force, the technical validity of the 1839 treaty is extremely doubtful;
(_e_) that even if it be valid its breach is not a _casus belli_ unless
the parties for reasons of their own choose to make it so; and (_f_)
that the German national peril pleaded by the Imperial Chancellor in his
Peer Gynt speech (the _durchhauen_ one), when he rashly but frankly
threw away the strong technical case just stated and admitted a breach
of international law, was so great according to received Militarist
ideas in view of the Russian mobilization, that it is impossible for us
or any other Militarist-ridden Power to feel sure ourselves, much less
to convince others, that we should have been any more scrupulous in the
like extremity. It must be added that nothing can extenuate the enormity
of the broad fact that an innocent country has been horribly devastated
because her guilty neighbors formed two huge explosive combinations
against one another instead of establishing the peace of Europe, but
that is an offence against a higher law than any recorded on diplomatic
scraps of paper, and when it comes to judgment the outraged conscience
of humanity will not have much patience with the naughty child's plea of
"he began it."

5. Militarism must not be treated as a disease peculiar to Prussia. It
is rampant in England; and in France it has led to the assassination of
her greatest statesman. If the upshot of the war is to be regarded and
acted upon simply as a defeat of German Militarism by Anglo-French
Militarism, then the war will not only have wrought its own immediate
evils of destruction and demoralization, but will extinguish the last
hope that we have risen above the "dragons of the prime that tare each
other in their slime." We have all been equally guilty in the past. It
has been steadily assumed for years that the Militarist party is the
gentlemanly party. Its opponents have been ridiculed and prosecuted in
England; hanged, flogged or exiled in Russia; and imprisoned in France: