A New World Map
By Wilhelm Ostwald.
Late Visiting Professor to Harvard and Columbia Universities from the University of Leipsic.
The following article is extracted from a letter written by Prof. Ostwald to Edwin D. Mead, Director of the World Peace Foundation.
The war is the result of a deliberate onslaught upon Germany and Austria by the powers of the Triple Entente—Russia, France, and England. Its object is on the part of Russia an extension of Russian supremacy over the Balkans, on the side of France revenge, and on the side of England annihilation of the German Navy and German commerce. In England especially it has been for several centuries a constant policy to destroy upon favoring occasion every navy of every other country which threatened to become equal to the English Navy.
Germany has proved its love of peace for forty-four years under the most trying circumstances. While all other States have expanded themselves by conquest, Russia in Manchuria, England in the Transvaal, France in Morocco, Italy in Tripoli, Austria in Bosnia, Japan in Korea, Germany alone has contented itself with the borders fixed in 1871. It is purely a war of defense which is now forced upon us.
In the face of these attacks Germany has until now (the end of August) proved its military superiority, which rests upon the fact that the entire German military force is scientifically organized and honestly administered.
The violation of Belgian neutrality was an act of military necessity, since it is now proved that Belgian neutrality was to be violated by France and England. A proof of this is the accumulation of English munitions in Maubeuge, aside from many other facts.
According to the course of the war up to the present time, European peace seems to me nearer than ever before. We pacificists must only understand that unhappily the time was not yet sufficiently developed to establish peace by the peaceful way. If Germany, as everything now seems to make probable, is victorious in the struggle not only with Russia and France but attains the further end of destroying the source from which for two or three centuries all European strifes have been nourished and intensified, namely, the English policy of world dominion, then will Germany, fortified on one side by its military superiority, on the other side by the eminently peaceful sentiment of the greatest part of its people, and especially of the German Emperor, dictate peace to the rest of Europe, I hope especially that the future treaty of peace will in the first place provide effectually that a European war such as the present can never again break out.
I hope, moreover, that the Russian people, after the conquest of their armies, will free themselves from Czarism through an internal movement by which the present political Russia will be resolved into its natural units, namely, Great Russia, the Caucasus, Little Russia, Poland, Siberia, and Finland, to which probably the Baltic provinces would join themselves. These, I trust, would unite themselves with Finland and Sweden, and perhaps with Norway and Denmark, into a Baltic federation, which in close connection with Germany would insure European peace, and especially form a bulwark against any disposition to war which might remain in Great Britain.
For the other side of the earth I predict a similar development under the leadership of the United States. I assume that the English dominion will suffer a downfall similar to that which I have predicted for Russia, and that under these circumstances Canada would join the United States, the expanded republic assuming a certain leadership with reference to the South American republics.
The principle of the absolute sovereignty of the individual nations, which in the present European tumult has proved itself so inadequate and baneful, must be given up and replaced by a system conforming to the world's actual conditions and especially to those political and economic relations which determine industrial and cultural progress and the common welfare.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
ARTHUR VON BRIESEN