But his responsibility for spreading the war is of little consequence beside his conduct since it began. His first step was to trample under foot his own nation’s contract with Civilization itself; to violate the rules that, with infinite labor and through infinite suffering, had been slowly built up in aid of international peace and justice; to begin murdering an unoffending people whose peace his own country had solemnly pledged itself to maintain—devastating their country and robbing them of millions on millions, all because they had defended rights which, as already said, were pledged by his own country.
He had prepared for this by debauching his own peaceful, industrious, scholarly and harmony-loving people into such familiarity with the apparatus and drill and idea of war, that they have been taking on the army ways, ideas, ambitions and megalomania at a progressive rate that has saddened the former admirers who have visited them at sufficient intervals to notice the change. Even among the scholars, not only has the army influence spread, but the old allegiance to the simple life is gone. Our exchange professors report the deterioration. Says one: “They have been bought by court favors.”
And they, like us, have been corrupted by their prosperity; their patriotism has become perverted into greed; and the vast industry, the vast wealth, even the vast population that this once exemplary people had built up in spite of the Emperor’s colossal military waste, he is destroying to feed his own lust of power, and he has impregnated them with that lust, and the trade which his people have made worldwide by their industry, he is, for most fallacious and insignificant reasons, seeking to extend by their blood.
He is widely believed to be insane. However that may be, I do not see how any candid and unbiased judgment can find him other than a man forsworn, a robber, a murderer of the innocent—of his own people no less than of other peoples, a destroyer of civilization, an enemy of mankind.
Perhaps the worst tragedy in the whole awful drama is this man’s militarism rotting out the morality of the people of Luther, Kant and Fichte. His ministers now talk of the highest moral stand a nation ever took, in England’s defence of Belgium’s neutrality, as the absurdity of going to war over a little piece of paper. It is also a large part of the present German philosophy that force and cunning are essential agents in evolution. The pity and tragedy of it!—that the German race, long the moral leaders of the world, should have sunk to a Machiavelism below Machiavelli—one not even, like his, superficially intelligent and refined, but throughout stupid and brutal.
This German military philosophy that reckons only with itself, carries the elements of its own destruction. It is already actually at war with most of civilized Europe. It may not be destroyed this year or even next, but destroyed it will be; and until it is destroyed, civilization stops and stands at bay.
If necessary, its every resource must be called into play. Even those of remote Japan are already in action. If the need becomes greater, inaction on the part of nearer nations will become disgraceful. The wisdom that ignored the comparatively petty issues in Mexico, will become folly if it ignores anything so colossal as the present issues may become, especially as they already deeply concern our own blood.
If the outcome of the battles shall be the Kaiser’s victory, it will be for us only to reflect that the end is not yet, and that the Power which works out our good, often does it by ways that appear to our limited vision strangely devious. But if the battles shall destroy his dynasty, and dismember the artificial and cruel Austrian empire which ostensibly initiated all these horrors, and lead to a concord of the nations against such disasters in future, the justice of the Power above all empires will, despite all the misery, again be made plain.