The Crime Against Europe | Page 7

whose function is "to dictate the maritime law of
nations," will beget indeed a new Europe, but a Europe whose
acquiescence is due to fear and the continued pressure of well-sustained
force--a Europe submitted to the despotism of unnatural alliances
designed to arrest the laws of progress.
The laws of progress demand that efficiency shall prevail. The crime of
Germany has been superior efficiency, not so much in the arts of war as
in the products of peace. If she go down to-day before a combination of
brute force and unscrupulous intelligence her fall cannot be permanent.
Germany has within herself the forces that ensure revival, and revival
means recovery. Neither France nor Russia nor both combined, can
give to Europe what Britain now designs to take from it by their help.
Whatever may be the result of this war on the field of battle, to France
indeed it can bring only one end. For her there is no future save that of
a military empire. Her life blood is dried up. This war will sweep away
all power of recuperation. She will remain impotent to increase her race,
sterile of new forces for good, her young men's blood gone to win the
barren fields of Alsace. Her one purpose in the new Europe will be to
hold a sword, not her own, over the struggling form of a resurgent

Germany in the interests of another people. Let Germany lose
1,000,000 men in the fighting of to-day, she can recover them in two
years of peace. But to France the losses of this war, whether she win or
lose, cannot be made good in a quarter of a century of child births.
Whatever comes to Russia, to England, France as a great free power is
gone. Her future function will be to act in a subordinate capacity alone;
supported and encouraged by England she will be forced to keep up a
great army in order that the most capable people of the continent, with
a population no defeat can arrest, shall not fill the place in Europe and
in the world they are called on surely to fill, and one that conflicts only
with British aims and appetites.
German expansion was no threat to France. It was directed to other
fields, chiefly those of commerce. In order to keep it from those fields
England fanned the dying fires of French resentment and strove by
every agency to kindle a natural sentiment into an active passion.
The historian of the future will record that whatever the immediate fate
of Germany may be, the permanent victim was France.
The day England won her to an active policy of vengeance against the
victor of 1870, she wooed her to abiding loss. Her true place in Europe
was one of friendship with Germany. But that meant, inevitably, the
discovery by Europe that the chief barrier to European concord lay not
in the armies of the powers, but in the ring of hostile battleships that
constrained her peoples into armed camps.
European militarism rests on English navalism. English navalism
requires for its continued existence a disunited Europe; and a Europe
kept apart is a Europe armed, anxious and watchful, bent on mutual
attack, its eyes fixed on the earth. Europe must lift its eyes to the sea.
There lies the highway of the nations, the only road to freedom--the
sole path to peace.
For the pent millions of Europe there can be no peace, no laying aside
of arms, no sincere development of trade or culture while one people,
in Europe but not of Europe, immune themselves from all attack, and
sure that whatever suffering they inflict on others can never be visited

on their own shores, have it in their power to foment strife with
impunity and to call up war from the ends of the earth while they
themselves enjoy the blessing of peace.
England, the soul and brain of this confederacy of war abroad remains
at peace at home. As I write these words a despatch from Sir Alfred
Sharpe, the correspondent of a London paper in France, comes to hand.
It should be placarded in every Foreign Office of the world, in every
temple of justice, in every house of prayer.
"It is difficult for the people in England to realize the condition of
Northern France at the present time. Although the papers are full of
accounts of desolation and destruction caused by the German invasion,
it is only by an actual experience that a full realization of the horror
comes. To return to England after visiting the French war zone is to
come back to a land of perfect peace, where everything is normal and
where it is not easy to believe we are almost within hearing distance of
the cannonade on