By Wilhelm Ostwald.
Late Visiting Professor to Harvard and Columbia Universities
from the University of Leipsic.
_The following article is extracted from a letter written by Prof.
Ostwald to Edwin D. Mead, Director of the World Peace Foundation._
The war is the result of a deliberate onslaught upon Germany and Austria
by the powers of the Triple Entente--Russia, France, and England. Its
object is on the part of Russia an extension of Russian supremacy over
the Balkans, on the side of France revenge, and on the side of England
annihilation of the German Navy and German commerce. In England
especially it has been for several centuries a constant policy to
destroy upon favoring occasion every navy of every other country which
threatened to become equal to the English Navy.
Germany has proved its love of peace for forty-four years under the most
trying circumstances. While all other States have expanded themselves
by conquest, Russia in Manchuria, England in the Transvaal, France in
Morocco, Italy in Tripoli, Austria in Bosnia, Japan in Korea, Germany
alone has contented itself with the borders fixed in 1871. It is purely
a war of defense which is now forced upon us.
In the face of these attacks Germany has until now (the end of August)
proved its military superiority, which rests upon the fact that the
entire German military force is scientifically organized and honestly
administered.
The violation of Belgian neutrality was an act of military necessity,
since it is now proved that Belgian neutrality was to be violated by
France and England. A proof of this is the accumulation of English
munitions in Maubeuge, aside from many other facts.
According to the course of the war up to the present time, European
peace seems to me nearer than ever before. We pacificists must only
understand that unhappily the time was not yet sufficiently developed to
establish peace by the peaceful way. If Germany, as everything now seems
to make probable, is victorious in the struggle not only with Russia and
France but attains the further end of destroying the source from which
for two or three centuries all European strifes have been nourished and
intensified, namely, the English policy of world dominion, then will
Germany, fortified on one side by its military superiority, on the other
side by the eminently peaceful sentiment of the greatest part of its
people, and especially of the German Emperor, dictate peace to the rest
of Europe, I hope especially that the future treaty of peace will in
the first place provide effectually that a European war such as the
present can never again break out.
I hope, moreover, that the Russian people, after the conquest of their
armies, will free themselves from Czarism through an internal movement
by which the present political Russia will be resolved into its natural
units, namely, Great Russia, the Caucasus, Little Russia, Poland,
Siberia, and Finland, to which probably the Baltic provinces would join
themselves. These, I trust, would unite themselves with Finland and
Sweden, and perhaps with Norway and Denmark, into a Baltic federation,
which in close connection with Germany would insure European peace, and
especially form a bulwark against any disposition to war which might
remain in Great Britain.
For the other side of the earth I predict a similar development under
the leadership of the United States. I assume that the English dominion
will suffer a downfall similar to that which I have predicted for
Russia, and that under these circumstances Canada would join the United
States, the expanded republic assuming a certain leadership with
reference to the South American republics.
The principle of the absolute sovereignty of the individual nations,
which in the present European tumult has proved itself so inadequate and
baneful, must be given up and replaced by a system conforming to the
world's actual conditions and especially to those political and economic
relations which determine industrial and cultural progress and the
common welfare.
[Illustration: NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
_See Page 565_]
[Illustration: ARTHUR VON BRIESEN
_See Page 548_]