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VI

SOME PROBLEMS OF READJUSTMENT: POLITICAL BOUNDARIES AND NATIONAL RIGHTS

VI

SOME PROBLEMS OF READJUSTMENT: POLITICAL BOUNDARIES AND NATIONAL RIGHTS

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annexations, no contributions, no punitive indemnities" has become a familiar formula for the settlement of the war's issues, dear to the hearts of doctrinaire political radicals and to the minds of sentimentalizing pacifists. Its generality and vagueness are the best of its endearing virtues. It is as unreflective, as unregarding of the concrete and specific constituents of an organization of democratic peace as the formulæ of the pan-Germanists among the Central Powers or the panic-Americans and bitter-enders, like Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and Bolo Pasha, among the democracies of the Entente. The notion on which the latter advocate their readjustment is the notion of vae victis, and for the Junkers of Germany nothing could be

more apropos to keep the people of Germany at war in the Junker interest. The notion which guides the anti-annexationists is in effect that of the status quo ante, and that is only just less desirable to the irresponsible German governing class than German victory. The formula against annexations, contributions, and indemnities really looks backward. It denies to the war the salutary consequences in the reorganization of mankind which alone can a little mitigate its horror. If acted upon, it would in a generation bring on a new war with the same motives in play as in this one. Regarded squarely, it is a piece of what William James used to call vicious abstractionism, generated without consideration of the specific situations and living problems it is intended to relieve and to settle; situations and problems which, moreover, have themselves so changed in character and implication since the beginning of the war that the bearing of any formula upon them, including the formulæ of democracy and nationality which dominate these studies, requires a constant and watchful readjust

ment that renders a priori assumptions of any sort venturesomely speculative.

Assumptions, however, must be made, and their danger is lessened in the degree in which they utter the enduring motives in human nature and social action. In the light of these, as well as in view of the originating conditions and purposes of the present war, a lasting peace cannot be a negotiated peace.

A lasting peace must needs be a dictated peace, and the dictator's victory must needs be at least so thoroughgoing as to compel, should it be found desirable, those members of the Central-European establishment whose policy is responsible for the atrocities on the high seas, in Belgium, in France, in Poland, and in Armenia, to stand public trial for murder. Peace without this degree of victory is too likely to be only an armistice: students of ancient history may recall the "negotiated" peace of Nikias between Athens and Sparta during the Peloponnesian war, a peace that served only to prolong the intolerable agony of the noblest family of mankind that an

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