question. He stammered out that in that particular case he, personally, would fight.
You believe, then, Mr. Advocate-General, that when a war breaks out there is on one side a Government entirely in the wrong, which attacks, and on the other a Government which has all the right on its side, and which suffers a cowardly aggression? You believe that it is easy to know who is in the wrong when a war breaks out! Look at the Boer government and the Japanese government! It was they who declared war. But are they for that any more the aggressors than the English and the Russian governments which provoked them into war?
In 1870 it was the French government which declared war for an alleged insult to its ambassador, although the ministers knew from the ambassador himself that there had been no such insult. But was the German government, with its Ems telegram trick, any less blameworthy?[1] When a war breaks out between two governments, the people never know which is the real aggressor. They do not find it out until long afterwards, when the war is over. If war had broken out six months ago between the French and the German governments over Morocco, we should have had to wait, probably for ten years, before we learnt all about the blunders and the blustering of your Delcasse. When a war breaks out, the big capitalist and governmental journals in each country always make out that the other country is the aggressor. As for us here, what we know is this, that if war occurs between France and Germany it will be a conflict between the capitalist classes for the markets of the world. Therefore, whoever may be the apparent aggressor, we will not fight. You patriots will fight if your
- ↑ To precipitate the war Bismarck caused the Berlin journals to publish a note worded in such a way as to lead the public to believe that the French ambassador had been "snubbed" by the King of Prussia at an interview in Ems. The American "sense of honor" is less delicate than that of the French. It required the typical incident of violence, the blowing up of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, to precipitate the Spanish-American war. It is not yet known "who blew up the Maine," though suspicion points its finger at American capitalists.
