Right Above Race

by Otto H. Kahn

To believe American public opinion influenced by the profits which come to this country from the supply of arms, is to misunderstand completely the American mode of thought and feeling. Moreover these profits go to very few pockets, and public opinion here being anything but unduly complacent towards large corporations and capitalists is by no means inclined to view with favour the gathering in of these huge profits by a very limited number of individuals and concerns.

You quote with approval General von Schlieffen's remark that "in war, after all, the only thing that matters is those silly old victories."

You would surely not say that in the individual's daily struggle for existence or in competitive industrial strife, "the only thing that matters" is success. Rather you would be the first to grant, as you have always demonstrated in your acts, that there are certain ethical limitations laid down by the conscience and the moral conceptions of humanity, which must be respected in the struggle for success, however keen, even though the very existence of the individual and the maintenance of wife and child be at stake.

Schlieffen's utterance, in the meaning which your quotation gives it, throws overboard everything that civilization and the humanitarian progress of centuries has accomplished towards lessening the cruelty, the hatred and the suffering engendered by war, and towards protecting non-combatants, as far as possible, from its terrors. It is tantamount to the doctrine of the fanatical Jesuit: "The end justifies the means."

And it is something akin to this very doctrine which Germany has made her own and applied in her conduct of this war as she has done in none of her previous wars. The conviction that everything, literally everything, which tends to ensure victory is permitted to her, and indeed called for, has now evidently assumed the power of a national obsession. Thus, the violation of innocent Belgium in defiance of solemn treaty; the unspeakable treatment inflicted on her people; the bombardment, without warning, of open places (which Germany was the first to practise); the destruction of great monuments of art which belonged to all humankind, as in Rheims, and Louvain; the Lusitania horror, the strewing of mines broadcast, the use of poisonous gases causing death by torture or incurable disease; the taking of hostages; the arbitrary imposition of monetary indemnities and penalties, and so forth. It is these facts that the non-combatant nations charge against Germany, and quite apart from the responsibility for the war, it is in them that may be found the main reason why public opinion in neutral countries has more and more turned against Germany as the war has continued.

I say "innocent Belgium," for it is entirely evident that the Belgian-English pourparlers, of which Germany discovered documentary evidence, related merely to the eventuality of Germany's violating Belgian neutrality, and therefore in no way constituted a relinquishment of neutrality on Belgium's part. In so far as these pourparlers did not keep strictly within these limits (manifestly as a result of excessive zeal on the part of the English military attaché in question) they were formally and categorically rejected and disavowed, by both the Belgian and English Governments. This is shown by official papers which have been published. It cannot be doubted that these proceedings of disavowal were entirely bona fide, for they took place at a time and under circumstances such that no one could possibly have imagined that the correspondence evidencing them would ever see the light of day. Inasmuch as you mention these Anglo-Belgian pourparlers as among the reasons justifying Germany's invasion of Belgium, it is worth pointing out that this treaty defying invasion was perpetrated before Germany had discovered the existence of the documents which evidenced that such pourparlers had taken place.

Germany's reasoning that she was compelled to take the initiative in violating the treaty of neutrality in order to avoid the imminent danger that England and France would do so first and thereupon advance troops against her through Belgium, is, even if such reasoning were morally admissible, no valid argument; for, only a few days before, England and France had solemnly pledged themselves in the face of the whole world to respect Belgium's neutrality.

If, as you believe, England had been planning for years to attack Germany via Belgium, would she not then have had in readiness an invading force somewhere near adequate for such an undertaking? Instead she had the mere bagatelle of 75,000 or 100,000 men, which in the first months of the war actually constituted her whole available continental fighting force.

To any one of unprejudiced judgment there remains, therefore, no choice but the conclusion that Germany's violation of Belgium did not even have the excuse of being a measure of self-defence, but, as the Chancellor in effect admitted in his first speech on the subject in the Reichstag, was undertaken simply because "in war the only thing that matters is those silly old victories."

Not, as you say, in obedience to England's command (what power had England either to command or enforce her commands?), but from a compelling impulse of national honour did Belgium oppose the German breach of neutrality with force of arms, though it would evidently have been to her material interest to comply with Germany's summons or at any rate to offer merely nominal resistance.