while France and England can send her neither money nor provisions, for they would fall into the hands of those engaged in torturing her, so much so that every attempt on their part to alleviate her sufferings would but retard her deliverance still further.  Did history ever witness a more poignant, a more desperate tragedy?  It is a fact that in the midst of this war we are constantly finding ourselves confronted with events such as history hitherto has never beheld.  A people resembling an enormous beast of prey, in order to punish a loyalty and heroism which, if it retained the slightest notion of justice and injustice, the smallest sense of human dignity and honour, it ought to worship on its knees:  this vast predatory race stealthily resolved to exterminate an inoffensive little nation whose soul it felt was too great to be enslaved or reduced to the semblance of its conqueror’s.  It was on the point of succeeding, amid the silence, the impotence, or the terror of the world, when from beyond the Atlantic a generous nation took that heroic little people under its protection.  It understood that what was involved was not merely an act of justice and elementary pity, but also and more particularly a higher duty towards the morality and the eternal conscience of mankind.  Thanks to this great nation’s intervention, it will not be said, in the days to come, that justice, loyalty, honesty and heroism are no more than dangerous illusions and a fool’s bargain, or that evil must necessarily, at all times and places, conquer whenever it is backed by force, or that the only reward which duty magnificently done may hope to receive on this earth is every manner of grief and disaster, ending in death by starvation.  So immense and triumphant an example of iniquity would strike the ideals of mankind a blow from which they would not recover for centuries.

3

But already this help is becoming exhausted; it cannot be indefinitely prolonged; and very soon it will be insufficient.  It is, moreover, at the mercy of the slightest diplomatic or political complication; and its failure will be irreparable.  It will mean utter famine, unexampled extermination, which till the end of the world will cry to heaven for vengeance.  It is no longer a question of weeks or months, but one of days.  That is where we stand; and these are the last hours granted by destiny to an inactive Europe wherein to expunge the shame of her indifference.

These hours belong almost solely to you, for others have not your power.  Whatever may happen, however long you may postpone the issue, one of these days you will be obliged to join in the fray.  Everything advises, everything orders you to do so; and I can see nothing on the side of honour, justice or humanity, on the side of the will of the centuries or the human race, nor even on the side of prudence and self-interest, that allows you to avoid it.  Is it not better and more worthy of yourselves than all the subtleties, plottings and petty bargainings of diplomacy?