Page:Gilbert Keith Chesterton - How to Help Annexation (1918).djvu/13

 Rh succeed. No one will steal what he will know that he cannot keep; no one will again commit the crime first and make up the excuses afterwards, if he knows that those excuses will not be heard.

But there is a final and farcical fact which crowns the argument. It is equally obvious that this Pacifist compromise about Alsace not only gives a special advantage to external aggression, but also gives a special advantage to internal misgovernment. It will not only be to the interest of a prince to seize a province by war, but it will also be to his interest to oppress it when he has got it. For, supposing for the sake of argument that there is now a German majority in Alsace, how was that majority attained? Even German citizens are not sufficiently tame to troop into a strange country in sufficient numbers for that. Even German officials are not sufficiently numerous to overbalance a population without assistance. The process was admittedly accelerated and completed by the continuous exodus of the original French inhabitants. That exodus in its turn was accelerated and completed by German tyranny, or what they regarded as German tyranny.

So that even if we were in any doubt about whether the Germans ruled badly, we could not (in common reason) have any doubt that it was to their interest to rule badly. If they did not, we can only suppose that they refrained from pursuing their most obvious advantage through some over-sensitive modesty in the German character, or some suicidal unselfishness in the Prussian policy. But even then we should have no guarantee that the next