“Give us ten years,” the Munich socialist frequently said. “By that time the crown prince of Bavaria, who is a liberal, will have become king; the Prussian electoral system, the Bastille of the autocracy, will have been destroyed. But if we fail in Prussia, we shall have done with legal methods, and our watchword will be _Vive la Révolution_! For the death of William II will mean the regime of the sabre.”
“Ten years,” I rejoined, “is a long time in an epoch of tense and threatening rivalries. Are you not afraid that before this period comes to an end fear of democracy, ambition, and economic needs may force your government to declare war against us?
“You will all be famous soldiers of the Kaiser, should that happen, you good liberals and socialists. You imagine yourselves opposed to militarism. But, without knowing it, you are its best resource, its great accomplice. You are such ardent patriots. You have so fanatical a belief in the destiny of Germany. How trifling is the difference between you and the pangermanists. You desire hegemony without war; they desire it at all costs, even if they have to fight for it. What does this distinction matter? It will be so easy, when the right moment comes, to befool you. It will be so easy for the wolf to appear in sheep’s clothing; to masquerade as a victim; to pretend that Germany has been invaded; to give to a war of aggression and conquest the sacred aspect of a war of national defence!
“Let us suppose that, through ill-luck, the war ends in a German success. Good-bye, then, to your dreams, to European idealism, to democratic dogmas. Great will be the discomfiture of your Tugendbund. The days of the Holy Alliance will return. When peace comes under these conditions your ‘borns,’ on their manorial estates, will luxuriate in the pious certitude that they are essentially different from the ‘not-borns,’ and that God has predestined them to be masters and leaders of men, just as, in the beginning, He created the white elephant and the royal tiger. Then, perhaps, in our defeat, we shall regretfully recall Sembat’s formula, _Faites un roi, sinon faites la paix_; then we shall hail Maurras as a prophet; inspired with a sense of renewed virtue, we shall mock at the civic dream which was our chief glory; and we shall fill the world, again become feudal, with the clamour of our repentance. A fine spectacle indeed would be such a repudiation by France of the great vision of fraternal justice with which she intoxicated the nations. What will you do in those days, you German democrats, when the mother of all democracy is vanquished, when the only disinterested champion of your ideal has perished at your hands?