war.

He went to the utmost limits in promising benevolent consideration for
Germany's view-point and wishes, then and in the future, and he stated
that if Germany would put forward any reasonable proposition honestly
calculated to maintain peace, England would support it with all of its
influence, and if France and Russia would not fall in line England
would promptly separate itself from these two countries.

These overtures and pleas met with no response from the Masters of
Germany. They declared war.

It is probably true that the Russian Pan-Slavists had planned war
sooner or later, just as the Pan-Germans did. War might _perhaps_ have
come then or at some other time, even if the Prussian rulers had not
precipitated it. But the fact remains that it was the Imperial German
Government which _did_ declare war. For having anticipated that
"perhaps," and resolved it according to their own plans and wishes,
for that, their initial crime, and for those which followed, the
rulers of the German people will have to answer before the judgment
seat of God and history. Upon them rests the blood-guilt for this
dreadful catastrophe which has befallen the world.

V

A few days ago I read a poem addressed to Germany, of which these
lines have remained in my memory:

"Oh, land of now, oh, land of then,
Dear God, the dreams, the dreams of men!
Enslaved, immersed in greed and hate,
Where are the things which made you great?"

The things which made Germany great are not dead, and the world cannot
afford to allow them to die. They belong to the immortal possessions
of the human race.

They have passed, for the time being, alas, out of the keeping of the
mass of the German people, whose glorious inheritance they were.

They are now in the keeping of that minority, not, perhaps, very great
as yet, but growing steadily, of men in Germany itself from whose eyes
the scales have begun to fall. They are in the keeping of all the
nations who appreciate and cherish and are determined to maintain
those great and high things which the civilized world has attained
through the toil, sacrifice and suffering of its best in the course of
many centuries. And, above all, they are in the keeping of the ten or
fifteen millions of Americans of German descent.

As that great American of German birth, Carl Schurz, and many other
brave and high-minded Germans--my own father, I am proud to say, among
them--in 1848 stood in arms against Pru