The curtain has fallen. The Treaty of Versailles has for a time given pause to the armed conflict in Central Europe. Evident to the end that, having regained their strength, the nations may again take up their arms, so as to burst the chains in which defeat has fettered them.
The idea of the “world-peace,” which the Christian churches have been preaching for twenty centuries, is buried for years to come.
To us, how childishly naïve now seem the efforts of the humanists of the nineteenth century, who by prolonged, ardent propaganda sought to soften the horrors of war and to introduce the limiting norms of International Law! Yes, now, when we know that one may not only infringe the neutrality of a peaceful, cultured country, but give it to be ravaged and plundered; when we can sink peaceable ships, with women and children on board, by means of submarines; poison people with suffocating gases and tear their bodies with the fragments of explosive bullets; when a whole country, a whole nation, is quoted by cold, political calculation merely as a “Barrier” against the invasion of armed force and pernicious ideas, and is periodically either helped or betrayed in turn.
But the most terrible of all weapons ever invented by the mind of man, the most shameful of all the methods permitted in the late World War was the poisoning of the soul of a people!
Germany assigns the priority of this invention to Great Britain. Let them settle this matter between themselves. But I see my native land crushed, dying in the dark night of horror and insanity. And I know her tormentors.
Two theses have arisen before mankind in all their grim power and all their shameless nakedness:
All is permissible for the advantage of one’s country!
All is permissible for the triumph of one’s party, one’s class!