5"^4- m UC-NRLF 
 
MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 > ' ' ' * 
 
 THE EUROPEAN WAR 
 
 A lecture delivered under the auspices of the 
 Nucleu de Propaganda Pro-Alliados at the 
 Academia de Estudos Livres on the 13th May, 
 1917, by Henrique Lopes de Mendonca, Associate 
 Academia das Sciencias de Lisboa 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN, Ltd. 
 
 1, ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON 
 
 1917 
 
 PRICE TWOPENCE 
 
MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 THE EUROPEAN WAR 
 
 A Lecture delivered under the auspices of the 
 Nucleu de Propaganda Pro- A Hi ados at the 
 Academia de Estudos Livres on the 13th May, 
 1917, by Henrique Lopes de Mendonca, Associate 
 Academia das Sciencias de Lisboa 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN, Ltd. 
 
 I, ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON 
 
 1917 
 
D 53-4 
 
 L7f 
 
 
MORAL ASPECTS OF THE 
 EUROPEAN WAR. 
 
 A Lecture delivered under the auspices of the 
 Nucleu de Propaganda Pro-Alliados at the 
 Academia de Estudos Livres on the \^th May, 
 
 191 7, by Henrique Lopes de Mendonca, 
 
 Associate Academia das Sciencias a? Usboa. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen: 
 
 Instead of the lecture I have so kindly been 
 invited to deliver, I should have preferred to preach 
 you a sermon on the text of the sacred words — 
 In terra pax hominibus ! On earth, peace, says 
 the text, and it adds : bonce 'voluntatis — good will 
 toward men. That is to say, to those of good will, 
 to right-minded men, to lovers of justice, to men 
 who do not place their personal interests before the 
 welfare of their country and of mankind. As to 
 the others, these form a minority, insignificant in 
 numbers but powerful throughout the world by the 
 dissolvent power of their intrigue, their grasping 
 egotism, their malevolent solidarity. I shall speak 
 of them later on perhaps : that is to say, if time 
 permits, and if my audience is disposed to listen. 
 
 The former, composing the great majority of 
 crushed, impoverished, bereaved mortals, cast into 
 grief and misery by the most tremendous war that 
 
 history has ever witnessed, these are the men who 
 
 [ »i 
 
 840680 
 
2 MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 interest me, who interest us all. It is their voice 
 which speaks through the lips of the great statesmen 
 of the belligerents, proclaiming their desire for 
 peace, but an honourable peace, a lasting peace, a 
 peace which shall free future generations from 
 the anguish and tortures assigned by destiny to ours. 
 This brings me to the point of my sermon ; but 
 let us turn back a little. For sacred discourses I 
 find myself lacking in the one essential thing, and 
 perhaps the greater portion of my audience may be 
 in like case — we have not the gift of faith ! For 
 want of it, the heart of many of us has for long 
 been desolate and shrouded in gloom. This I 
 deplore for my hearers as I do for myself. To live 
 in a dream is still the most blissful, perhaps the only 
 really happy form of existence on earth. And the 
 dream of the supernatural is the supreme hope, for 
 without hope the soul of man sinks into darkness. 
 This it was which inspired Dante to record, over 
 the gateway to his Inferno, the fateful legend : 
 
 Lasciate ogni spei'anza, 6 vol che entrate. 
 
 And indeed, with an eternity of despair, no other 
 torment was required to make a hell of Hell. 
 
 But let us desist from vain regrets. It is 
 possible that the philosophic mission of Christianity 
 may be on the point of vanishing from the world. 
 Sincerely I hope not. But its social mission still 
 survives, despite revolutions and cataclysms, as the 
 source of all morality among the civilised nations 
 of Europe and America. Be we devout, sceptical, 
 or atheistic, we still remain saturated with its 
 doctrine, and thus fail to conceive, outside the 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR. 3 
 
 domain of savagery, any society which does not 
 revere its precepts. The ideals of justice on which 
 all democratic legislation is based spring from the 
 blood so unjustly shed on Calvary. The ideals of 
 love, which kindle our hearts, take their rise from 
 the sacred lips which proclaimed : " Love one 
 another." The ideals of equality and fraternity, 
 never yet attained, were from the same sublime 
 source. Yet it is remarkable that those very revolu- 
 tionaries who are the fiercest in their zeal for stripping 
 Christ of His divine attributes should inscribe on 
 their banner of social regeneration, in the name of 
 Humanity, the identical words which epitomize 
 the doctrine preached in the name of God. 
 
 Hence, Gentlemen, my conclusion is this : be 
 our sentiments as regards religion what they may ; 
 be we believers or sceptics, mystics or atheists, in 
 the depths of our souls we are all Christians — 
 Christians from the moral standpoint, Christians 
 in our mutual relations with the Godhead. Twenty 
 centuries of Christianity have accumulated in our 
 consciences a store of ethical sentiments which no 
 storm will ever sweep out, unless we are prepared 
 to revert to primitive savagery. Conceptions of 
 honour, of duty, of respect for the rights of others, 
 of charity towards the unfortunate, of pity for the 
 oppressed, of horror for unjust violence, of hatred 
 for tyranny, of execration for perfidy and crime : all 
 these have become engrafted into our very being 
 as essential principles, incontestable and indispens- 
 able to our social life. Without them we should 
 lapse into the cavern-life of troglodytes, seizing 
 with tooth and claw, with the knife and other 
 
4 MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 weapons of death, the bread we require to keep us 
 from starvation. 
 
 True, the good seed of the Gospel has not yet 
 expelled evil from the world. But in the human 
 animal it has at least softened those instincts of 
 rapine, the proximate or remoter source of all social 
 conflagrations. War itself, the organic fatality of 
 societies, from the time when Christ's word poured 
 balm upon the soul of the warrior, has become less 
 atrocious in its methods. In that long period of 
 ten centuries known as the Middle Ages, when a 
 northern barbarian came on the scene, flooding the 
 lands of the sun in the hope of restraining the 
 advance of the Graeco- Roman civilisation, a gleam 
 of hope filtered into the dungeons of the captives, 
 a ray of pity flashed against the swords of the 
 invaders. Faith, honour, adherence to the plighted 
 word, respect for innocent and defenceless life, 
 protection for the unjustly persecuted : all these 
 notions of justice and dignity, which Roman law 
 had formulated and Christ's apostles had acclaimed, 
 found their way into a code tacitly accepted by 
 all civilised peoples, even by those who, like the 
 Mussulman, were themselves outside the pale of 
 the Church. Such was the code of chivalry, 
 which for centuries stood as the safeguard of 
 millions of oppressed, the refuge of the weak, a 
 shield against the tyranny of the strong, and a 
 mitigation of the violence of armed savagery in war. 
 
 By this I do not mean, and it would be senseless 
 to affirm, that, times without number, brute force 
 did not gain the mastery over law and reason ; that 
 might was not the supreme arbiter of unbridled 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR. 5 
 
 ambition. But it is certain that brute force itself 
 paid homage to justice by cloaking its misdeeds 
 under moral pretexts more or less specious. It was 
 in the name of Catholic faith that the Spanish 
 conqueror slew the Indian, that his kings bathed 
 Flanders in blood. It was under colour of a 
 resistance to despotism that Napoleon I. undertook 
 by force of arms to forge his own despotism upon 
 Europe. And in the various wars of succession, the 
 ambitions which crossed swords always invoked the 
 protection of divine right, universally acknowledged 
 as the source of monarchical power. 
 
 What I mean to say is that greed or wicked- 
 ness invariably clothed itself in the guise of some 
 sacred ideal, and at least in modern times — 
 never till now — has it dared to affront the con- 
 science of mankind by a cynical parade of its true 
 intentions. 
 
 Never till now, I have said ; never till yesterday, 
 I ought to have said. For it was but yesterday, 
 only three years ago, in the full dayliglit of civilisa- 
 tion, that a European nation struck the cultured 
 world full in the face, proclaiming over all the 
 globe the supremacy of might as the dogma of her 
 moral culture. It was but yesterday, to the shame 
 of civilisation, that the most admirable conquests of 
 modern science, carefully turned to account during 
 forty years of painstaking preparation, were brought 
 into play to crush the weak, to surprise the unsus- 
 pecting, to trample under the brutal weight of her 
 armies the most generous aspirations of the human 
 soul — all this, according to the impenitent confes- 
 sion of her warriors and philosophers, with the sole 
 
6 MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 object of riveting upon the world at large the iron 
 bondage of German rule. 
 
 History repeats itself. Some fifteen centuries 
 before, Attila, king of the Huns, devastated all 
 Europe, proclaiming that never again would grass 
 grow where the hoofs of his steed had trod. Just 
 in the same spirit German arrogance boasted itself 
 that never again, in the regions swept by German 
 cannon, would popular liberty be reborn. Over the 
 whole world of old, with Attila, dark night came on. 
 But mark the fateful coincidence : it was on the 
 banks of the Marne, in the Catalaunian plains, that 
 the defeat of the Hunnish hosts dispelled the fear- 
 some gloom ; and it was in the battle of the Marne 
 that the first dawn of victory gleamed in our eyes. 
 Let us be of good cheer : the same fate is in store 
 for the modern Hun. 
 
 The modern Hun has to go under, if we so will it. 
 Let us strengthen our will, not only against the 
 transitory vicissitudes of war, but — note this well — 
 against the persistent insinuations of peace. Yes ! 
 For almost half a century these influences, slowly 
 infiltrating, have threatened to pervert our thought 
 and deprave our conscience, just as they have 
 succeeded in doing within the borders of Germany 
 herself. For the present war is the explosion of 
 deleterious forces which, sapping Germany, have 
 brought her back to the first stage of normal civilisa- 
 tion. In attempting to establish the Teutonic 
 hegemony of the world, those forces have shaken the 
 foundations upon which human society rests ; they 
 have converted social life into a fierce struggle of 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR. 7 
 
 individual egoisms in perpetual revolt against the 
 preponderant egoism. 
 
 The Germany of which I speak, please remember, 
 is not the Germany which captured the admiration 
 of thinkers, philosophers and artists. It is not the 
 Germany which under the hand of Luther broke the 
 fetters of religious intolerance, which illuminated 
 human thought by the brilliant beacon of Kant, 
 which through the sublime genius of Goethe shed 
 its renovating rays over universal literature, which 
 with Beethoven and Wagner brought fresh charm 
 into the Divine Art. No ! From the day when the 
 most unprogressive of Germany's races, that race 
 which to-day stands for the truculent energies of 
 barbarism, hurled over her the chariots of its steel 
 colossus, that Germany, great and mighty, sank into 
 oblivion. The German nation (though blindly and 
 unconsciously so) is to-day the victim of Prussian 
 militarism. Aided by a tenaciously malevolent 
 intelligence, the germs of that poison, spread ever 
 since the eighteenth century at the instance of 
 Frederick the Great, have been filtering into the 
 organism of Germany, there to develop with intensity, 
 above all since the war of 1871 placed the Imperial 
 crown on the head of the King of Prussia. From that 
 time onward the pest overflowed the frontiers and 
 began to contaminate the whole world. To-day, and 
 only to-day, has the consciousness of this infernal 
 perversion of men's minds begun to be perceived, up 
 to now accepted as it has been by the snobism of the 
 world at large as if it were a salutary transformation. 
 
 Yes ! Many of our contemporaries, and among 
 them some of the best informed, have been reading 
 
8 MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 eagerly and assimilating with delight the Nietzschian 
 doctrine that for those organisms endowed with an 
 excess of energy, the so-called supermen, all man- 
 kind should make way. And this abominable 
 doctrine, based on a sophistication of scientific 
 principles, the negation of all morals and all justice, 
 the consecration of violence and rapine, has been 
 received without protest, nay even with sympathy, 
 by minds rooted in Christianity, by social workers 
 whose activities had for their motive force the 
 deepest respect for the dignity of man. 
 
 But if the tares spread beyond the German 
 
 borders, what wonder that they should have flourished 
 
 within them, where an environment had been so 
 
 assiduously prepared for their reception ! The State, 
 
 with singular astuteness, turned to its own ends, if it 
 
 did not actively promote, the vagaries of genius so 
 
 as to mould the German mentality. Nietzsche's 
 
 monstrous theory was practically given a collective 
 
 interpretation. The superman was expanded into 
 
 the super-nationality. The professor and the soldier 
 
 effectively collaborated with the philosopher in the 
 
 work of moral perversion. Into the Germanic 
 
 conscience was infused the mystic conviction that 
 
 the German people was that chosen by the Deity 
 
 to shepherd the human flock. The pride of moral 
 
 and intellectual supremacy became engrained in the 
 
 soul of the people, inspiring her claim to an 
 
 indisputable dominion over all the races of the 
 
 earth. She presented an amazing crisis of general 
 
 megalomania, which the imminence of defeat has 
 
 not yet cured, and her partial victories still foster. 
 
 Of this fact there are abundant proofs, but want of 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR 9 
 
 time and the character of this discourse forbid my 
 enlarging upon them. Suffice it to mention, as the 
 latest instance of this form of arrogance, the 
 expression used last summer by Professor von 
 Stengel, of the University of Munich. " The whole 
 war up to now," his iron pen wrote, " has shown 
 that Germany has been selected by Providence to 
 guide all other nations. Let us march at the head 
 of them, and we shall lead them to a permanent 
 peace. For this mission we have the strength, and 
 likewise the spiritual gifts, as we are the crown of 
 all civilisation. . . . The whole world, and 
 especially the neutral nations, have only one means 
 of profitable existence, and that is to submit 
 themselves to our direction, which is superior to 
 all others from every point of view. No nation 
 surpasses us in the widest and highest ideals and 
 sentiments, and under our dominion none need 
 concern himself as to the defence of his rights." 
 
 Be it specially noted : the words I have just 
 recited were penned in cold blood, inside the walls 
 of a German University, by a man whose brain was 
 saturated with science, at the very period when two 
 years of war-pressure at the hands of the Allies had 
 begun to make itself cruelly felt within the borders 
 of Germany. Yet this document unmistakably 
 manifests the ambition of universal dominion, its 
 threats not even sparing the neutral Powers. It 
 portrays in gloomy perspective a future for 
 humanity under the iron-shod jack-boot of the 
 Teuton. 
 
 Should not the universal conscience, that of the 
 whole civilised world, be it inspired by Christ or 
 
io MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 Muhammad, by Buddha or by the goddess of 
 Reason, combine in revolt against this formidable 
 hypertrophy of national egoism ? With all sincerity 
 I confess it : in the midst of this tremendous con- 
 flagration, what most alarms one, the epidemic of 
 war-madness in Germany synchronising with a 
 world-wide blindness elsewhere, is that Germany 
 should have allies at all, and that a single neutral 
 should continue to exist in the world. When, with 
 an effrontery such as this, a whole people forsakes 
 its rudimentary moral sense, boasting its own 
 brute force as the sole sanction of its boundless 
 pride, we feel we are confronted with a pack 
 of ravening wolves. These it behoves us to hunt 
 down with all our available energies, unless we 
 all, every man among us, mankind in the mass, 
 are willing to be torn to pieces by their death- 
 dealing fangs. 
 
 To hunt them down, yes ! To destroy them 
 utterly, no ! This would neither be practicable, nor 
 humane, nor yet beneficial. Our vision is one of 
 a reconstituted Germany, relieved of Prussian 
 militarism, dedicated to her own prolific task of 
 peace and science, unoppressed by the horrid 
 nightmare of which her only record is a universal 
 hatred. Freed from the illusive fumes of vainglory, 
 her eyes fixed on the supreme ideal of liberty, her 
 robust hands wielding the instruments of honest toil, 
 her powerful brain applied to invention, a Germany 
 such as we portray would be a potent lever of 
 incalculable value towards human progress. During 
 long years of apparent prosperity, though the latent 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR. u 
 
 virus was mining her organism, she showed the 
 world the greatness of her genius, the pertinacity 
 of her toil, the excellence of her manufactures. She 
 contributed largely to the material comfort of man- 
 kind, rendering life easier and more joyous, and 
 giving the poor a share in that luxury which used to 
 be the monopoly of the rich. It may have been 
 that to this end this unfortunate people was 
 ignorantly sacrificing its old ideals of dignity, burning 
 on the altars of despotism the last remnants of its 
 democratic pride. But however great her services 
 to us may have been, the price she demanded from 
 us in return was out of all proportion. It was an 
 ignoble serfdom, this transformation of free men 
 into a gang of convicts, toiling on the endless task 
 of filling their coffers. The first onslaughts of 
 hunger should have led them to see the senselessness 
 Df such an aspiration. 
 
 What a pity that to this distracted people, the 
 progenitor of heroes and geniuses, so cruel a 
 disillusionment as this should alone have remained! 
 But, should it open her eyes to her true position, she 
 may be able later on to say, having regained full 
 possession of her senses, that it was not she who 
 was defeated, but the ancestral forces which over- 
 whelmed her from within, the atavic eruption of 
 barbarism bursting through the noble sentiments 
 acquired by her as the work of many centuries of 
 civilisation. That formidable outburst over, she will 
 have been released by the hands which, when fighting 
 her, were purifying her from the malign ferment 
 which has poisoned her culture — a culture of which 
 she was so proud, yet one which only attains its 
 
12 MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 true fecundity when the rays of the Latin sun are 
 allowed free play upon it. 
 
 For half a century the Germanic genius, shrouded 
 in a mantle of pride, has sought to withdraw itself 
 from those vivifying rays. The result is what w T e 
 are now witnessing. Given up entirely to herself, 
 Germany has by insensible transitions been sliding 
 down the declivity into barbarism. Kept going by 
 her undeniable internal energy, her products have 
 been colossal, but monstrous ; flourishing, but 
 aberrant. A depraved philosophy : a brutalised art. 
 In applied science alone, served by an admirably 
 methodical mind, and on the utilitarian side of 
 civilisation alone, thanks to an astounding tenacity, 
 has German genius during that period earned an 
 indisputable title to the gratitude of mankind. 
 
 But it is equally certain that this very savagery 
 of greatness in her conceptions has blinded her. I 
 have already referred in passing to the fatal 
 influence of German philosophy. That influence 
 has not restricted itself to the limited orbit of those 
 thinkers who alone possess the brains capable of 
 the laborious assimilation of such metaphysical 
 dainties. Lamentable though it may be, it would 
 not be altogether an evil had they, sequestered in 
 their own lazarettos, refrained from contaminating 
 society at large. But around the thinkers there 
 hover the restless, petulant multitude, the chatter- 
 ing, pervading army of snobs, and it is they who are 
 the transmitters and the propagators of the virus. 
 Filtered through this layer, those philosophical 
 principles change their form, either crystallising 
 into dogmatic aphorisms or diffusing themselves in 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR. 13 
 
 subtle emanations which spread throughout the 
 whole body social. Often even the most beneficent 
 of them, by excessive concentration, assume dele- 
 terious properties : what then of those which, as in 
 the present instance, are by their nature dissolvent ? 
 In this way the pernicious principle of the 
 supremacy of force over right, elevated into a 
 body of moral doctrine, the inspiring idea of the 
 Nietzschian philosophy, has been worked to its full 
 extent so as to arouse into mischievous activity the 
 savage instincts slumbering in the minds of the many. 
 Recourse to violence, intolerance of control, the 
 rebellion of the ruled, exacerbations of the egoistic 
 passions, refusal to yield where interests conflict, all 
 emerge as the fatal and ultimate consequences 
 towards which we have long been ignorantly drifting. 
 And indeed many minds at present hostile to 
 Germanism have nevertheless become tainted by it. 
 Everywhere idealistic tendencies are carped at, 
 humane precepts ridiculed, disinterestedness 
 scorned, the struggle for life accentuated. Our old 
 romantic ideals are tied up into bundles and slight- 
 ingly labelled " sentimentalism." And this spirit 
 of disdain, which in the individual lets loose the evil 
 passions, has its inevitable reflection in international 
 life. Among private individuals, as among nations, 
 material interest is assigned as the sole possible 
 motive for every act. Legal formulae become a 
 deceptive cloak for the claims of the weak, and 
 the strong may tear them up or remodel them 
 according to their own sweet will. And the majority 
 of minds, imbued with this sinister teaching, fail to 
 perceive, in their impulsive indignation, that the 
 
i 4 MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 synthesis of it is to be found in the old Jesuitical 
 maxim, adopted by the German Chancellor, " The 
 end justifies the means." 
 
 A curious thing ! The Germanic spirit, prone to 
 expansiveness like all its earlier contemporaries, 
 used to indulge from the first in the most exaggerated 
 flights of romantic idealism. We have a familiar 
 instance of the kind in the youthful creation of 
 Goethe — Werther. Remember how he could find 
 no other means of ridding his brain of a criminal 
 passion than by shattering it with a pistol-shot. 
 The vogue created by this romance became so 
 extraordinary throughout Germany that imitators 
 arose on all sides. An epidemic of passional suicide 
 ran through the nation. Goethe had to hasten to 
 check it, and succeeded in doing so by cauterising 
 the evil he himself had created, in his later work, 
 "The Basis of Sentimentalism." 
 
 And now, a century and a half later, the torrent of 
 German materialism and overweening self-adulation 
 has not merely subverted the exaggerated senti- 
 mentalism of the ultra-romantic school, but has 
 stripped off the foliage and withered the flower 
 of romance which gave the human soul its only 
 perfume. It has thus destroyed the only check 
 upon the corrosive influence of egoistic passion, the 
 only restraint upon savagery and crime. And this 
 time there is not the slightest hope that the dis- 
 seminators of the pestilence will repent and provide 
 the remedy for the evil they have wrought. 
 
 My audience will note how dark a future would 
 be reserved for mankind had chance not opposed a 
 barrier to this devastating torrent, and, after it had 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR. 15 
 
 been dammed back, had some germs of good, 
 deposited by the flood, not been left in the world. 
 
 But, as the apothegm of the old Roman poet hath 
 it : " Quern Jupiter vult perdere, dementat prius." 
 It was thus that Germany, materially prosperous, 
 aggrandised from the worldly standpoint, allowed 
 herself to be deceived so far as to attempt a gigantic 
 and decisive blow towards making good her own 
 monstrous megalomania. The blow was prematurely 
 delivered. The world had not yet been sufficiently 
 sapped by the corruption previously spread abroad. 
 It was still but a minority of thoughtless persons 
 who, impelled by a craving for the new and the 
 extravagant, by the deplorable obsession of political 
 passion or of despicable interests, received and 
 welcomed the advent of the movement. The others, 
 the well-meaning, not entirely contaminated by the 
 virus, had their eyes opened in time to the menace as 
 revealed in the crushing of innocent populations, in 
 the vandaJistic destruction of revered monuments, 
 in terror glorified as the true system of warfare, in 
 unscrupulous rapine, in slaughter without pity, in 
 ferocity without limits. Taken thus by surprise, the 
 nations armed themselves to resist the barbarians. 
 They saw, emerging from the sea, the agonised arms 
 of the victims of the Lusitania. The cries of the 
 starving, the captives led into slavery, the slaughtered, 
 cries from Belgium, from France, from Serbia, filled 
 the air. A drop of the heroic blood of Edith Cavell 
 entered all honest hearts as a burning incentive 
 to vengeance. 
 
 But I need not recapitulate the dreadful tragedy 
 which for the last three years has been bathing the 
 
16 MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 world in blood. I am no politician, so it is in its 
 moral aspect alone that I justify the lawfulness — nay, 
 more, the bounden duty — of resistance at all hazards 
 to the arrogant ambitions of Germany, to the fatal 
 corruption which her hegemony would diffuse among 
 us, to the infamies with which she has stained the 
 pages of history. 
 
 The world's moral conscience has at last revolted 
 in an unmistakable form. No more eloquent con- 
 demnation of welt-politik as interpreted by the 
 Central Empires exists than is furnished by the 
 famous message of President Wilson to the American 
 Senate. He is blind who does not see in that 
 document the synthesis of the cries for justice, for 
 that national liberty which a Prussian kick would 
 hurl into the abyss ; it demands that these things be 
 secured for all time. 
 
 I am not unaware, Gentlemen, that the message 
 to which I have just referred has given rise to 
 controversy among the Allies themselves. But, 
 much as I respect all expression of genuine opinion, 
 and gather from it elements for the formation of my 
 own, I have a way of thinking, rightly or wrongly, 
 which is that of my own brain, and not of others. 
 My motto is that of de Musset : 
 
 Mon verve nest pas grand, mais je bois dans 
 mon verre. 
 
 Thus let me show you briefly the wine I have in 
 my cup — a wine which may be different to-morrow 
 should good reason be forthcoming for altering or 
 improving upon it. For, among the few qualities in 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR. 17 
 
 respect of which I believe myself to diverge from 
 the national character, I claim to be neither impulsive 
 nor unyielding — characteristics which to my mind 
 seem too German not to be worth a serious effort to 
 eradicate them from our psychology. 
 
 Throughout the world to-day there is no one of 
 good faith who is not standing at the window watch- 
 ing anxiously for the coming of the white dove with 
 the symbolic olive-branch. But let not our vision be 
 deceived. Let not the plumage coloured by the 
 rays of the dawn disguise the hue of blood, or the 
 folia o-e of the hangman's oak be mistaken for that 
 of the olive. Yet this is precisely the device to be 
 feared should perchance the dove come from the 
 aviaries of the Kaiser, the hatching-ground of all 
 the perfidies and lies that for half a century back 
 have been flying round the political horizons of 
 Europe. We all know to-day how the falsification 
 of the celebrated telegram of Ems was the origin of 
 the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. And we have 
 now seen how Germany tore up the treaty which 
 imposed upon her respect for the neutrality of 
 Belgium, and the conventions of The Hague which 
 aimed at attenuating the cruelties of war; how 
 she induced Greece to betray Serbia, her ally. To 
 look to her, then, to honour her own signature to 
 a treaty of peace, so long as the instruments which 
 can still serve her boundless ambitions remain 
 unbroken in her hands, would be a form of madness 
 only comparable in imbecility to that of the guileless 
 creature who would commit his money and his life 
 to an armed bandit, trusting to the bandit's word of 
 honour. No matter how intense the desire for 
 
18 MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 peace, the Allies must refuse to treat for it with so 
 perfidious an enemy, who dares to propose it while 
 in the same breath boasting himself victorious. 
 Much more so that the moment has now arrived 
 when their resources, tardily assembled, justify them 
 in the hope of manacling the enemy in a very short 
 space of time. A bargain concluded under such 
 conditions as these can be little else than a mere 
 truce, permitting the foe to collect himself and 
 prepare for a new and more terrible onslaught than 
 before. The transaction would be inspired by a 
 desire not altogether unlike the egoistic wish to 
 postpone the payment of a debt, although well aware 
 that it would only stand overloaded with accumulated 
 interest so as to crush our heirs and successors. 
 
 It was in this spirit that the Allies replied to the 
 humane intervention of President Wilson with a 
 frank exposition of their aims. The Central Empires 
 dared not indulge in a similar outspokenness. The 
 arrogant and cynical frankness that is theirs is only 
 for use when they believe themselves certain of 
 victory. When uncertain they hide their claws, but 
 woe betide him who trusts to the velvet paw thus 
 shown him ! 
 
 Still the President of the great transatlantic 
 Republic did not relax his efforts. He waited, 
 serene and pertinacious, until the ideals of justice 
 embodied in his noble message should have 
 penetrated deep into the American conscience. 
 The practical politician may perhaps disdain the 
 document as one of platonic idealism. I, however, 
 in my quality of unyielding idealist, salute it as the 
 most admirable manifesto of international law as yet 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR. 19 
 
 issued by the chief of any State. I salute it as, in 
 its own phraseology, " the voice of the silent mass 
 of humanity, which as yet has not had the time or 
 the opportunity of making known what is passing in 
 its heart with regard to the death and the ruin 
 befalling the persons and the homes most dear to 
 it." I salute it as the most solemn condemnation of 
 that despotism which, under the mask of political 
 equilibrium, would trample whole nations underfoot. 
 I salute it as translating the most generous aspira- 
 tions for national liberty which the mind of a 
 statesman can conceive. 
 
 It would be superfluous to analyse further this 
 magnificent document. It will take its place in 
 History as the most radiant escutcheon of glory 
 for the great nation which conceived it. Let me 
 confine myself to the enumeration of its essential 
 characteristics : peace without victory, a peace 
 which will not be a ferment of persistent hatreds ; 
 the right of peoples to group themselves under 
 governments fulfilling their own ideals ; the equality 
 of nations before the common law, irrespective of 
 nice distinctions as to the greater and the smaller 
 nations ; the organisation of an international force 
 so powerful as to impose its will on any combination 
 for perturbing the common peace ; the freedom of 
 the seas ; access guaranteed to them for the 
 legitimate expansion of all ; limitation of armaments ; 
 the free action of every people in the direction 
 of their own policy, exempt from threats and 
 overlordship. 
 
 Who can in good faith refuse his enthusi- 
 astic applause to this programme of world-wide 
 
2o MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 confraternity? It may be that much that it contains 
 is unrealisable, at least in the near future. But even 
 in this world of ambitions and miseries the germs 
 which fall will not be sterile. It will certainly be 
 necessary for their fructification that the so-called 
 Great Powers, those of both the belligerent factions, 
 shall resign themselves to immediate sacrifices and 
 to mutual compromises. Still, a rapid scrutiny of 
 the map of Europe will show that the claims 
 of justice will be chiefly felt by our enemies. 
 Alsace-Lorraine, which in the course of forty-four 
 years German militarism has failed to Prussianise, 
 will return to the fond bosom of France. Poland 
 will be freed from the tense bonds holding her to 
 Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The Czechs will 
 demand the restoration of their ancient kingdom 
 of Bohemia. The Slav, Italian, Croat, and 
 Slovene populations, now conglomerated in the 
 mosaic pompously styled the Apostolic Empire, will 
 revert to their respective folds. And in this way 
 will be broken up that decorated casket of Pandora 
 from which for ages, to the undoing of mankind, 
 have emerged the mephitic gases of war. 
 
 Now you can see, Gentlemen, why the message 
 of President Wilson, transformed into a diplomatic 
 instrument, should prove inharmonious during this 
 anachronistic fury of despotism raging so terribly 
 over Central Europe. We, however, who prize 
 above all things liberty and justice, cannot fail to 
 receive it as the basis of a future and welcome code, 
 universally accepted by civilised nations, under which 
 international affairs will be governed. We salute it 
 as the dawn of a hopeful day, through the heavy 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR. 21 
 
 clouds still venting their fury upon us. We welcome 
 our troubles, we rejoice in our sacrifices, so long as 
 we know that our children and grandchildren shall 
 warm themselves in the splendid sunshine which 
 these slender rays foretell for us. 
 
 But that we may accept these sacrifices without 
 reluctance, it behoves us that they be equitably 
 apportioned. And this brings me to the topic 
 which President Wilson seems to have overlooked. 
 I am now trying to keep the promise I gave at the 
 beginning of my discourse. But as the subject is a 
 delicate one, and I am perhaps the first to broach 
 it, I propose to resort to a mythological parable 
 which will be easily intelligible to those who can, 
 and will, understand my meaning. 
 
 Olympus of the Greeks and Romans is an 
 inexhaustible repertory of symbols, and from it I 
 propose to draw my materials. 
 
 First of all, let me present to you Mars, the god 
 of war — a stupid deity, whose strength would be of 
 no avail had chance not brought Minerva, the 
 goddess of wisdom, to aid him. It was she who 
 trained his muscles and improved his weapons. 
 Here we have him, brave and ready for the fray, but 
 so downish that he lets himself be caught in a net 
 by the jealous Vulcan, at the moment when robbing 
 the latter of the conjugal caresses of the fair and 
 beauteous Venus. So stupid is he that this issue 
 is not settled in favour of the stronger. It is then 
 that the astute Mercury comes to his aid. You 
 know him ? — the gentleman with wings on his heels 
 and helmet, who carries a winged staff with a pair 
 
22 MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 of serpents curled round it — his caduceus. If you 
 have not seen him, you must have heard him 
 flying round the market places, the counters of the 
 banks, and the offices of the merchants. Such is 
 Mercury. 
 
 Now Mercury, the amiable, insinuating and 
 jealous, whispers things into the asinine ear of 
 Mars, and to such good purpose that the clown at 
 once places himself at his service. Thenceforward 
 Mars goes round the world, aided by Minerva, 
 inspirer of the discovery of all harmful things, from 
 the monk Schwartz, who invented gunpowder, down 
 to the manufacturer Krupp, who makes 42 cm. 
 guns, and harnessed to Mercury, who pulls the 
 strings. So, behind this fearsome automaton, 
 making use of the terrors he inspires, moving his 
 arms and legs at will, wrinkling his brow, shooting 
 boasts from his lips and fire from his eyes, Mercury 
 o-oes on governing the world. He it is who directs 
 the pen of the diplomatist and places himself at the 
 elbow of the statesman. Governments, autocratic, 
 parliamentary, or democratic, bow the knee before his 
 omnipotent caduceus. With the lever of monopolies 
 and syndicates, the cunning deity has succeeded in 
 setting up the famous law of supply and demand by 
 which to strangle nine-tenths of the human race. 
 Its high priests, gambling with national jealousies, 
 make their own understandings with one another all 
 round the world, from Hamburg to New York,Trom 
 London to Tokio, from Paris to Melbourne, from 
 Vienna to Pekin, ready to make peace or war as the 
 interests of their cult may dictate. Should a con- 
 flagration break out, the blood shed but serves to 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR. 23 
 
 give a greater brilliancy to the gilding of the 
 caduceus, the flames to melt the metal which will 
 improve it. 
 
 One might think that Mercury, in spite of all his 
 astuteness, may sometimes deceive himself and fail 
 to measure correctly the consequences of the moves 
 he makes on the great chess-board of the world, 
 with its potentates as his pawns. But he never 
 loses. He always has the knack of turning the 
 misfortune of others to his own advantage. Every 
 hungry belly to him represents more nuggets of 
 gold to be garnered in with eagerness ; every 
 mourning, some more yards of crape to be supplied 
 by him at a good price; every cannon-ball, so 
 many more pounds of steel to be turned into the 
 gold which rings true. And in this way he is 
 cunning enough to compensate himself copiously, 
 excessively, for all the sacrifices he pretends to 
 make for love of countries he does not even know, 
 out of dedication to ideals that to him are but so 
 many empty labels. 
 
 Ah, good Mercury ! honest Mercury ! sparkling 
 Mercury ! As it is in the nature of things that you 
 must govern the world, when may we expect you to 
 acquire at least so much of a conscience as may 
 serve you by way of mariner's compass ? 
 
 Wilson failed to mention this, perhaps the most 
 powerful of all the agents of war. I am not surprised. 
 He would not be the chief of a State were he not to 
 pay homage to the divine caduceus. But in the end, 
 from the resolute attitude he has now assumed, 
 it seems certain that the desires of Mercury this 
 
24 MORAL ASPECTS OF 
 
 time are in accordance with those of well-intentioned 
 men. , Peace is the universal aspiration. But 
 between good and evil, peace cannot exist for long 
 unless evil submits itself, unless the noxious ferments 
 are destroyed. And whatever may be the sophisms 
 engendered by Germany and welcomed by a world of 
 evil-disposed and blind, it is indubitable that her 
 enemies are on the side of right. 
 
 Thus it is, Gentlemen, that I excuse myself from 
 appealing to the material interests affected, or from 
 employing arguments drawn from politics, when I 
 seek t© justify the armed intervention of the civilised 
 world against the powerful empire which hopes to 
 drag it back into barbarism. In the name of all the 
 moral principles buffeted and trampled underfoot, of 
 the evangelical culture which has tamed the human 
 beast, of the justice preached on the Cross and 
 revindicated in the fires of the Holy Office and on 
 the scaffolds of the Revolution, of the consciences 
 affronted by the infamies of a despotic militarism, of 
 the rights spat upon by the Teuton, I claim this 
 war to be a sacred one. And to sanction the 
 solidarity of movement of all the peoples against the 
 ambitions of Germany, it does not occur to me to 
 invoke a more adequate text than that which a great 
 German has himself furnished. The words I would 
 quote are those of Schiller : " Let no free country be 
 alien to the freedom of another country." 
 
 Assuredly, when, more than a century ago, 
 Schiller put these words into the mouth of one of 
 his characters, he little foresaw that his own country 
 would take its stand as the systematic persecutor of 
 popular liberty. His generous spirit did not dream 
 
THE EUROPEAN WAR. 25 
 
 that the moral sense of his fellow-countrymen would 
 become perverted to the extent of preaching force as 
 the one and only source of right, violence against the 
 weak as the duty of the strong, espionage as the 
 basis of civic education, sack and extermination, as 
 legitimate means of gain, fetters imposed on men 
 for the benefit of, and under the lash of, supermen, 
 human life itself as a benevolent concession of the 
 Kaiser. The religious soul of Schiller could not 
 have anticipated that the old northern divinity Thor, 
 the lord of war, would reincarnate himself in that 
 arrogant potentate, proclaiming to the four winds of 
 heaven the supremacy of terror and the inanity of all 
 Christian morality. 
 
 But to-day, as a reply to that execrated doctrine, 
 there is the human aphorism of the great dramatist 
 which deserves to be inscribed on the common 
 banner of the Allies : " Let no free country be alien 
 to the freedom of another country." 
 
 Portugal is going solemnly to affirm on the field 
 of battle her adhesion to this precept, though uttered 
 by German lips. In defence of it, Portuguese will 
 fight side by side with Englishmen, as they fought 
 with them at Aljubarrota, side by side with French- 
 men, who fought with them at Montes Claros. 
 Were it necessary to appeal to a motive less 
 disinterested than the noble ideal proclaimed by 
 Schiller, we have this : the payment of an ancient 
 debt, to which our honour binds us. Let us go 
 forward to defend territories of those who defended 
 ours, let us maintain the independence of nations 
 who contributed to the salvation of our own 
 independence. 
 
26 MORAL ASPECTS OF THE WAR. 
 
 But the objective is a higher one, I repeat. 
 This has been made quite clear within the last 
 few months, through the revolution in Russia, the 
 participation of the United States, and the solidarity, 
 more or less effective, of all the democracies. It 
 is the peoples' struggle for right, for liberty, for 
 civilisation against the dark forces of despotism 
 and barbarism. Portugal would betray her historic 
 mission were she now to fold her arms, the arms 
 which discovered worlds. When the earth was 
 given to man, it was not that it should be peopled 
 by slaves. The sails of Portuguese ships surrounded 
 the globe like a diadem of stars, not as a collar of 
 darkness to strangle it. 
 
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