lad to publish Mr. Shaw's brilliant appeal to the President of
the United States, because we believe that when the time for settlement
arrives, the influence of America will be a powerful, perhaps a
decisive, factor in obtaining it. We agree, too, with him that while she
is not likely to respond to an appeal to intervene on the side of the
Entente or the Alliance, the case of Belgium, the innocent victim of the
war, is bound to find her in a very different mood. The States are
already Belgium's almoner; it is only a step further for them to come in
as her savior. But on a vital point we disagree with Mr. Shaw. His Irish
mind puts the case with an indifference to which we cannot pretend. We
have got to save Western Europe from a victory of Prussian militarism,
as well as to avenge Belgium and set her on her feet again. We regard
the temper and policy revealed in Germany's violation of Belgium soil
and her brutalization of the Belgian people as essential to our judgment
of this war and its end. And we dare not concede an inch to Mr. Shaw's
"right of way" theory. His distinction between "right of way" and a
"right of conquest" has no practical effect other than to extinguish the
rights of small nationalities as against great ones, who alone have the
power to take a "right of way" when it is refused, and afterward to turn
it into a right of conquest. Germany's action was not only a breach of
her own treaty (only revealed within a few hours of its execution), but
of Article I. of The Hague Convention on the rights of neutral powers:

"THE TERRITORY OF NEUTRAL POWERS IS INVIOLABLE."

It is not therefore a small thing that Germany has ripped clean through
the whole fabric of The Hague Conventions of 1907. Could the American
Government, aware of that fact, address herself to intervention on the
Belgian question without regard to the breaches of international law
which were perpetrated, first, through the orignal German invasion of
Belgium, and then in the conduct of the campaign in that country?

*A German Letter to G. Bernard Shaw*

By Herbert Eulenberg.

_The following letter from the noted German playwright Eulenberg,
whose plays of a decided modern tendency have been presented
extensively in Germany and in Vienna, was made public by the German
Press Bureau of New York in October_, 1914.

Bernard Shaw: You have addressed us Germans several times of late
without receiving a reply from us. T