That it has had its parallel in other and less civilized ages may be freely admitted, but until German scientists, philosophers, educators, and even doctors of divinity attempted to justify this wanton outrage, it had been hoped that mankind had made some progress since the times of Wallenstein and Tilly.
The verdict of Civilization in this respect will be little affected by the ultimate result of the war, for even if Germany should emerge from this titanic conflict as victor, and become, as it would then undoubtedly become, the first power in the world, it would none the less be a figure for the “time of scorn to point his slow unmoving finger at.” To the eulogists of Alexander the Great, Seneca was wont to say, “Yes, but he murdered Callisthenes,” and to the eulogists of victorious Germany, if indeed it shall prove victorious, the wise and just of all future ages will say, “Yes, but it devastated Belgium.”
The fact that many distinguished and undoubtedly sincere partisans of Germany have attempted to justify this atrocious rape, suggests a problem of psychology rather than of logic or ethics. It strongly illustrates a too familiar phenomenon that great intellectual and moral astigmatism is generally incident to any passionate crisis in human history. It shows how pitifully unstable the human intellect is when a great man like Dr. Haeckel, a scholar and historian like Dr. von Mach, or a doctor of divinity like Dr. Dryander, can be so warped with the passions of the hour as to ignore the clearest considerations of political morality.
At the outbreak of the present war Belgium had taken no part whatever in the controversy and was apparently on friendly relations with all the Powers. It had no interest whatever in the Servian question. A thrifty, prosperous people, inhabiting the most densely populated country of Europe, and resting secure in the solemn promises, not merely of Germany, but of the leading European nations that its neutrality should be respected, it calmly pursued the even tenor of its way, and was as unmindful of the disaster, which was so suddenly to befall it, as the people of Pompeii were on the morning of the great eruption when they thronged the theatre in the pursuit of pleasure and disregarded the ominous curling of the smoke from the crater of Vesuvius.
On April 19, 1839, Belgium and Holland signed a treaty which provided that “Belgium forms an independent state of perpetual neutrality.” To insure that neutrality, Prussia, France, Great Britain, Austria, and Russia on the same date signed a treaty, by which it was provided that these nations jointly “became the guarantors” of such “perpetual neutrality.”
In his recent article on the war, George Bernard Shaw, who is inimitable as a farceur but not quite convincing as a jurist, says:
As all treaties are valid only rebus sic stantibus, and the state of things which existed at the date of the Treaty of London (1839) had changed so much since then ... that in 1870 Gladstone could not depend on it, and resorted to a special temporary treaty not now in force, the technical validity of the 1839 treaty is extremely doubtful.
Unfortunately for this contention, the Treaty of 1870, to which Mr. Shaw refers, provided for its own expiration after twelve months and then added:
And on the expiration of that time the independence and neutrality of Belgium will, so far as the high contracting parties are respectively concerned, continue to rest as heretofore on the 1st Article of the Quintuple Treaty of the 19th of April, 1839.
Much has been made by Mr. Shaw and others of an excerpt from a speech of Mr. Gladstone in 1870. In that speech, Mr. Gladstone, as an abstract proposition, declined to accept the broad statement that under all circumstances the obligations of a treaty might continue, but there is nothing to justify the belief that Mr. Gladstone in any respect questioned either the value or the validity of the Treaty of 1839 with respect to Belgium.