[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]

Maximilian Harden, author of the article of which the following is a translation, is the widely known German journalist and publicist who has been termed “the German George Bernard Shaw.”  The article was published in the second February number of Die Zukunft.

Japan and the United States are being wooed.  Ever since the Western powers’ hope of speedy decisive blows on the part of Russia have shriveled up, they would like to lure the Japanese Army, two to four hundred thousand men, to the Continent.  What was scoffed at as a whim of Pinchon and Clemenceau now is unveiled as a yearning of those at the head of the Governments.

The sentimental wish to see Germany’s collapse completed by the activities of the allied European powers now ventures only shyly into the light of day.  The ultimate wearing down of the German Army assures us of victory; but a speedy termination of the war under which the whole hemisphere suffers would be preferable.  The Trans-Siberian Railway could bring the Japanese to Poland and East Prussia.  The greatness of the expenditures therefor cannot frighten him who knows what tremendous sums each week of the war costs the Allies.  Where it is a question of our life, of the existence of all free lands, every consideration must vanish.  Public opinion desires an agreement with the Government of the Mikado.

These sentences I found in the Temps.  England will not apply the brakes.  Mr. Winston Churchill, to be sure, lauds the care-free fortune of his fatherland, which even after Trafalgar, he says, did not command the seas as freely as today; but in his inmost heart even this “savior of Calais” does not cheat himself concerning the fact that it is a matter of life and death.  In order not to succumb in such a conflict, England will sacrifice its prosperous comfort and the lordly pride of the white man just as willingly as it would, if necessary, Gibraltar and Egypt, (which might be within the reach of German armies in the Spring.)

Will Japan follow the luring cry?  Any price will be paid for it.  What is Indo-China to the Frenchmen, whose immense colonial empire is exploited by strangers, if thereby they can purchase the bliss of no longer being “the victims of 1870”?  And the yellow race that co-operated on Europe’s soil in the most momentous decision of all history would live in splendor such as had never before been seen, and could keep China, the confused, reeling republic, for at least a generation in its guardianship.

The land of the Stars and Stripes is only being asked to give its neutrality the color of good-will.  It is, for the time being, unlikely that the United States would stand beside our opponents with army and navy, as has been urgently counseled by Mr. Roosevelt, (who received the honorary doctor’s title in Berlin and as a private citizen reviewed a brigade drill at the Kaiser’s side.) Nevertheless, experience warns us to be prepared for every change of weather, from the distant West, as well as the distant East, (and to guard ourselves alike against abuse and against flattery.)