Page:Gilbert Keith Chesterton - How to Help Annexation (1918).djvu/15

 Rh all European and American democracy has always sympathised in her self-defence, and whom even Prussian despotism has hardly dared to accuse of mere aggression. We are to do this wrong to the one people whom almost everybody admits to have been in the right. Nay, we are not only to disregard a justice which even the Germans can hardly deny, but a gratitude which we ourselves have incessantly asseverated.

Everyone knows that France could have had Alsace-Lorraine ten times over, if she had listened to the ten-fold flatteries of Germany during the present war, offering her every kind of concession to betray her Allies. Ever since she took the first rush and won the whole war for us in the passages of the Marne the Germans have been bribing her with both hands. If she had not so stood, England would never have had time to create an army, and most certainly Russia would never have had time to create a revolution. Now that England is at leisure to elaborate discipline, and Russia at leisure to enjoy liberty, it is pleasantly proposed that they should desert their first line of defence; that they should throw away the broken shield behind which they have done all things.

It is an agreeable proposal that England, having thus been able to increase her own armies, should throw over that historic army of which she at first formed a small part. But indeed it is not more quaint than the larger conception, that the ultimate work of the Russian Revolution should be the undoing of all the work of the French Revolution. France had stood upon the Meuse in the eighteenth