liberty against the Czar. Would you defend one despotism against another? Unite and make war on both. There was no reason for war between the Western nations; French, English, and German, we are all brothers and do not hate one another. The war-preaching press is envenomed by a minority, a minority vitally interested in maintaining these hatreds, but our peoples, I know, ask for peace and liberty and that alone. The real tragedy, to one situated in the midst of the conflict and able to look down from the high plateaus of Switzerland into all the hostile camps, is the patent fact that actually each of the nations is being menaced in its dearest possessions—in its honour, its independence, its life. Who has brought these plagues upon them? brought them to the desperate alternative of overwhelming their adversary or dying? None other than their governments, on whom, in my opinion, the guilt rests; the three rapacious eagles, the three empires, the tortuous policy of the house of Austria, the ravenous greed of Russia, the brutality of Prussia. The worst enemy of each nation is not without, but within its frontiers, and none has the courage to fight against it.
It is the monster of a hundred heads, the monster named Imperialism, the will to pride and domination, which seeks to absorb all, or subdue all, or break all, and will suffer no greatness except itself. For the Western nations Prussian imperialism is the most dangerous. Its hand uplifted in menace against Europe has forced us to join in arms against this outcome of a military and feudal caste, which is the curse not only of the rest of the world but also of Germany itself, whose entire thought it has subtly poisoned. We must destroy this first; but not this alone, the Russian autocracy too must be dealt with in the fulness of time. Every nation to a greater or less extent has an imperialism of its own, and whether it be military, financial, feudal, republican, social or intellectual, it is always the octopus sucking the best blood of Europe. Let the free men of all the countries of Europe when this war is over take up again the motto of Voltaire: Écrasez l’infâme.
