He went to the utmost limits in promising benevolent consideration for Germany's view-point and wishes, then and in the future, and he stated that if Germany would put forward any reasonable proposition honestly calculated to maintain peace, England would support it with all of its influence, and if France and Russia would not fall in line England would promptly separate itself from these two countries.
These overtures and pleas met with no response from the Masters of Germany. They declared war.
It is probably true that the Russian Pan-Slavists had planned war sooner or later, just as the Pan-Germans did. War might perhaps have come then or at some other time, even if the Prussian rulers had not precipitated it. But the fact remains that it was the Imperial German Government which did declare war. For having anticipated that "perhaps," and resolved it according to their own plans and wishes, for that, their initial crime, and for those which followed, the rulers of the German people will have to answer before the judgment seat of God and history. Upon them rests the blood-guilt for this dreadful catastrophe which has befallen the world.
V
A few days ago I read a poem addressed to Germany, of which these lines have remained in my memory:
"Oh, land of now, oh, land of then, Dear God, the dreams, the dreams of men! Enslaved, immersed in greed and hate, Where are the things which made you great?"
The things which made Germany great are not dead, and the world cannot afford to allow them to die. They belong to the immortal possessions of the human race.
They have passed, for the time being, alas, out of the keeping of the mass of the German people, whose glorious inheritance they were.
They are now in the keeping of that minority, not, perhaps, very great as yet, but growing steadily, of men in Germany itself from whose eyes the scales have begun to fall. They are in the keeping of all the nations who appreciate and cherish and are determined to maintain those great and high things which the civilized world has attained through the toil, sacrifice and suffering of its best in the course of many centuries. And, above all, they are in the keeping of the ten or fifteen millions of Americans of German descent.
As that great American of German birth, Carl Schurz, and many other brave and high-minded Germans—my own father, I am proud to say, among them—in 1848 stood in arms against Prussian oppression, for liberal ideas and right and truth and freedom, so do we stand now. In fighting for the cause of America as loyal Americans, we are fighting at the same time for the deliverance of the country of our birth from those unrighteous powers which hold it enthralled and feed upon its soul.