NEUTRALITY:

THE CRUCIFIXION OF PUBLIC OPINION

By

S. Ivor Stephen

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

1916

(page 43 & 149-150)

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF.

AN INTRODUCTION.

The author hopes the reader will bear with him in his efforts to show what some great writers some of our papers and some of the vilifiers had to say about this very same Kaiser before this war broke out.

Mr. Aleister Crowley, the great English writer and poet, says: “It was my purpose to expose the infamous pretense, which, however, is not too inane to dupe even clean-sighted Englishmen in their hysteric hour—the pretense that the Kaiser is a “mad dog,” a homicidal maniac, a man like Nebuchadnezzer in the Hebrew fable, or like “Atilla, the scourge of God,” or Tamerlane. It is a lie. The Kaiser has always been, and is today, a man of peace. He has indeed lived up to the maxim “Si vis pacem, para bellum,” and, loaded with the legacy of hate which the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine had thrust upon his shoulders, he could do no less without offering the breast of Germany to the ravisher.

A lamb to the slaughter, indeed, with Le Revanche in every mouth! What could he do, with men yet alive who remembered Jena and the ceaseless raids and ravages of Bonaparte? But in a hundred crises he kept his head; he kept the peace. He had plenty of chances to smash France; he did not take them.

An ambitious prince might have put a relative on the throne of Louis XIV while France was torn by the Boulanger affair, the Panama scandal, the Dreyfus horror, when Diogenes might have gone through France with a modern searchlight for his lantern without finding a single man who was not a traitor to his country, or at least to the Republic, and the most trustworthy man of affairs was he, who could be trusted to put the “double-cross” on every one. The Kaiser never stirred.

It would have been easy to destroy the Russian menace at the time, when Japan was straining the sinews of the Tartar giant, or when the Moscow Revolution showed that the Tsar could not trust his own soldiers, and the Imperial Guard, hastily summoned from St. Petersburg, shut up the garrison of Moscow in the Kremlin, trained their own guns upon them, and disarmed them. The Kaiser did nothing. He kept the peace.”

Thus an eminent Englishman’s view of the Kaiser. But he’s not alone in his land to hold such view.

Aleister Crowley, the famous English writer, states: “Nobody can understand the mystery of France’s participation in this unholy alliance with England and Russia. One motive is the recovery of that lost glory, and of that supreme position in Europe. The other consideration has to do with the vast sums transmitted from Paris banking houses to Petrograd, Moscow and Odessa.

“When Russia leads the war to Armageddon, France must follow. Hesitation would entail the cancellation of the enourmous indebtedness, a flat repudiation. A stroke of the autocratic pen in Petrograd can bring the French to bankruptcy, and well they know on which side their bread is buttered. I for my part feel but the deepest sympathy for her, because I love her, and it makes me sad to think what a fall she has had since those splendid days under Richelieu and Louis XIV.

“It seems but yesterday when she dictated policies to every chancellery! No merely earthly splendor seems at all comparable with hers from the age of Mazarin to that of the French Revolution. Then comes the Napoleonic glory, and we have Talleyrand triumphant at the congress of Vienna. The third Napoleon continues the magnificent procession.

“Paris is always the Queen City of the world, reigning in undisputed sway over men and manners, over arts and sciences, the home of beauty and delight. How shocking the collapse when a unified Germany, frugal, domesticated,, pious, comes between exquisite France and the glories she has lost. It is an old, old story of Cinderella stepping out of the kitchen to eclipse her proud sister.

“I know Germany. I spent a month there every year, and I know how intellectual Germany thinks and feels about France. There’s no prejudice, hatred feeling of ‘Revanche,’ disdain or contempt in Germany against France. Just to the contrary, the fine arts of France, her culture and painting have become a cult with the Germans. The appreciation of Rodin was first initiated in Germany.

“They venerate Anatole France; Flaubert, Balzac, Maupassant produce the same effect upon them as though they were the flowerings of German art and creation. They adore the folk lore of southern France. You can find passionate admirers of Mistral in little German towns, in German alleys and garrets. It is the world’s loss that France and Germany are not united politically. France and Germany ought to be the Keepers of the Light, the bulwarks of continental freedom and culture. But, alas! Fate has decreed otherwise.”