GERMAN PEACE AIMS.
(To THE EDITOR or rue ErECTATOR."] Sta,—Germany, conscious at last of her immediate failure to enslave the world under the thraldom of German Kultur, is now engaged in a supreme effort to cut her losses, gain time for recuperation, and prepare for a fresh spring i a spring in which she hopes to make good her past defects of diplomacy and men- tality. To-day, however, she is fighting for very life, but it is the life of a man-eating tiger who has taken red and cruel toll of many peoples; and, when at last surrounded by a strong ring of hunters, seeks to persuade them that they have come out against a much-maligned lamb, a lamb inspired by the instincts of humanity, full of the impulses of peace, and animated only by the ecstasies of universal love. It is the world-old story of Little Red Riding Hood, and if the wolf of to-day assumes the idle of the Grandmother, it is but the better to achieve her nefarious ends. As the toils close, the wolf playing the lamb essays a would-be pathetic bleat in the ears of neutrals who have not suffered, in the vain hope that their pity or interests may induce some mitigation of punishment.
It is always difficult, if not actually impossible, for detached or distant peoples to realize dispassionately the full horrors of wide- spread and violent death, to visualize in this case the red iniquity of Belgium and France, the enormity of the wholesale murder and mutilation, of the rape and torture, crucifixion and fire, suf- fered and endured for over two years by men, women, and helpless children. It has been an unceasing hell of pitiless brutality, systematically enforced to terrorize the civil population, and, as a resultant of their suffering and martyrdom, to break down all armed resistance in the field. This hideousness hes been per- petrated broadcast and persistently in Asia as in Europe; whole countries have been devastated and the populace deported into cruel slavery, into a slavery of militarism more abhorrent thus
that for the abolition of which was fought the American Civil War. In the present war all laws of God and man have been set aside with contumely, because of inherent German brutality and cupidity.
These things it is not well to bury with the dead, to stifle with the deported, or to seek to gloss over and hide their awful realism because of a decadent sentimentality. They are too real and
solemn for this, and moreover, they would to-day and ten times intensified, be the lot of every British man, woman, and child if Germany became even temporarily supreme; and it is to save us fl'om this fate and these very things, wherein are comprised all others, that our sons and brothers, even as we read, are to-day laying down their lives. This verity cannot be too sharply asseverated, and forced into the Empire's very soul; for it is the essence and alchemy of the war—and the friendly neutrals of to-day may be the belligerents of to-morrow, suffering these same self-same things.
An Australian who for many years managed in Amefica a department of a very large American concern, and who for some years has been transferred to London, recently told me that twenty per cent. of the American people are pro-Ally, twenty per cent. pro-German, and that the remaining sixty per cent. bare no very decided views on the matter; that of the twenty per cent. pro-Germans the great majority are first of all American, and if the U.S.A. were drawn into war with Germany would be American out and out. In sentiment Germany was still their Fatherland, and, their kinsmen being at war with a Power other than their adopted country, they were in it, all for the Fatherland; just as we ourselves would be for Britain if the positions were reversed. He said that for the sixty per cent. of ao very pronounced views an analogy might be found in the conduct of Britain in recent wars. These wars helped our trade directly sad indirectly, and we freely supplied all war and economic needs. Money then flowed in upon us, if in less degree than to the America of to-day, but, as with them, continents and oceans by also between us and such belligerent trade. Our traders were n ot directly affected by the war, save as a money-earning proposi- tion, and they also overlooked or did not apprehend the appreciable danger of the sacrifice of the individual and national soul on the altar of Mammon, a fatality not always readily manifest to the successful operator.
What the U.S.A. may to-day fail to realize is the fundamental truth that she, with humanity, is spiritually involved; for the war is inherently a spiritual conflict from which none may stand aside and plead : "Am I my brother's keeper? " Even in the British Empire itself there remains a certain moiety which has sot yet grasped this spiritual aspect of the war. Among these are the unregenerate rich, to whom colossal war-fortunes are in- growing: the unthinking among shopkeepers whose tills are bulging; the selfish among workpeople whose wages are phenomenal; all indeed who have not yet realized the correlative responsibility of unexpected wealth, and the bounden duty of every single citizen of the State. With all this unexampled inrush of undreamed-of siehes as of privilege, can it be wondered if some, even where chastened by the inevitable bereavement of war, have not yet apprehended the full need and meaning of personal sacrifice? And until such need has been realized, and every ounce of wealth and energy and universal sacrifice freely given, are we spiritually it to win the war?
In origin, the war is one of gratuitous and wanton Prussian aggression and conquest, of Allied defence and repudiation; and if the relative factors are now transposed, or in process of being transposed, into not only German defence but a struggle for life itself, the initial causes can never be forgotten. With Germany, however, it is not now, nor indeed ever has been, a struggle for the life of German humanness—that none desire to destroy—but it stands for and is the crude and naked continuance of Prussian arrogance, brutality, and crime; against which, and against which only, and its recrudescence the Allies are fighting the spiritual battle of the world. For the cynical and colossal crimo of its inception and prosecution due reparation and expiation must be made. When such has been made, and when Germany has renounced and given unequivocal guarantees for complete fulfil- ment, peace may come, but until then her cry for peace is but the try of the unassuaged and thirsting sword.—I am, Sir, &c.,
jANES A. Mows.
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