19 MAY 1917, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

LORD ROBERT. CECIL'S SPEECH.

IT is very seldom that one- is able to feel whole-hearted 1 admiration for a speech in the House of Commons. We feel it, however, for Lord Robert Cecil's statement on Wed- nesday in regard to the terms of peace. Specially to be commended is his pulverization, for it was nothing, else, of Mr. Snowden and his brother-twitterers in the. Pacificist grove. Mr. Snowden and his friends probably mean well, but the muddy mixture of vanity, ignorance, and preiudice against' their own countrymen from which they draw their inspiration is always leading them to build upon a foundation of paradox. So great too is the hypnotic influence of Germany and of German ideas upon their minds that they are perpetually impaling themselves hopelessly on dilemmas. When con- fronted with such a question as " When is annexation not annexation ? " they answer it in effect : " When it is carried out by the. Germans." To the question, " Are oppressed peoples to .be allowed to free themselves ? " the Snowdenian answer appears to be : " Not if their oppressors are Germans, Austrians, or Turks." To the question, Should reparation be made for ill deeds, for shameless destruction, for wanton cruelty, for murder and outrage, due not to the disorganization or the- madness of war but to a deliberate and calculated policy ? " the reply, implicit if not open, is : "'Not if the crime was committed by Germany." Finally, to the supreme ques- tion, " Is it not worth while to endure the horrors of war a little longer in order to _ensure a lasting peace ? " there is always hovering in the background the answer : " Not if it will involve humiliation for Germany." - One would have imagined- that Mr. Snowden and his sup- porters when they reached conclusions of this kind would have been horrified. Not a bit of it. Wrapped in his intellectual cloak of pride and self-love, the Paeifieist never seems to realize the consequences of his demands. As long as he is able to pretend to himself that he is being kind and jiist to Germany and her rulers, and that he is chastening the British Government and weakening the power of what he would call our cruel Imperialism, he is quite satisfied. It is a strange, an almost incomprehensible, position. One can best excuse it by noting that on the minds of weak, self-satisfied, and vain people who eke out an exiguous store of knowledge with a plentiful supply of shrill logic, the strain of war prodeces a hind of.. hysteria in.. -which everything is topsy-turvy and nothing has its true value. Persons in this condition appar- ently can and will believe anything they want to, believe. The German Chancellor in the German Reichstag may tell the world, as Herr von Bethmann Hallweg told us this week, that Germany stands where she- has always stood as regards peace terms, rejects the idea of no annexations, and has no intention of giving up anything or making any reparation, but rather will exact reparation from those she calls her assailants. All this makes no impact on the minds of the Pacifieists. To them, after such a speech quite as much as before, Germany appears as the injured innocent of Europe, attacked by cruel foes; or rather a cruel foe, for to these disordered imaginations Britain is not only the villain but the sole villain of the. piece. So complete and so excellent was Lord Robert Cecil's exposure of what was the practical meaning of a policy of no annexation and no indemnity that it would- be a work of supererogation for us to dwell upon it at length. " No annexation" sounds a fine phrase in the abetract, but in the .concrete it means replacing Armenia, Arabia, and Mesopo- tamia under the most hideous as well as the most inefficient tyranny that the world has ever, seen: -Again, it means in the case of the German colonies the exposing the natives; who have welcomed the British troops as liberators, to a fate which no considerate man can contemplate without a sense of absolute horror. Equally sane, equally humane; and equally .sound was' Lord Robert Cecil's masterly. dealing with the questions of Poland, Alsace-Lorraine, and what Mr. Devlin characteristically called " the dismemberment of Austria "- i.e., the liberation of the Slays, Rumanians, and Czecho- Slovaks. The only passage about which we feel a slight twinge of disappointment- is that in which Lord Robert dealt with the question of no peace with the Hohenzollerns. We frankly confess that we should like to see our Government able to persuade the rest of the-Allies to assume the position which Castlereagh persuaded the Allies to assume at the end of the Napoleonic War. It will be remembered that he induced them to place Napoleon and his dynasty under the ban of Europe, and to make them pay the penalty for all the miseries they had brought on the world. But though we may be. disappointed, we are not surprised that Lord Robert Cecil did not gratify us here, nor do we suppose for a moment that if we had been in the position of the British. Government we should have found it possible to go further than they did. We have no right to bind our Allies, and there is, of course, in this question of a ban the-difficulty that it involves denying to the German people the lull right to chooee their own form of government. What we do think, however, that we might very properly do is to follow Bismarck's example and say that we will only make peace with the German people and not with those who pretend to speak in their name. Here again; however, we shall have to obtain the agreement of all the Allies, and it may be argued that we ought to reserve the energy of all of us for the prosecution of the war rather thanfor debating abstract points of -policy within sound of the guns. Also no doubt our Government, and probably still more the Govern- ments of the Allies, would say that they wish to have the greatest possible amount of sea-room in the matter. of making peace. If, as still may very well happen, the Hohenzollern were suddenly to offer acceptable peace, terms, we ought no to be unable to accept them because we had tied our hands_by an abstract declaration. If that were the argument, as we expect it would be, we are bound to say that we sigh as haters of tyranny but obey as lovers of peace.

Before we leave Lord Robert Ceeirs speech we must quote the admirable passage with which it concluded " I think the last word on that subject was said by Miss Cavell when she was -under sentence of death. She said, ' Patriotism is not enough.' _I agree. You do not want leas than patriotic" you want more. You want to add to it—and this raufg be the foundation of any peace that we make—justice, chivalry, respect for obligations, and respect for the weak, and if we can secure a pestle founded on those central doctrines 1 shall be glad -te co-operate with any hon.. Member, of the House .to erect whale barriers may be possible against the recurrence of a devastating. war such Eta this."

Those are words' to- which every honest man, every humane man, and every friend of liberty and of those rights which are above even patriotism can give assent with his whole heart. We want a peace that ennobles, not a peace that depraves and humiliates, a peace that raises not degrades mankind, a peace which will leave the world better and not worse for the- war.

It is .a source of na small satisfaction that Mi. Afiquith, who followed Lord Robert Cecil, should' have supported him in every essential. In particular, he' took exactly the same view of the German Chancellor's speech as did Lord Robert.