The Casuistry of the Intellectual Savage.
In the hands of such a nation an international convention is not merely idle and impotent; the convention itself becomes positively dangerous, simply because it can be perverted. It can be used to invest the most barbarous acts with a specious plausibility, and can be turned against the very people whom it was designed to protect. Any one who takes the trouble to study the official proclamations of the German military authorities, or the introductory memorandum to the German White Book, cannot fail to be struck by this. A civilian who fires on the enemy forfeits under international law the privileges of a non-combatant. The rule means as much as it says, and no more; it does not impose on a civil community the obligation to prove that it is a non-combatant. But in nine out of ten German proclamations the rule is invoked as an excuse for involving a whole community in responsibility with their lives for the acts or omissions, real or alleged, of single individuals--“the innocent will suffer with the guilty”[68]--and the “law of nations” is invoked to put a whole population “outside the pale” of it.[69] At one stroke we are carried back to the days of the blood-feud and of vicarious punishment, and the law of nations is perverted from an instrument of progress to an organon of bloody sophistries. So, too, the Hague Convention which requires that requisitions of supplies should not be made without giving receipts is observed in the letter and violated in the spirit; receipts are given, but they are forged. The obligation of a treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium is admitted, but a false charge and a falsified document is advanced to justify its breach. A brigade order to kill all prisoners is first denied, and then when denial becomes futile, a fictitious order of a prior date is alleged against us in order to dignify the real order with the sanction of “reprisals.” Defenceless merchantmen are attacked and sunk at first sight, and then when they carry guns for their protection their precautions for defence are used as a retrospective pretext for attack. The same curious casuistry is invoked to excuse the attacks on Scarborough and London, and the Hague Convention is interpreted, in defiance of its authors, to support the plea that whatever barbarity is not expressly prohibited is thereby condoned.