Excerpt from International Conciliation, Vol. 129: August, 1918

In dealing with the Belgian question too, our repre sentative men must make specific statements and not indulge in ambiguous generalities before they can dare, before the judgment seat of exact truth, to talk about the hand which had been extended for peace being rudely rejected. All turns upon the conciliatory spirit, upon the triumph of sound words over all pretense, and not upon pacific formulas. Only when the resto ration of Belgium is looked upon as a question of national honor and not as a matter of business, only when we take back the word of the Chancellor as to a committed wrong, only when the sense of right of the German people becomes so strong that it breaks through all pretenses and sees how inadequate are the so-called proofs with which certain teachers of inter national law have brought suspicion upon the Belgiangovernment and talked us out of any thought of wrong on our part - only then shall we reach the right conclusions and find the right words to convince the rest of the world that a new Germany has come into existence. After it was stated in the summer of 1917 by German military experts that the whole plan of the French campaign and strategy prove, that the violation of Belgian neutrality did not enter into the plans, all other assertions of a Belgian conspiracy against us have become worthless, quite apart from the fact that all the much quoted conversations dealt not with the making of war but only with defense against German invasion. The foundation for an objective and just examination of the Belgian question has therefore been laid. The determination to carry out such an examination will be far more weighty for the conclusion of peace than ten offers of peace. It is also of vital importance for the respect for law and conscience on the part of the whole German people. It is a national question of the first importance. Peace depends, however, not only upon us but upon the attitude taken by austria-hungary. Has Austria Hungary comprehended the necessity for an agree ment with our opponents on matters of principle, from which all other agreements follow as a matter of course? It is at once evident that a political authority which rests upon the federal union of widely differing nationalities, cannot settle questions by the mere catchword 'self-determination'. There is in this struggle for freedom an anarchistic, destructive ten deney which leads every baker's shop to declare itself autonomous. But just because the catchword is rejected, there is all the more obligation to promise radical changes, guided by entirely new principles, incertain governmental and administrative methods which contributed largely to the outbreak of the world conflagration. For example, the austro-italians, and particularly the Dalmatian populations, should have been promised after the war the greatest possible in dependence in dealing with questions of taxes, cus toms, and so forth, and full consent to their autonomy in all matters of education and religion. In such ways this whole world-uprising might have been checked effectively. The fact that, instead of this, the official attitude has been limited to mere insistence on the rights of possession, marks a failure in world policy which must make the impression upon the rest of the world that we have not yet comprehended that the hour for the world-wide application of these policies I has struck, and that it is idle to enter into peace nego tiations with a people so far removed in all that con cerns these vitally important principles. In truth, there grips the people of the Central Powers like a curse a one-sided, political tradition of centralization which holds them imprisoned by the fear of liberty and withholds from them the truth that 'nothing binds so fast as liberty'.