A General Sketch of the European War | Page 3

it does of the most iniquitous
war of mere aggression. The aggressor, for instance, proposes to take
the goods of his victim without the pretence of a claim. He is
attempting to impose his will upon that victim. The victim, in resisting
by force of arms, is no less attempting to impose his will upon the
aggressor; and if he is victorious does effectually impose that will: for
it is his will to prevent the robbery.
Every war, then, arises from some conflict of wills between two human
groups, each intent upon some political or civic purpose, conflicting
with that of his opponent.
War and all military action is but a means to a non-military end, to be
achieved and realized in peace.
Although arguable differences invariably exist as to the right or wrong
of either party in any war, yet the conflicting wills of the two parties,
the irreconcilable political objects which each has put before itself and
the opposition between which has led to conflict, can easily be defined.
They fall into two classes:--

1. The general objects at which the combatants have long been aiming.
2. The particular objects apparent just before, and actually provoking,
the conflict.
In the case of the present enormous series of campaigns, which occupy
the energies of nearly all Europe, the general causes can be easily
defined, and that without serious fear of contradiction by the partisans
of either side.
On the one hand, the Germanic peoples, especially that great majority
of them now organized as the German Empire under the hegemony of
Prussia, had for fully a lifetime and more been possessed of a certain
conception of themselves which may be not unjustly put into the form
of the following declaration. It is a declaration consonant with most
that has been written from the German standpoint during more than a
generation, and many of its phrases are taken directly from the
principal exponents of the German idea.
(I) THE GERMAN OBJECT.
"We the Germans are in spirit one nation. But we are a nation the unity
of which has been constantly forbidden for centuries by a number of
accidents. None the less that unity has always been an ideal underlying
our lives. Once or twice in the remote past it has been nearly achieved,
especially under the great German emperors of the Middle Ages.
Whenever it has thus been nearly achieved, we Germans have easily
proved ourselves the masters of other societies around us. Most
unfortunately our very strength has proved our ruin time and again by
leading us into adventures, particularly adventures in Italy, which took
the place of our national ideal for unity and disturbed and swamped it.
The reason we have been thus supreme whenever we were united or
even nearly united lay in the fact, which must be patent to every
observer, that our mental, moral, and physical characteristics render us
superior to all rivals. The German or Teutonic race can everywhere
achieve, other things being equal, more than can any other race.
Witness the conquest of the Roman Empire by German tribes; the
political genius, commercial success, and final colonial expansion of

the English, a Teutonic people; and the peculiar strength of the German
races resident within their old homes on the Rhine, the Danube, the
Weser, and the Elbe, whenever they were not fatally disunited by
domestic quarrel or unwise foreign ideals. It was we who revivified the
declining society of Roman Gaul, and made it into the vigorous
mediæval France that was ruled from the North. It was we who made
and conquered the heathen Slavs threatening Europe from the East, and
who civilized them so far as they could be civilized. We are, in a word,
and that patently not only to ourselves but to all others, the superior and
leading race of mankind; and you have but to contrast us with the
unstable Celt--who has never produced a State--the corrupt and now
hopelessly mongrel Mediterranean or 'Latin' stock, the barbarous and
disorderly Slav, to perceive at once the truth of all we say.
[Illustration: Sketch 1.]
"It so happens that the various accidents which interrupted our strivings
for unity permitted other national groups, inferior morally and
physically to our own, to play a greater part than such an inferiority
warranted; and the same accidents permitted men of Teutonic stock, not
inhabiting the ancient homes of the Teutons, but emigrated therefrom
and politically separated from the German Empire, to obtain
advantages in which we ourselves should have had a share, but which
we missed. Thus England, a Teutonic country, obtained her vast
colonial empire while we had not a ship upon the sea.
"France, a nation then healthier than it is now, but still of much baser
stock than our own, played for centuries the