The avowal has not come from Germany's statesmen. It has come from her
military leaders, who are her real rulers. Her statesmen have said that
they wished peace, and were ready to discuss its terms whenever their
opponents were willing to sit down at the conference table with them.
Her present Chancellor has said--in indefinite and uncertain terms,
indeed, and in phrases that often seem to deny their own meaning, but
with as much plainness as he thought prudent--that he believed that
peace should be based upon the principles which we had declared would be
our own in the final settlement.
At Brest-Litovsk her civilian delegates spoke in similar terms;
professed their desire to conclude a fair peace and accord to the
peoples with whose fortunes they were dealing the right to choose their
own allegiances. But action accompanied and followed the profession.
Their military masters, the men who act for Germany and exhibit her
purpose in execution, proclaimed a very different conclusion. We cannot
mistake what they have done--in Russia, in Finland, in the Ukraine, in
Rumania. The real test of their justice and fair play has come. From
this we may judge the rest.
They are enjoying in Russia a cheap triumph in which no brave or gallant
nation can long take pride. A great people, helpless by their own act,
lies for the time at their mercy. Their fair professions are forgotten.
They nowhere set up justice, but everywhere impose their power and
exploit everything for their own use and aggrandizement, and the peoples
of conquered provinces are invited to be free under their dominion!
Are we not justified in believing that they would do the same things at
their western front if they were not there face to face with armies whom
even their countless divisions cannot overcome? If, when they have felt
their check to be final, they should propose favorable and equitable
terms with regard to Belgium and France and Italy, could they blame us
if we concluded that they did so only to assure themselves of a free
hand in Russia and the East?
Their purpose is, undoubtedly, to make all the Slavic peoples, all the
free and ambitious nations of the Baltic Peninsula, all the lands that
Turkey has dominated and misruled, subject to their will and ambition,
and build upon that dominion an empire of force upon which they fancy
that they can then erect an empire of gain and commercial supremacy--an
empire as hostile to the Americas as to the Europe which it will
overawe--an empire which will ultimately master Persia, India, and the
peoples of the Far East.