If a State hold valuable minerals, as Sweden has iron, and Belgium coal, and Rumania oil, or if it has abundance of water power, like Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland; or if it holds the mouth of a navigable river, the upper course of which belongs to another nation, a great State may conquer and annex that small State as soon as it finds that it needs minerals or water power or river mouth.  It has the power, and power gives right.  The interests, sentiments of patriotism, and love of independence of the small people go for nothing.  Civilization has turned back upon itself; culture is to expand itself by barbaric force; Governments derive their authority, not from the consent of the governed, but from the weapons of the conqueror; law and morality between nations have vanished.  Herodotus tells us that the Scythians worshipped as their god a naked sword; that is the deity to be installed in the place once held by the God of Christianity, the God of righteousness and mercy.

States—­mostly despotic States—­have sometimes applied parts of this system of doctrine; but none have proclaimed it.  The Roman conquerors of the world were not a scrupulous people, but even they stopped short of these principles; certainly they never set them up as an ideal; neither did those magnificent Teutonic Emperors of the Middle Ages, whose fame Gen. von Bernhardi is fond of recalling.  They did not enter Italy as conquerors, claiming her by right of the strongest; they came on the faith of a legal title which, however fantastic it may seem to us today, the Italians themselves, and, indeed, the whole of Latin Christendom, admitted.  Dante, the greatest and most patriotic of Italians, welcomed the Emperor Henry VII. into Italy, and wrote a famous book to prove his claims, vindicating them on the ground that he, as heir of Rome, stood for law and right and peace.  The noblest title which these Emperors chose to bear was that of Imperator Pacificus.

In the Middle Ages, when men were always fighting, they appreciated the blessings of war much less than does Gen. von Bernhardi, and they valued peace, not war, as a means to civilization and culture.  They had not learned in the school of Treitschke that peace means decadence and war is the true civilizing influence.

Great Achievements of Small States.

The doctrines above stated are, as I have tried to point out, well calculated to alarm small States which prize their liberty and their individuality, and have been thriving under the safeguard of treaties; but there are other considerations affecting those States which ought to appeal to men in all countries, to strong nations as well as to weak nations.

The small States whose absorption is now threatened have been a potent and useful—­perhaps the most potent and useful—­factor in the advance of civilization.  It is in them and by them that most of what is most precious in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in science, and in art has been produced.