In these acts, the Germans have done what they could to destroy the International Law which has been one of the most laborious and most hopeful products of civilization.
All law, local and international, has been made by the most advanced people, and must be guarded by them against the less advanced. Each civilized nation has a police force to guard its national law, but International Law has not yet progressed so far. Yet whatever may have been the origins of the present war, the Germans’ conduct of it has made them international outlaws, and constituted the nations fighting them a police to maintain the law.
Whatever the time and sacrifice involved, whatever other nations may be needed to strengthen the police force, the law must be vindicated, or civilization must go backward generations, and build the law up again.
That a union to develop and enforce International Law may result from the present war, seems among the possible compensations of the waste and misery. The world will have had enough of war, and more than enough, to a degree never before concentrated in as brief a period. In the early and long wars, men had not outgrown the stolid conviction that war was the inevitable and normal condition of the race; and at that stage of the race’s evolution, so it was. But evolution has progressed, men’s—many men’s—ideas are different, and during this unparalleled tragic absurdity, they are going to become still more different, and at an unprecedented rate. Never before did a nation go to war as England now has done, to vindicate, enforce, and preserve what had been evolved of International Law. The German barbarities have made all England’s allies warriors in the same cause, and have opened the eyes of the world, as never before, to its value, its dignity, and, the blood flowing for it is going to add, its sacredness. To the seed planted at The Hague, this blood will be a fertilizing stream, and a growth may be expected that will be a shade and a defence to the nations.
EN CASSEROLE
Special to Our Readers
In this number, we have put the war articles last, giving them the place of second emphasis, and at the cost of cutting into the Casserole, because at the time the table of contents was made up, we considered the topic of our first article, Free Speech, of more consequence than any War possible among civilized nations. But we did not then suppose that one of the nations we considered civilized was capable of stamping on treaties, violating neutralities, dropping unnotified bombs on cities, and, if late reports are true, guiding the Turk in another assault on civilization.