Germany Fighting for Life.
I am not defending the violation of Belgian neutrality. This, undeniably, was a most unjustifiable action, in spite of German claims that she was forced into it by the necessities of the situation. But I am explaining that, even had it not occurred, still England would have gone to war.
That was the situation.
Germany is now fighting for her very existence, and I, who am not without knowledge of German conditions, am convinced that never has there been a war more wholly that of a whole people than is this present conflict, as far as Germany is concerned.
Any one who has been in even superficial touch with German public opinion and individual feeling in any part of the empire, since the war began, must know that there is hardly a man, woman, or child throughout the empire who would hesitate if called upon to sacrifice possessions or life in order to insure victory to the Fatherland. Seventy million people who are animated by unanimous sentiment of this sort cannot be crushed, probably not subdued.
And England is confronted by the certainty that her world leadership is the stake for which she is fighting; that her defeat would mean the end of the vast dominance which she has exercised throughout the world, since the time of the Armada, through the power of her great navy.
Is it not apparent, therefore, that these nations, if left to themselves, inevitably must continue the war until one side or the other, or both, shall become exhausted—an eventuation which may be postponed not for mere months but for years?
In our own civil war Grant for almost two years stood within a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles of Richmond, the heart of the Confederacy, and was not able to sufficiently subdue Lee's forces to enable him to get possession of the city until the complete exhaustion of the Confederacy's resources in men and money had been accomplished.
