Page:The guilt of William Hohenzollern.djvu/272

268 willing instrument of their plans, and were thereby placed in a false position. The great majority of the German people felt their solidarity, almost up to the very end of the war, and in many cases down to our days, with those who duped them and led them and all Europe to destruction. The nation was blind to their crimes and misdeeds; it screened them, and it passionately championed their innocence.

So, in spite of its moral blamelessness, it was burdened with the political guilt of the dynasty and its henchmen, and became the object of the fiercest hate and loathing to the whole world, a hatred that imposed upon it, after its defeat, the most terrible of peace terms and treated it as a race of lepers.

He who loves the German people, not only the national German but also the international Socialist and Democrat, to whom every nation is equally dear, must endeavour to deliver it from this terrible ban, to free it from the awful burden laid upon it by the old régime.

This process of the rehabilitation of the German people in international esteem is continually hampered, not only by those who still adhere to the fallen régime, or were even its actual accomplices, but also by politicians who, although they have now recognized how pernicious it was, still cannot make up their minds to see things as they really were.

They believe they are serving the German people by proving its innocence through the exculpation of its former masters. But all they are doing is merely to keep alive the appearance of its guilt, as that of its former rulers becomes more and more notorious from day to day. It is to be hoped that the German and Austrian documents now communicated will make the continuance of this perverse policy as impossible as they must make