New York Times Current History The European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 Part 27

The method by which Eastern Europe has succeeded in financing itself is rather mysterious. We know, of course, that the original Franco-Russian Alliance was based on reciprocal interests, and that large sums of French money flowed into Russia, which partly developed the natural resources of Russia and were partly in the shape of loans that in all likelihood were used for war material.

Slavs in Germany.

The conflict between the Slavs and the Teutons all along the line on which they border has therefore been in two ways intensified. In the first place, just in proportion as Germany has become an industrial State, the field work has been intrusted to immigrant Slavs, some of whom come only for the season and return, but a very large number of them--estimated at the present moment at close to a million--have substantially settled within the borders of the German Empire. That is to say, there is a constant injection of 1-1/2 per cent. of Slavic blood into the territories of the German Empire.

Suppose now that Russia should succeed in establishing the protectorate over all Slavs which she desires, and at the same time should press back the Germans on that border line, something very closely approximating a new migration of peoples in Europe will take place.

As far as I know the German feeling, expressed both privately and publicly, officially and unofficially, they have hoped to maintain their complete consanguinity, if not h.o.m.ogeneity, within the lands they regard as their home; and their preparations for war, their increase of their military strength, have been made, professedly at least, solely in the interest of defense. Americans can simply not realize--it is impossible for them to realize--the difference in the degree of civilization and culture on either side of a purely artificial boundary line.

Very fortunately it has entered the minds of several people lately to write to the newspapers about the unhappy confusion that comes from the use of words in a meaning which at home they do not connote at all.

Take, for example, the whole question of militarism. As we see it, it is a matter altogether of degree. For defense against what the German considers the most terrible danger that he personally has to confront, it has been necessary from time to time to change both the size and the composition of his forces, whether offensive or defensive, and they therefore have introduced compulsory military service, an idea which has always been very offensive to Anglo-Saxons, but which in cases of dire necessity they have been compelled to utilize themselves, as, for example, during our own civil war, the abandonment of voluntary enlistment and the introduction of the draft.

Now, the compulsory military service of the German means that every man is for a period of his life drafted and trained as a soldier. Forty years ago there were a great many men who escaped by reason of one or another provision of the law. That number was steadily diminished until within eighteen months, when finally it was proclaimed that every German who could endure the severity of that training must undergo it, and that was due to the fact that the military balance of power of which I spoke had been so completely changed by the re-armament of Russia and by the formation of the South Slav armies in the Balkan Peninsula.

As a parallel we might imagine, not one troublesome neighbor, but four.

We might imagine a tremendous military power developed in Canada, and we might imagine a hostile military power on the Atlantic side and another one on the Pacific side, in which case we would beyond a question have to expand our inchoate militarism, just in proportion as we came to feel the necessity for a strong physical defensive or offensive in the way of a great standing army, and we probably would do it without any hesitation.

Now, Germany has not any really bitter foe on the north, although there is no love lost between the Germans and the Scandinavians; but it has an embittered foe on the east, and another one on the west, and what has proved to be an embittered foe upon the water and a very lukewarm neutral State on the south, a State which had joined in alliance with her.

Italy had joined what Italy considered a defensive alliance, but not an offensive alliance, and chose to regard the outbreak of this war as an offensive movement on the part of Germany, and for that reason has refused to partic.i.p.ate in the struggle.

I say for that reason because, having been accustomed to reading, all my life, long diplomatic doc.u.ments, really having been trained, you might say, almost in the school of Ranke, who was the inaugurator of an entirely new school of historical writing based on the criticism of historical papers, I have come to realize that the dispatches of trained diplomats are for the most part purely formal, and that while these respective publications of Great Britain and of Germany have a certain value, yet nevertheless the most important plans are laid in the embrasures of windows, where important men stand and talk so that no one can hear, or they are arranged and often times amplified in private correspondence which does not see the light until years afterward, and that the most important historical doc.u.ments are found in the archives of families, members of which have been the guiding spirits of European policy and politics.

So that what the secret diplomacy of the last years may have been is as yet utterly unknown, and certainly will not be known for the generation yet to come and perhaps for several generations. The student in almost any European capital is given complete access to everything on file in the archives, including secret doc.u.ments, only down to a certain date.

That date differs in various of these storehouses, but I think in no case is it later than 1830.

If you ask why, there are the sensibilities of families to be considered, there is the question of hidden policies which they do not care to reveal, and then there is the whole matter of who the examining student is. For instance, certain very important papers were absolutely denied to me, as an American, in Great Britain--or at least excuses were made if they were not absolutely denied--which were opened to an Englishman who was working upon the same subject at about the same time.

The reason for such observations at the present hour is plain enough.

Public opinion is formed upon what the public is permitted to know, and is not formed upon the actual facts which the public is not permitted to know. And for that reason Americans, remote as we are from the sources of information, and especially remote from that most delicate of all indications, the pulse of public opinion in foreign countries, ought to be extremely slow to commit themselves to anything.

Attack on Sir Edward Grey.

Now, we have just had a very interesting incident. THE NEW YORK TIMES printed recently what the British call their "White Paper," as well as the German "White Paper." The editors of our most important journals announced that they had read and studied those papers with care, and that on the face of those papers, beyond any peradventure, Germany was the aggressor. German militarism had flaunted itself as an insult in the face of Europe. Germany had violated neutrality, Germany had committed almost every sin known to international law, and therefore the whole German procedure was to be reprobated.

Within a very short time a Labor member of Parliament, J. Ramsay Macdonald, rises in his place, able and fearless, and, on the basis of the "White Paper," as published and put in the hands of the British public, attacks Sir Edward Grey for having so committed Great Britain in advance to both Russia and France that, in spite of the representations of the German Amba.s.sador, he dared not discuss the question of neutrality. This member of Parliament manifestly belongs to the powerful anti-war party of Great Britain, a party two of whose members, John Burns and Lord Morley, resigned from the Cabinet rather than condone iniquity; a party which before the outbreak of the war made itself heard and felt, and protested against the partic.i.p.ation of Great Britain, desiring localization of the struggle.

Mr. Macdonald says that in his opinion this talk about the violation of Belgian neutrality, from the point of view of British statesmen, is absurd, because as long ago as 1870 the plans for the use of Belgium, both by France and by Germany--in other words, the violation of its neutrality--were in the British War Office, and that Mr. Gladstone rose in his place and said he was not one of those whose opinion was that a formal guarantee should stand so far in thwarting the natural course of events as to commit Great Britain to war; and that has been the announced and avowed policy of Great Britain all the way down since 1870, and that therefore talk about the violation of Belgian neutrality is a mere pretext.

That is another instance of this secret agreement that goes on, which so commits a man like Sir Edward Grey that in the pinch, when the German Amba.s.sador substantially proposed to yield everything to him and asked him for his proposition, he cannot make any.

These facts are in the "White Paper." As far as I know, no editor in the United States who claims to have studied thoroughly that "White Paper"

has ever brought this out, and they had not been published in that paper at the time when Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith made their respective speeches and committed the British Nation to the war.

Another unhappy use of language which has been noted in the public press is due to the literal translation of words. Americans simply do not know what the word Emperor means. To most of them it connotes the later Roman Emperors, or the autocratic Czar of Russia, or the short-lived but autocratic quality of Napoleon III., so that when we use the word Emperor we are thinking of an absolutely non-existing personage, unless it be the Czar of Russia.

We like very much to make sport of phrases from languages unfamiliar to us, and we enjoy the jokes of ludicrous translations, and so we take the term "Oberster Kriegsherr" and we translate it "Supreme War Lord."

What conception the average American forms of that is manifest. Whereas, as a matter of fact--and this has already been pointed out both in conversation and in public prints--the term means nothing in the world but Commander in Chief of the German Empire, has not any different relation whatsoever in the substance of its meaning than that which Presidents of the United States have been in time of supreme danger to the country. Mr. Lincoln was just as much an "Oberster Kriegsherr" at one period of his term as the German Emperor could ever be; in fact, rather more.

Sherman's March to the Sea.

In truth, the sense of outrage which Americans feel over the horrors of war, while most creditable to them, is very often based upon an ignorance of the rules and regulations of so-called civilized warfare, and upon a sentimentality, which, though also very creditable, is unfortunately not one of the factors in the world's work. It would not hurt Americans occasionally to recall Sherman's march to the sea, during which every known kind of devastation occurred, or to recall Gen.

Hunter's boast that he had made the Valley of Virginia such a desert that a crow could not find sustenance enough in it to fly from one side to the other, and yet at that time, in what we considered the supreme danger to our country, the conduct of those men was approved, and they themselves were almost deified for their actions.

While parallels are dangerous and the existence of one wrong does not make another action right, yet at the same time a very considerable amount of open-mindedness must be exercised in a neutral country when regarding the pa.s.sionate devotions of combatant nations to their culture, to their safety, to their interest; and it should be recalled that in the heats and horrors of war it is extremely difficult, however trained or disciplined troops may be, to prevent outrages, and that so far as we have gone in accurate information the least that can be said is that it is slowly dawning upon us that horror for horror and outrage for outrage there has been no overwhelming balance on either side.

The Allies (this interview was received Tuesday morning) firmly believe that the struggle on the west is so indecisive up to this time that what will count for them is the duration of the war. Lloyd George has just said, not in the exact language, but virtually, what Disraeli said in 1878: "We don't want to fight; but, by jingo, if we do we have got the ships, we have got the men, we have got the money, too." Those are the words that brought into use the expression "jingoists."

Now, Lloyd George said the other day that it was the money which in the long run would count and that Great Britain had that; and the meetings that are held to induce Englishmen to enlist are addressed by speakers who meet with lots of applause when they say: "We may not be able to put the same number of men into the field immediately that Germany was able to put or Russia was able to put, but in the long run, considering the att.i.tude of all the different parts of our empire, we will be able to put just as many men, and therefore time is on our side both as regards force in the field and money to sustain it." (The London Times confesses that enlistment in Ireland is a failure.)

Lloyd George says that for a comparatively short time England's enemies can finance themselves and be very efficient, but that as time pa.s.ses they unquestionably will exhaust not only their pecuniary means but their resources of men as well. That is his position at this time.

Therefore, it does appear as if the long duration of the war was a thing desired, at least in Great Britain, as being their hope of victory. Both Great Britain and France are wealthy countries. Just how wealthy Germany is I do not think they realize, nor do we know, nor what its ultimate resources can be.

Now, looking at the allied line as a whole, we will suppose that the German forces were overwhelmingly triumphant in France, and suppose, likewise, which is by no means as strong a hypothesis, that Russia is overwhelmingly victorious against Austria and the Eastern German Army; then, of course, you have the situation in which that one of the Allies which is triumphant will a.s.sert its leadership in the terms of peace that will be reached, and would have the hegemony, as we call it, of all Europe.

Russia's Position.

So that the defeat of the Allies in the west and their overwhelming success in the east would compel the acceptance, in any peace that might be made, of such terms as Russia chose to dictate. She would have to be satisfied, otherwise there would only be one outcome of it; that is, of course, if Great Britain and France could not accept those terms, there would be a rupture, and stranger things have been seen than Germany, France, and Great Britain fighting against Russia.

Stranger things than that have been seen; such changes in the alliances between States have occurred at intervals from the seventeenth century onward in Europe, a phase of the subject that is too lengthy to discuss here, but which every student of history knows all about. And it is thinkable that they might occur again.

Suppose, on the other hand, that the Germans should imitate Frederick the Great, which is not so preposterous as appears on the face of it, because of comparatively easy means of transportation, and should be able to make successive victorious dashes, first in the east and then in the west, backward and forward; leadership would be hers, and France would be a minor power for years to come.

Probably peace might come more quickly if neither side should be absolutely victorious than otherwise. But for the moment I think that the agreement among the Allies is a very portentous thing, as far as the duration of the war is concerned.

"Do you think that any secret agreement may exist; that France even now may have made an agreement with Germany?" Mr. Sloane was asked.

I cannot think so. I think it very evident there is no such secret agreement. If one existed it would be much more likely to be between Russia and Germany. You remember the development of Prussia, which is, of course, the commanding State in the German Empire, occurred by its careful conservation of the policy which was laid down in the political will of Frederick the Great, that of keeping friends with Russia.

The fact of the matter is, Prussia was saved in the Napoleonic wars by the act of Gen. Yorck at Tauroggen, when he suddenly abandoned the French and went over to the Prussians, and while Russia has within half a generation become intensely bitter against Germany, yet it is true that the Baltic Provinces, in which the gentry and the burghers are Germans, have furnished most important administrators to the Russian Empire, a fact that causes much of the jealousy in Russia on the part of the native-born Russians against the Germans of the Baltic Provinces.

Nevertheless, self-interest is a very important thing, and if Russia thought for a moment that France was going to abandon her I think she would turn to Germany right away.

As time has developed the nations of today, it has come to be understood by hard-headed statesmen that those who conduct their respective affairs can have no other guiding principle than the interest of their own State, no other.

There is a persistent feeling throughout the world that there is an a.n.a.logy between the individual man and organized society. There are books written to show that States must and do pa.s.s through the various stages through which an individual pa.s.ses, namely, infancy, childhood, youth, middle age, old age, decay. By a perfectly natural parallel the majority of men apply the same morality to the State which they apply to the individual, and they insist upon it that a State must be moral in every respect; that it must have a conscience; that it must have virtue; that it must practice self-denial; that it must not lay its hands on what does not belong to it. In short, that it must as a State or as a nation be "good," in exactly the same sense in which a person is "good."

In other words, they personify the State.

I have never heard of any speaker or writer who would not approve of that as an ideal, and who would not desire that the millennium should come upon earth now, and that exactly the same virtues that are held up for personal ideals should be held up for national ideals.

I think we all believe that, but, as a matter of fact, in a world const.i.tuted as ours is, the one test of a good Government, applied by every individual, is the material prosperity of the people who live under it, and for that reason if the people do not at first put in power men who can give them material prosperity they will put such failures out and try another set of rulers, and they will go on and on that way until necessarily the policies of statesmen must be based upon the interest of that State whose destinies are in their hands. So that the only hope of relations between nations similar to those that exist between good men and good women is that the individuals of that nation, its population, its inhabitants, should consent to exercise the self-denying virtues; and until that point is reached there can be no good State in the sense in which there can be a good man. We ought all to work for it, but it is not here now, and there are no signs on the horizon of its approach.

In a war, therefore, every statesman studies the resources of his nation, and when the time comes that it is manifestly his duty to put an end to warfare, it is only by the public approval that he dares do it, by showing that it is to their advantage to give up the things for which they went to war, in greater or less degree.