The sheet-anchor of new Germany’s faith is her own exclusive right to tear up treaties, violate agreements, and trample the laws of humanity underfoot. To no other Power, however great its temptation, however pressing its needs, is this privilege to be extended. Belgian neutrality is but a word to be disregarded—by Germany; a solemn treaty is but a scrap of paper to be flung into the basket—by Germany; but woe betide any other Power who should venture to turn Germany’s methods against herself! Now that Japan has begun operations against German Tsingtao, the Kaiser’s Minister in Pekin promptly protested against the alleged violation of Chinese neutrality which it involved. Sacred are all those engagements by which Germany stands to gain some advantage, and it is the duty of the civilized world to enforce them. All others which are inconvenient to the Teuton he may toss aside as scraps of paper.
To the threats that China would be held responsible for injury to German property following on the Japanese operations, unless she withstood the Japanese by force, the Pekin Government administered a neatly worded lesson. If the Pekin Government, the Foreign Minister replied, were to oppose the landing of the Japanese on the ground that the territory in question belongs to China, it would likewise be her duty to drive out the Germans for the same reason, Tsingtao also being Chinese. Moreover, Tsingtao had only been leased to Germany for a term of years, and, according to the scrap of paper, ought never to have been fortified, seeing that this constituted a flagrant violation of China’s neutrality. These arguments are unanswerable, even from Germany’s point of view. But the Kaiser still maintains that he has right on his side! Deutschland über Alles!
With a people whose reasoning powers show as little respect for the laws of logic as their armies evince for the laws of humanity or their press for truth, it would be idle to argue. Psychologically, however, it is curious to observe the attitude of the body of German theologians towards the scrap of paper. Psychologically, but also for a more direct reason: because of the unwarranted faith which the British people are so apt to place in the German people’s sense of truth and justice, and more particularly in the fairmindedness of their clergy. Well, this clergy, in its most eminent representatives, does indeed expend strong adjectives in its condemnation—not of the Kaiser’s crime, but of Belgian atrocities!
This is how German divines propound the rights and wrongs of the Belgian episode to Evangelical Christians abroad:
Unnameable horrors have been committed against Germans living peaceably abroad—against women and children, against wounded and physicians—cruelties and shamelessness such as many a heathen and Mohammedan war has not revealed. Are these the fruits, by which the non-Christian peoples are to recognize whose disciples the Christian nations are? Even the not unnatural excitement of a people, whose neutrality—already violated by our adversaries—could under the pressure of implacable necessity not be respected, affords no excuse for inhumanities, nor does it lessen the shame that such could take place in a land long ago christianized.
If Ministers of the Gospel thus tamper with truth and ignore elementary justice and humanity, can one affect surprise at the mischievous inventions of professional journalists?
This strange blending of religion with mendacity, of culture with humanity, of scientific truth with political subterfuge, reads like a chapter in cerebral pathology. The savage military organism against which a veritable crusade is now being carried on by the peace-loving, law-abiding nations of Europe has been aptly characterized as “the thing which all free civilization has learned to loathe like a vampire: the conscienceless, ruthless, godless might of a self-centred militarism, to which honour is a word, chivalry a weakness, and bullying aggression the breath of life.”[37]
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It is a relief to turn from the quibbles, subterfuges, and downright falsehoods that characterize the campaign of German diplomacy to the dignified message which the King-Emperor recently addressed to the Princes and Peoples of that India which our enemies hoped would rise up in arms against British rule.