This is the German doctrine, secreted in the pages of many a German manual,[66] and now published to the world in the German Proclamations and the evil deeds which they both excuse and provoke. This it is which has made the German nation, in the words of Lord Rosebery, “the enemy of the human race,” and has caused the very name of this bestial and servile people to stink in the nostrils of mankind.
THE FUTURE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND THE QUESTION OF RETRIBUTION
Many years ago the most distinguished of the modern school of French historians wrote a remarkable essay on the subject of “Diplomacy and Progress.”[67] He knew Europe as few had known it; he had spent his life in its chancelleries and its archives, and his wisdom was only equalled by his knowledge, for he had studied not only books but men. In that essay he speculated as to the effect of the progress of mechanical invention in the arts of war upon the prospects of European peace, and he confessed to a mournful depression. But the source of his apprehension was not Europe but Asia. He foresaw the possibility of some potent Oriental nation awaking from its secular meditations and applying itself in a single generation to an apprenticeship in those mechanical arts which are no longer the peculiar mystery and the prerogative of the Western world. A nation thus acquiring the destructive resources of the West, while retaining the peculiar morality of the East--its ruthlessness, its contempt for human life, its sombre fatalism, its indifference to personal liberty, its chicanery, its love of espionage--might, he apprehended, fall upon Europe in a catastrophic assault as unforeseen as it would be unprovoked, and threaten her with destruction.
The catastrophe has fallen, but the foes of Europe have been those of her own household, and we have discovered with a shock of dismay that the comity of European nations has harboured a Power which is European in nothing but in name, and is more completely alien to Western ideals than the tribes of Afghanistan. A hybrid nation of this type which is intellectual without being refined, which can discipline its mind but cannot control its appetites, which can acquire the idiom of Europe and yet retain the instincts of Asia or rather of some pre-Asiatic horde, presents the greatest problem that has ever perplexed the civilisation of man. It is like an intellectual savage who has learnt the language and studied the dress and deportment of polite society, but all the while nurtures dark atavisms and murderous impulses in the centres of his brain. The subtle danger of the presence of such a nation in the European comity is that it uses the language of that international society, and yet all the while means something different, and that with every appearance of solemn subscription to its forms and treaties it is making mental reservations and “economies” which strike at the very root of them.