Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/261

 world can no longer go on, under the perpetual threat of its recommencement. As long as in Berlin, Vienna, and Constantinople emperors, believing themselves to be invested with the Divine mission of governing the world, continue to dispose as they will of all the moral and material forces of their docile people, ready to follow them in all their enterprises, there can be no security for us, no social life possible, no hope of development nor of democratic progress. No treaty, whatever may be its terms, can give us the indispensable guarantee since we know from experience how enemy countries treat those scraps of paper.

On the 2nd of August 1914 the German minister at Brussels solemnly declared that we should remain apart from this conflict, that it might be we should see our neighbour's house in flames, but our own roof would be spared. Some hours after he delivered the ultimatum giving us, as is known, but a few hours to reply. Almost immediately the invasion began, and