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Show ENGLISH CRITIC CRITICISES ENGLAND. About the best thing we have seen on the cause of th war and the merits mer-its of the conflict comes from George Bernard Shaw. the English playwright, play-wright, who writing in the London Dailv NeW speaks plainly openly admitting ad-mitting that Great Britain was not forced into the war through a high sense of duty to the small empire bf Belgium but entered the struggle in order to hold in check the Germ- i empire in a war which, jf the Kaiser v.on. would place England at a greater disadvantage in commerce and national prestige. Shaw says Now that we are at war it is well we should know what the war is about. To begin with, we are not at war because Germany made an infamous proposal that we should allow al-low her to violate Belgian neutrality If it had suited us to accept that proposal, pro-posal, we should have found plenty of reason for accepting it The devotees de-votees of our own neutrality have found some or them already no more infamous than the diplomatic reasons we have given in the pa3t for courses which happen to be convention to us Let us, therefore, drop It. "Our national track of virtuous Indignation In-dignation is tiresome enough in peaceful peace-ful party strife at home, at war it la ungallant and unpardonable. Let ' us take our pugnacity to the field and leave our h; DOCriS and our bad blood at home They weaken the heroic lighter and encourage only blackguards. This war i a balance of power war and nothing else, and the fart! that we ail have to face is that, if our side is victorious, the result will be an overbalance of power in favor : of Russia, far more dangerous than I to all other eombatants than the One we are fighting to redress. "Prussian militarism has bullied I ns lor forty years, and months ngo neither Germanv nor France believed I that we would tight when it came to the poini That is why there wasj such a wild explosion ol delighted surprise when the French chamber learned thai we were game after all. That is why the Kaiser, though reck- less of everv other interest concerned, 'offered us the best excuse ho could invent for our neutrality, believing we were onlj too ieady to snatch tit it. And that is also why we had to I takn off our cOal and sail In We had to Bhow that when il comes to a balance ol power we are no mere dummy weight, in Hie scale Our immediate business there is to tight hard as we can, for our weight, 'when the settlement comes. I will depend on the part we shall have played iu the conflict 'Meanwhile the political influence ot organized la nor at uome must noi be waved in idle and exasperating platitudes about the wickedness 0 war and the extravagance of big af momenta and the simplicity f,f non l intervention and all other splintered planks of the old peace retrenchment and reform platform France instead of Using Iter surplus sur-plus Income in abolishing French slnms and building up French clnl dren into strong men and women, has tent it to Russia to strengthen the most tyrannical government In Europe Eu-rope and to secure the interest on her loan she has entered into an unnatural unnat-ural alliance with Russia against her more civilized neighbors "We have no right to throw stones at France on this account, tor we made an agreement With Russia of a still more sordidly commercial character char-acter for the exploitation of Persia with capital that should have fed our starving children, and now mark the consequences Germany, with hostile hos-tile France on one side and hostile Russia on the other is in a position I so dangerous that we here in our island can form no conception of Its j intolerable tension. By our blindness we have brought about the war We have deliberately added to. the strain by making a military and naval alliance alli-ance with France without at the samo time balancing its effect by assuring Germany that If she kept peace with Prance we would not help Russia against her, nor In the last resource allow Russia to advance her frontier w est ward. Is it to be wondered at that Potsdam Pots-dam militarism with a chronic panic pan-ic and with militarism raided, to desperation des-peration by the menace of Russia. France and England has made a wild attempt to cut its way out after af-ter a despairing appeal to let it fight one to two instead of one to three? "Let us bf just to Potsdam. It may serve Potsdam right that she frightened us all so much that we became incapable of realizing that our terror was nottiing to hers Bill If we had been true to civilization and kept our capital at home and our honor untarnished by squalid commercial commer-cial adventures in the east wc should have controlled the situation and kept the European peace History will noi excuse us because, after making war inevitable, we ran around at the last moment begging everybody not to make a disturbance." |
