Page:Gilbert Keith Chesterton - How to Help Annexation (1918).djvu/8

 8 a Teutonic transformation in Alsace as settling the matter, we simply hoist a signal to say that such matters can always be settled by annexation, so long as it is annexation by an autocracy. We offer a permanent prize and provocation to conquerors, so long as they are also despots. The military ruler has only to send in one body of his slaves in uniform and then another body of his slaves in mufti; and lands will be perpetually added to the possessions of pure despotism, amid Pacifist cheers for the principle of pure democracy.

To take a working model: suppose the Germans landed in Essex and succeeded in annexing that county. The justification of the act, by the recognised German philosophy of history, would, of course, be the easiest part of the matter; there could be no reasonable doubt that the county in question is "old German land." It is self-evident that Essex is only a degenerate version of East Saxony. It is merely the more eastern portion of the King of Saxony's dominions which, in some convulsion of the Dark Ages, has been so dislocated as to turn up at a considerable distance to the west.

It is unfortunate that the military acquisition of the territory would certainly present difficulties which are absent from this logical establishment of a claim to it; and even if it were successful, a problem of the population would remain. The Essex country folk are proverbially slow and conservative; and few of the rustics have any close acquaintance with anthropological and ethnological hypotheses. It is probable that an almost ineradicable prejudice, to the effect that they are an