Your appeal to intellectual Germany we reciprocate with a question to intellectual England.  It is as follows:  How is it possible for you to witness your country’s present unheard of policy (so opposed to culture) without rising as one man against it?  Do you believe that we thinking Germans would ever, without saying or doing anything, observe an alliance of our Government, whose goal was the strengthening of imperialism and the subjugation and destruction of a cultured power, such as France or England?  Never!  Among your people only a very small number of brave scholars protested against this criminal alliance of your Government at the beginning of the war.  You others, you poets, painters, and musicians of present-day England were silent and permitted Sir Edward Grey to continue to sin against a people related to you by blood and intellect.  You raised your voice a little, Bernard Shaw!  But what did you propose to us:  “Refrain from your militarism, my dear Germans, and become again the congenial, complacent poets and thinkers, the people of Goethe and Beethoven, whom no one hated!  Then we will surely help you against the bad Russians!”

Is not this proposal a bit too naive for you, Bernard Shaw?  We are situated in the midst of Russians and Frenchmen, who have formed an open alliance against us for more than twenty years.  Our neighbors in the East denounce nothing more than us, and our neighbors in the West denounce us and plan against us, who have for nearly half a century evinced nothing but friendliness toward them.  When such enemies surround us, does not your friendly counsel, Bernard Shaw, seem as if you said to us:  “Just let yourself be massacred, Germans!  Afterward your British cousins will vouchsafe you their protection.”

Germany Not Isolated.

Do you think that we would carry on our militarism and our expensive drilling if we lived on an island as you do?  We would not think of it.  We would speedily dispatch a blood-thirsty butcher, like your Lord Kitchener, from our island to our most unhealthy colony.  We could not even reconcile our worthy Dr. Karl Peters, who had dealt a little unscrupulously with a few negro women, with our conceptions of culture, and had to pass him over to you!  But the thought shall not come to me or to us, as it does to your Prime Ministers, to pose as angels of light, a fact about which you have yourself told your compatriots the bitter truth to our great joy.  We admit having injured Belgium’s neutrality, but we have only done it because of dire necessity, because we could not otherwise reach France and take up the fight against two sides forced upon us.  Belgium’s independence and freedom, which is suddenly of the utmost importance to your King and your Ministers, we have not touched.  Even after the expeditious capture of Liege we asked Belgium for the second time:  “Let us pass quickly through your country.  We will make good every damage, and will not take away a square foot