The number of francs mentioned on the Grand Duke of Hesse's card will have to be paid in full after the war. So will the thousands of requisitions signed by persons of less importance—governors, generals, colonels, majors, men who thought they could ransack all Belgium and the north of France with impunity, giving in exchange mere scraps of paper.
The great cities of Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Laon and Mezières have been compelled to pay exorbitant levies for war purposes, which have amounted to billions of francs. This was contrary to all international law and to the Hague Tribunal's regulations. The funds thus illegally extorted will have to be repaid in full. No indemnities—that is understood and is perfectly just. It is precisely because there will not have to be any indemnities that the indemnities already extorted will have to be made good.
Finally, just as France cannot make peace without receiving restitution and reparation, she cannot make peace without receiving certain guarantees.
Here we approach one of the most complex and difficult aspects of the entire problem, because we find ourselves in the presence of the famous League of Nations. President Wilson, one of the most noble and generous spirits, one of the greatest figures that has appeared in the entire war, launched if not the idea at least the first definite statement thereof.... And this statement has awakened in all hearts, tired of carnage and slaughter, the same infinite hope that words of goodness, liberty and fraternity always awaken, which evoke the thought of the supreme end towards which humanity tends. The statement has done better than merely move men's emotions, it has moved men's thoughts. It has kindled in them a ray of hope which tends to shine more brightly every day in that they know that the civilized world will be truly a civilized world only when it is formed and fashioned in the likeness of a civilized nation. In a civilized nation no one has the right to kill another man, to obtain justice by using force, to commit murder, nor to raise armed bands to shoot, blow up or kill with poisoned gas other men. Tribunals exist to appease differences and to prevent fighting; every citizen is associated with every other citizen in the common cause of security and progress.
In a civilized world no nation has the right to massacre, no nation ought to have the right to resort to the use of force to obtain justice, no nation ought to have the right to attack, harm, or destroy another nation. There ought to be tribunals to appease the differences of peoples as well as those of individuals; every nation ought to be associated with every other nation to assure the progress of the entire world.
This theory is not only appealing, it is irrefutable. But it is a law for this earth that the most profoundly just and true theories, those which have been most scientifically demonstrated, encounter, when put into practice, obstacles which have not been surmounted and are often insurmountable.
President Wilson, who is not only a great jurist and a noble idealist, but who also has that genius for realization which is a characteristic of all America, has not failed to appreciate the difficulties which the League of Nations would encounter were it put into practice. And if, in his messages, he has insisted with a force that is every day more eloquent on the necessity of tackling the problem; he has never given a detailed solution for it.
He has done better than that, for he has swept aside certain factors which would have made it absolutely impossible. On the second, of April, 1917, in his immortal declaration of war, he formally declared that "no autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within a partnership of nations or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and render account to no one, would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only a free people can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own."
These are admirable words of truth and of philosophic depth, words which deserve to be graven in stone. No autocracy, then, in the League of Nations, no German militarism nor Austrian imperialism in it. No universal league of nations, even, but a limited society, a society of democracies!