Page:Gilbert Keith Chesterton - How to Help Annexation (1918).djvu/14

 14 aggressor, having modelled himself upon Moltke and the successful Alsatian annexation, would necessarily share the characteristic Teutonic bashfulness or the typical Teutonic self-effacement. The commonsense of the crux would remain what it is; and it is that, in this particular position, it is obviously better policy to set up a bad government than a good one. Make the lives of the old inhabitants intolerable, and they will not remain to resist the new inhabitants; anybody can see that and (by all accounts) the German rulers have seen it very clearly.

To sum up, therefore, these are the three consequences of testing the claims to Alsace by an official counting of heads at the moment. First, it will quite obviously set up a principle which is a permanent provocation to war. Second, it will provoke quarrels in which a rigid despotism will always have a better chance than a free country. Third, it will actually make a malevolent despotism more probable and practical than a benevolent despotism. The best man will always be the aggressor; the best aggressor will be the autocrat; the best autocrat will be the tyrant. Such is the goal, or golden age of republican idealism, towards which we apparently travel.

All this is the plainest rationality and policy, and applies to all the politics of all the peoples; in that sense it does not matter to what particular nation this disastrous policy is applied. But what, when all is said, is the nation to which we are applying it? Against what community are we specially asked to deal this stroke of folly and bad faith? We are asked to commit this treason especially at the expense of France; of the one nation with whom