great Britain, Montenegro, Japan, Italy, Portugal, Rumania, the United States, Cuba, Brazil, Greece, Siam, China and little Liberia, while Guatemala, Panama, Haiti, Uruguay and Bolivia stood by in a position of neutrality, but for the most part indicating a willingness to help the Allies. ”

“ But after negotiations shall have failed; after a powerful, ambitious nation shall have taken possession of the key of their Western country and fortified it; after the garrisons are filled by the veterans who have conquered the East: will you have it in your power to waken the generous spirit of the West and dispossess them? ”

“ THIS picture represents two men whom the accidents of diplomacy and intrigue have placed upon the thrones of two small nations of southeastern Europe. The peoples whom they respectively rule have every conceivable reason for desiring the triumph of that principle of international right for which the Allies stand in this war, and which is the only possible defense of small nationalities. ”

“ While the confusion and violence of secular governments by the breaking in and settlement of the various northern tribes were greater than ever,—while the ecclesiastical constitution was all that yet held together the scattered portions of the shattered Western empire—the single Apostolical See of the West, whose Bishop was in constant correspondence with the spiritual rulers of these various countries, whose voice was ever and anon heard striving to win and soften into mercy and justice those temporal rulers, would be, as it were, "a light shining in a dark place." ”

“ I go forward to treat of the Papacy, deprived of all temporal support from the fall of the western empire, taking up the secular capital into a new spiritual Rome, and creating a Christendom out of the northern tribes who had subverted the Roman empire.
There is, I think, no greater wonder in human history than the creation of a hierarchy out of the principle of headship and subordination contained in our Lord's charge to Peter. ”

“ Pending the formulation of this scheme, he thought that Allied propaganda should insist upon Allied control of raw materials, of shipping, and on the Allies' power to ostracise for an indefinite period enemy peoples, until the terms of the Allied peace settlement were fully accepted. At the same time it should be pointed out that nothing stood between enemy people and a lasting peace except the designs of their ruling dynasties and of their military and economic castes. ”

“ If argument is required, we would point to the general principles accepted by the Allies when the United States joined them, to our splendid past, to the tenacity with which our race has for 600 years resisted Turkish attempts to absorb us, and, in a lesser degree, to what we tried our best to do in this war as one of the Allies. ”

“ At the bar of the nations we must be judged, when the war is over. But meanwhile, while it is still in progress, we can get some idea of the way in which the other nations regard us from the opinion of the neutral states and even of our Allies. Fas est et ab amicis doceri.
Since the war began I have watched it and England’s share in it from Belgium, Holland, France, Italy, and German and French Switzerland, and have talked about it with the inhabitants of various other countries, including Serbs, Greeks, Russians, Swedes, Montenegrins, and Americans. ”

“ So far as the proposals are concerned with our Allies—mention is made of the German possession of Belgium and of the Turkish Empire—I declare that, in fulfilment of our duty to our Allies, I am firmly determined to hold out in defence of our Allies to the very last. The pre-war possessions of our Allies we will defend equally with our own. This standpoint is that of all four Allies in complete reciprocity with ourselves. ”

“ But a discussion of future arrangements destined to insure an enduring peace presupposes a satisfactory settlement of the actual conflict; the Allies have as profound a desire as the Government of the United States to terminate as soon as possible a war for which the Central Empires are responsible and which inflicts such cruel sufferings upon humanity. ”

“ My conclusion is, that upon the strictest Church principles,—in other words, upon those principles which all Christendom, in its undivided state, recognised for six hundred years, which may be seen in the Canons and Decrees of Ecumenical Councils, our present position is tenable at least till the convocation of a really Ecumenical Council. The Church of England has never rejected the communion of the Western, and still less that of the Eastern Church: neither has the Eastern Church pronounced against her. She has only exercised the right of being governed by her own Bishops and Metropolitans. ”

“ The American envoys must not sit at the peace table as umpires between the Allies and the conquered Central Powers, but as loyal brothers of the Allies, as loyal members of the league of free peoples, which has brought about peace by overthrowing Turkey, Bulgaria, and Austria, and beating Germany to her knees. ”

“ The defeated States, therefore, must not be dismembered in the hope of making or keeping them weak; and that means, in detail, that, if the Allies win, the English and the French must not take the German colonies, or the Russians the Baltic Coast, the Balkans, or Constantinople; and that, if Germany wins, she must not dismember or subordinate to her system France or England or the neutral powers. That is the first clear condition of the future peace of Europe. ”

“ But in a Western Father, whose extant writings are so voluminous, and whose personal history is almost a history of the Church during the nearly forty years of his episcopate, and who continually gives judgment on all matters concerning the Church's government and constitution, it would seem impossible but that such a testimony should be found, if a thing so wondrous as is the Papal Power then existed. ”

“ Divided the Oceanic Allies are, to speak plainly, geographical rags and nakedness; united they are a world. To set about organizing that League now, with its necessary repudiation on the part of Britain, France, and Italy, of a selfish and, it must be remembered in the light of these things I have but hinted at here, a now hopelessly unpracticable imperialism, would, I am convinced, lead quite rapidly to a great change of heart in Germany and to a satisfactory peace. But even if I am wrong in that, then all the stronger is the reason for binding, locking and uniting the allied powers together. ”

“ Tenth, and finally, we must develop with our allies new means of bridging the gap between the East and the West, facing danger boldly wherever danger exists, but being equally bold in our search for new agreements which can enlarge the hopes of all, while violating the interests of none. ”

“ It is quite obvious that American claims have this difference from those of the Allies: they, in so far as they are territorial can at the peace be satisfied on the spot. America’s cannot. Hers depend absolutely upon the establishment, after the war, of a different and better international order; upon agreement as to what shall constitute international law and some method of ensuring its observance. ”

“ If ideas of conquest were to be the rule of our conduct, I foresee that we should, by necessity, be led from acquisition to acquisition, until we had the whole empire up in arms against us; and whilst we lay under the great disadvantage of fighting without a single ally, (for 311who could wish us well?) the natives, left without European allies, would find, in their own resources, means of carrying on war against us in a much more soldierly manner than they ever thought of when their reliance on European allies encouraged their natural indolence. ”

“ The determination of the great Central and Western States is to defend the rights of the States, the rights of individuals, and to restore our Unioniii. 62 as it was. We must not wear out the lives of our soldiers by a war to carry out vague theories. The policy of subjugation and extermination means not only the destruction of the lives and property of the South, but also the waste of the blood and treasure of the North. There is but one way to save us from demoralisation, discord, and repudiation. ”

“ And Europe, I hope, also realizes the awful moral situation of a nation which wholly sympathizes with the Allies, but whose sons, by the mere mechanical organization of militarism, are forced to fight against those whom they consider as Allies, and whom they love as brethren! ”

“ Neither Britain nor Japan can have any desire for territory, and after the war is over, an alliance offensive and defensive between these two nations would be worth all the loss of life and property we have incurred. ”

“ America speaks for the world in fighting Germany. Mark on a map those countries which are Germany's allies, and you will mark but four, running from the Baltic through Austria and Bulgaria to Turkey. All the other nations, the whole globe around, are in arms against her or are unable to move. ”

“ And does not the whole experience of the last three hundred years go to prove that no Oriental state which retains distinctively Oriental institutions can hope to keep its territory free from Western aggression? ”

“ It is, however, of far less importance in the war aims of the Allies that this and that particular scrap of territory should change hands from the control of one group of combatants to that of the other, than that the present practical ascendency of German Imperialism over the resources of the Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Jugo-Slav, Finnish, and Roumanian peoples should cease. ”

“ We—the Allies—are Latin and Slav and Saxon and Celt, and we shall never understand each other really well. The friendship of England with France is new, and has been grafted on centuries of clean warfare and honorable hostility; but on the many points on which we think differently, do we reproach each other? We have all retreated since the war began, and in each case our Allies have hurried up to tell us that our retreat was a masterpiece, as honorable as a victory. ”

“ Before any one of them can be answered the fate of the former Central Empires must be settled, because the Allies must know with whom they are dealing and how much they are deserving of confidence and trust, and how much they can be relied upon to carry out the terms of any agreement. ”