TOPICS OF THE DAY.

THE DUTY OF GERMANY.

AS we have always held that whether the King of Prussia and his advisers mean to be satisfied with such terms of peace as the Provisional Government of France can offer or not, they will undoubtedly appear before Paris before listen- ing to the question of terms at all, we are by no means dis- heartened by the absolute blank which seems still to pervade the whole political world as to the official intentions of Germany. It was wise in any case to bring the power of Germany fully home to the very heart and eyes of Paris. Now that Paris is actually insulated from the world, sur- rounded by a ring of German troops on every side, and that the awful peril of bombardment is at the very door, Paris will for the first time realize how insane and wicked were those fanatical shouts of exultation with which her inhabitants greeted the declared intention of invading and breaking up Germany. And it was only right that the great capital should be made to feel to its very centre what the cry of "A Berlin !" really meant. But this once accomplished, the respon- sibility of the German leaders becomes very grave indeed. They have hitherto had the full sympathy of all thinking and sober men in Europe. They have conducted a great war with splendid genius, and exhibited a great people's greatest qualities,—self-denial, fortitude, courage, in one word in the highest sense, discipline. And they have, with few exceptions, and these quite recent, shown nothing at all of the insolent pride of conquest. But at the walls of Paris the moral trial of Germany really begins. It is known that the French Provisional Government is quite willing to yield almost anything but territory as a condition of peace to the powerful foe. They would allow the fortresses of Strasburg and Metz to be razed. They would pay a great indemnity (even as high, it is said, as a hundred millions sterling) for the war. They would surrender the Baltic fleet. In a word, they would admit their complete defeat, do all that money can do to re- fund to the Germans the cost of the war, and surrender cer- tain great advantages which they have hitherto possessed for the conduct of any future war against Germany. But they will not transfer French subjects and French provinces to Germany against their own consent, They will defend Paris to the utmost, and, as they now think at least, even abandon Paris, and carry on the war in the South of France, rather than do this. Will Prussia listen to these terms, or will she either at once reject them, or worse still, avail her- self of the excuse that the present Provisional Government has no legal power to bind France, and so identify herself with the crimes of the fallen regime ? We can hardly believe, or indeed endure to believe, it. There has been hitherto a nobility about the demeanour of the German Government, which makes it most painful to conceive that it is now about to enter decisively on a path which will rapidly alienate all the sympathies of Europe, and not improbably those of its own subjects. A few unhappy " Socialist Democrats" in Brunswick who have protested vehemently against the policy of annexation, and asked for a recognition of the French Republic, have been already arrested and sent to prison. That is a bad beginning for the policy of annexation,—if policy of annexation it is to be,—and we trust it is not to be. But here is a distinct enough omen of the sort of internal divisions this policy might reproduce, neutralizing the marvellous consolida- tion of German unity which a common war of resistance, nobly waged, has already cemented.

It is said, and very justly, that defeated France cannot properly demand from Germany a better treatment than a defeated Germany would have received from France. No doubt. But are we, then, to measure the action of Germany by a French standard ? Will Germany herself consent to measure her own action by a French standard ? The Ger- man newspapers teem with words of the most bitter and stinging _ contempt for France. They speak,—the Allgemeine Zeitung of last Monday, for instance, speaks,— of the " lying," the " calumniating fury," the " bes- tiality " of the French, with scornful loathing. Well, we have not been slow to express our own abhorrence of many of the recent symptoms of the corruption of French society, —but the more we concede all this, the more astonished we feel at the plea put in for Germany, that she will do no worse than France intended to do, if she insists on establishing a Venetia of her own by annexing unwilling populations on the French bank of the Rhine. Is this, then, to be the end of the great and generous forbearance which Germany seemed to intend on the commencement of the war, that she is to claim for herself that she will not descend below the level of the French political morality I Would there ever have been a case of a more humiliating fall from high ground, due to the de- moralizing effect of successful conquest, than this excuse would show ? The Germans surely will be ashamed to measure their own duties in resisting and protecting them- selves from invasion, by the standard of a power politically degraded by a long course of corruption, for which they express so unmeasured and biting a contempt. Germany is great. enough to measure her own duties by her own sense of duty, and not by the exigencies of a petty retaliation.

Putting, then, completely aside the French standard, by which the friends of Germany seem now but too willing to measure her future course,—is there any reason of which Germany need not be ashamed for refusing to listen to the terms which the Provisional Government are known to be willing to offer ? That Germany can intend to accept the Ex. Emperor's pitiable assurance that he was averse to the war, but that the French people forced it on him, and affect to regard the displaced government as the only one with which. it is possible to treat for peace, is altogether incredible. To identify herself with the ruler whom Count Bismarck has just been doing all in his power to blacken, and declare the France who has broken with that ruler incompetent to represent the•

nation, would be to cover herself voluntarily with ridicule, and give the Republic so legitimate and patriotic a reason for- war to the knife as would be equivalent to a fresh army. That Germany should take up the cause of the corrupt and effete Empire must have been the dream of some bitter French Republican, and without the remotest countenance in any great German statesman's brain. A war to reinstate Louis Napoleon,—to force back on the French the master they had so recently dismissed for both incompetence and tyranny,—would, indeed, be a war of insult and intrigue: Let us dismiss that wild hypothesis of some of the official and semi-official Berlin newspapers, as a deliberate scoff at the character and intellect of Count Bismarck. Ncr is any better excuse for refusing to listen to the pro- posed terms to be derived from the obvious possibility that France may repudiate her Provisional Government, for, in point of fact, France cannot do so. The Provisional Govern-

ment, once satisfied, has at least the power to control any army by which Germany can be opposed, and that is more than enough. For the rest, Germany can take power to see the terms of peace carried fully out ; and as to the future, why the future may bring caprice and change of purpose quite as easily if the peace were made by the dissolved Legislative Assembly and the deceased Senate, as if it were made by the Provisional Government. The German future will take care of itself.

Thus the only respectable pretence for not listening to the terms which the Provisional Government are known to be

willing to accept, must be that those terms are inadequate.

If they were adequate, the Provisional Government has ample means to secure Germany against any danger of French re- pudiation. But are they adequate ? They are to our minds not only adequate, but precisely those which Germany should for her own sake impose.

They would indemnify Germany, so far as anything can indemnify a country for war, and render France much weaker than she is at the end of the war,—and at the beginning of it she was as much weaker than Germany as Italy was weaker than France. But they do not offer her a.

strong military frontier ? At all events, a far stronger military frontier than France, which will have no fortress at all like Coblenz, Mainz, Landau, and Germersheim on which to rest for the invasion of Germany. Berlin can never be reached by France as easily as Paris has been reached by Germany. A vastly stronger power, with an already vastly stronger frontier, should.

surely hesitate how it sacrifices all other considerations of policy

for the sake of making the frontier a little stronger yet. And what considerations of policy can be stronger than those which should prevent the Germans from annexing a French Venetia ?

However glad a Republic may be to repudiate the aggressions of the Empire, the very sentiment of equality which is at the heart

of such a Republic would keep alive the resolve to avenge the wrongs of Alsace and Lorraine, as the Republican sentiment in Italy kept alive the resolve to avenge the wrongs of Venice. In opposing herself to the most intimate popular conviction of modern Europe, that peoples are not to be transferred from one power to another merely for the sake of strengthening a raili- Lary frontier already superfluously strong, Germany would be challenging a host of quarrels, both external and internal, of which she will not soon hear the end, and breaking defini- tively with democratic ideas. She would seriously alarm Europe for the sobriety of a power which seems well-nigh irresistible, destroy her moral influence with the more demo- .cratic States, not improbably do something towards throwing Belgium into the arms of France, and mine the ground under the feet of her own Liberals. She would lose all the moral grandeur of her present position, sow the seeds of wars that would be anxiously watched for from the very day of the signature of peace, and divert the course of her own develop- ment and civilization from the pacific into the military channel. Ambition grows by what it feeds on, and the conquest of Alsace and Lorraine would, in all probability, excite the thirst for other annexations.

Finally, as regards the immediate present, there seems some fear that the vile hardness of heart which war always causes is already beginning to stimulate the mild and just German armies into acts as shameful, if not as treacherous, as that blowing-up of the citadel of Laon, so bitterly and justly resented by the German Press. In connection with the battles before Sedan, we have now the full reports of impartial English correspondents, both upon the burning of the wretched French inhabitants of Bazeilles, and on the treatment of the capitulat- ing army for many days after the capitulation. In respect to both matters, the reports seem to show quite a new spirit of German brutality,—a spirit which, if we may trust the letter which attributes to Count Bismarck the remark that they should delay the march on Paris a day or two, in order to give the Parisians time "to cook in their own juice,"—is not unshared by the great statesman at the helm. It is quite certain that a prolonged war will rob the Germans of all the bloom of their humanity, and reduce them to the brutaler level of professional armies. If they wish to avoid this, and far worse evils of all kinds as well, they will remember that the magnanimity of the victor is greater than victory itself, and not refuse to listen to the proposals which would save Paris.