ly turns her eyes dumbly toward you while
you look at the red ruin in which her villages, her heaps of slain, her
monuments and treasures are being hurled by her friends and enemies
alike, are you any the less bound to speak out than if Belgium had asked
you to send her a million soldiers?

Not for a moment do I suggest that your intervention should be an
intervention on behalf of either the Allies or the Entente. If you
consider both sides equally guilty, we know that you can find reasons
for that verdict. But Belgium is innocent; and it is on behalf of
Belgium that so much of the world as is still at peace is waiting for a
lead from you. No other question need be prejudged. If Germany maintains
her claim to a right of way through Belgium on a matter which she
believed (however erroneously) to be one of life and death to her as a
nation, nobody, not even China, now pretends that such rights of way
have not their place among those common human rights which are superior
to the more artificial rights of nationality. I think, for example, that
if Russia made a descent on your continent under circumstances which
made it essential to the maintenance of your national freedom that you
should move an army through Canada, you would ask our leave to do so,
and take it by force if we did not grant it. You may reasonably suspect,
even if all our statesmen raise a shriek of denial, that we should take
a similar liberty under similar circumstances in the teeth of all the
scraps of paper in our Foreign Office dustbin. You see, I am frank with
you, and fair, I hope, to Germany. But a right of way is not a right of
conquest; and even the right of way was not, as the Imperial Chancellor
imagined, a matter of life and death at all, but a militarist
hallucination, and one that has turned out, so far, a military mistake.
In short, there was no such case of overwhelming necessity as would have
made the denial of a right of way to the German Army equivalent to a
refusal to save German independence from destruction, and therefore to
an act of war against her, justifying a German conquest of Belgium. You
can therefore leave the abstract question of international rights of way
quite unprejudiced by your action. You can leave every question between
the belligerents fully open, and yet, in the common interest of the
world, ask Germany to clear out of Belgium, into France or across the
Channel, if she can, back home if she can force no other passage