AN APPEAL TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

This appeal comes to you from England at war, and it is addressed to you because upon your nation rests the issue of this conflict. The influence of your States upon its nature and duration must needs be enormous, and at its ending you may play a part such as no nation has ever played since the world began.

For it rests with you to establish and secure or to refuse to establish and secure the permanent peace of the world, the final ending of war.

This appeal comes to you from England, but it is no appeal to ancient associations or racial affinities. Your common language is indeed English, but your nation has long since outgrown these early links, the blood of every people in Europe mingles in the unity of your States, and it is to the greatness of your future rather than the accidents of your first beginnings, to the humanity in you, and not to the English and Irish and Scotch and Welsh in you that this appeal is made. Half the world is at war, 81or on the very verge of war; it is impossible that you should disregard or turn away from this conflict. Unavoidably you have to judge us. Unavoidable is your participation in the ultimate settlement which will make or mar the welfare of mankind for centuries to come. We appeal to you to judge us, to listen patiently to our case, to exert the huge decisive power you hold in the balance not hastily, not heedlessly. For we do not disguise from ourselves that you can shatter all our hopes in this conflict. You are a people more than twice as numerous as we are, and still you are only the beginning of what you are to be, with a clear prospect of expansion that mocks the limits of these little islands, with illimitable and still scarcely tapped sources of wealth and power. You have already come to a stage when a certain magnanimity becomes you in your relation to European affairs.

Now, while you, because of your fortunate position, and because of the sane and brotherly relations that have become a fixed tradition along your northern boundary—we English had a share in securing that—while you live free of the sight and burthen of military preparations, free as it seems for ever, all Europe has for more than half a century bent more and more wearily under a perpetually increasing burthen of armaments. For many years Europe has been an armed camp, with millions of men continually under arms, with the fear of war 82universally poisoning its life, with its education impoverished, its social development retarded, with everything pinched but its equipment for war. It would be foolish to fix the blame for this state of affairs upon any particular nation; it has grown up, as most great evils grow, quietly, unheeded. One may cast back in history to the Thirty Years’ War, to such names as Frederick the Great, Napoleon the First, Napoleon the Third, Bismarck; what does it matter now who began the thing, and which was most to blame? Here it is, and we have to deal with it.

But we English do assert that it is the Government of the German Emperor which has for the last 40 years taken the lead and forced the pace in these matters, which has driven us English to add warship to warship in a pitiless competition to retain that predominance at sea upon which our existence as a free people depends, and which has strained the strength of France almost beyond the pitch of human endurance, so that the education and the welfare of her people have suffered greatly, so that Paris to-day is visibly an impoverished and overtaxed city. And this perpetual fear of the armed strength of Germany has forced upon France alliances and entanglements she would otherwise have avoided.

Let us not attempt to deny the greatness of Germany and of Germany’s contributions to science 83and art and literature and all that is good in human life. But evil influences may overshadow the finest peoples, and it is our case that since the victories of 1871 Germany has been obsessed by the worship of material power and glory and scornful of righteousness; that she has been threatening and overbearing to all the world. There has been a propaganda of cynicism and national roughness, a declared contempt for treaties and pledges, so that all Europe has been uneasy and in fear. And since none of us are saints, and certainly no nations are saintly, we have been resentful; there is not a country in Europe that has not shown itself resentful under this perpetual menace of Germany. And now at last and suddenly the threatened thing has come to pass and Germany is at war.

Because of a murder committed by one of her own subjects Austria made war upon Servia, Russia armed to protect a kindred country, and then with the swiftness of years of premeditation Germany declared war upon Russia and struck at France, striking through the peaceful land of Belgium, a little country we English had pledged ourselves to protect, a little country that had never given Germany the faintest pretext for hostility, and in the hope of finding France unready. Of course, we went to war. If we had not done so, could we English have ever looked the world in the face again?

84And it is with scarcely a dissentient voice that England is at war. Never were the British people so unanimous; all Ireland is with us, and the conscience of all the world. And, now this war has begun, we are resolved to put an end to militarism in the world for evermore. We are not fighting to destroy Germany; it is the firm resolve of England to permit no fresh “conquered provinces” to darken the future of Europe. Whatever betide, all German Germany will come out of this war undivided and German still. Her own “conquests” she may have to relinquish, her Poles and other subject peoples, but that is the utmost we shall exact of her. With the accession of Austria, Germany may even come out of this war a larger Germany than at the beginning. We have no hatred of things German and German people. But we are fighting to ............