Christianity and Patriotism
that if the revanche of the French should be successful now, the Germans would have to avenge it again; and so on without end.
To his arguments that the French were in duty bound to rescue their brothers who had been torn from them, we replied that the position of the inhabitants, of the majority of the working-class inhabitants, of Alsace-Lorraine under the rule of Germany had hardly become worse in any respect than the position in which they had been under the rule of France; and that because a few Alsatians would prefer to be reckoned as French than as Germans, or because he, our visitor, thought it desirable to restore the glory of the French arms, it was not merely not worth while to provoke the terrible calamities which would be produced by war, but not even right to sacrifice a single human life.
To his retort that it was all very well for us to talk like that since we had not had the same experience, but that we should speak very differently if the Baltic Provinces or Poland were taken from us, we replied that even from the political point of view the loss of Poland or the Baltic Provinces could not be a misfortune for us, but might rather be regarded as a blessing, since it would diminish the military force and political expenditure required for them. From the Christian point of view we could not think war right in any case, since war
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