ted by her
Hohenzollern rulers since the days of the Great Elector, and especially
since Frederic the Great. Geographical pressure on all sides has made
Prussia feel herself in a state of chronic strangulation; and a man who
feels strangled will struggle ruthlessly for breath. To get breathing
space, to secure frontiers which would ease an intolerable pressure,
Frederic the Great could seize Silesia in time of peace in spite of his
father's guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction, and could suggest the
partition of Poland. Frontier pressure thus led to ruthless conquest
irrespective of rights; and that tradition has sunk deep. It has been
easier for England, an island state in the West exempt from pressure, to
think in other terms: it has been possible for Russia, secure in the
East, to think, and to think nobly (as the present Tsar has done), of
international obligation. Nor is it an accident that sees England and
Russia united in the common cause of Europe to-day--that sees both
championing the cause of small nations, one in the East, the other in
the West.[185]

But in whatever way we may excuse Prussia we must fight Prussia; and we
fight it in the noblest cause for which men can fight. That cause is the
public law of Europe, as a sure shield and buckler of all nations, great
and small, and especially the small. To the doctrine of the almightiness
of the state--to the doctrine that all means are justified which are, or
seem, necessary to its self-preservation, we oppose the doctrine of a
European society, or at least a European comity of nations, within which
all states stand; we oppose the doctrine of a public law of Europe, by
which all states are bound to respect the covenants they have made. We
will not and cannot tolerate the view that nations are 'in the state and
posture of gladiators' in their relations one with another; we stand for
the reign of law.

Our cause, as one would expect from a people that has fought out its own
internal struggles under the forms of law, is a legal cause. We are a
people in whose blood the cause of law is the vital element. It is no
new thing in our history that we should fight for that cause. When
England and Revolutionary France went to war in 1793, the cause, on the
side of England, was a legal cause. We fought for the public law of
Europe, as it had stood since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. We did
not fight in 1870, because neither France nor Germany had infringed the
public