BRYAN.
Germany's Conditions of Peace
The First Authoritative German Presentation of the Idea
By Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, Late German Colonial Secretary of State
That Germany would be willing to make peace on the basis of a free neutral sea, guaranteed by the powers, was indicated in a letter written by Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, ex-Colonial Secretary of Germany, and read at a pro-German mass meeting held in Portland, Me., on April 17, 1915. After an explanatory note Dr. Dernburg divided into numbered clauses his letter, as follows:
(1) Whatever peace is concluded should be of a permanent nature; no perfunctory patching up should be permitted. The horror of all the civilized nations of the Old World slaughtering one another, every one convinced of the perfect righteousness of their own cause—a recurrence, if it could not be avoided absolutely, should be made most remote, so as to take the weight from our minds that all this young blood of the best manhood of Europe might be spilled in vain.
(2) For this purpose it must be borne in mind that the world has changed considerably since the last big conflagration, and that all the countries striving for humanity and civilization are now one big family, with interests, spiritual as well as commercial, interlocking to a degree that no disturbance of any part of the civilized globe can exist without seriously affecting the rest. A disturbance in one quarter must make quite innocent bystanders involuntary victims, to the serious detriment of spiritual peace and commercial pursuits.
The great highway on which thoughts and things travel are the high seas. I can with full authority disclaim any ambition by my country as to world dominion. She is much too modest, on the one hand, and too experienced, on the other hand, not to know that such a state will never be tolerated by the rest. Events have shown that world dominion can only be practiced by dominion of the high seas. The aim of Germany is to have the seas, as well as the narrows, kept permanently open for the free use of all nations in times of war as well as in times of peace. The sea is nobody's property and must be free to everybody. The seas are the lungs from which humanity draws a fresh breath of enterprise, and they must not be stopped up.