Page:Gilbert Keith Chesterton - How to Help Annexation (1918).djvu/4

4 any shyness or morbid self-criticism we may hitherto have remarked in the Prussian officer will be warmed by such encouragement into something almost suggestive of pride.

In plain words, if we can take at all seriously the proposal of a mere peace of evacuation, this is the only serious thing to be said of it. It will be a peace of which the Germans will talk, and of which they will even be logically justified in talking, precisely as they talk of the peace of '71. Now there is only one detail of differentiation upon which this plain fact might be challenged. It may be objected that in '71 the new German Empire forcibly annexed two French provinces on the fanciful pretext that centuries ago they admitted the feudal and very formal suzerainty of an old and utterly different German Empire. It may be urged, by those who profess to combine their care for peace with a care for justice and the liberation of peoples, that this at least will not now be repeated. The Germans will not, as might naturally be expected, declare the whole of Normandy and Picardy to be parts of Germany. This magnanimity is the more striking, and even surprising, because the annexation would be quite in accordance with those philological and ethnological discoveries which German science has always been so fortunate in making, at the very moment when they could be confirmed and embodied by German Imperialism. The Prussian professors, upon their own principles, might easily take Normandy on the ground that it is named after the Northmen. For that matter, the Prussian professors, upon the same