r, like Norway,
Sweden, and Switzerland; or if it holds the mouth of a navigable river,
the upper course of which belongs to another nation, a great State may
conquer and annex that small State as soon as it finds that it needs
minerals or water power or river mouth. It has the power, and power
gives right. The interests, sentiments of patriotism, and love of
independence of the small people go for nothing. Civilization has turned
back upon itself; culture is to expand itself by barbaric force;
Governments derive their authority, not from the consent of the
governed, but from the weapons of the conqueror; law and morality
between nations have vanished. Herodotus tells us that the Scythians
worshipped as their god a naked sword; that is the deity to be installed
in the place once held by the God of Christianity, the God of
righteousness and mercy.

States--mostly despotic States--have sometimes applied parts of this
system of doctrine; but none have proclaimed it. The Roman conquerors of
the world were not a scrupulous people, but even they stopped short of
these principles; certainly they never set them up as an ideal; neither
did those magnificent Teutonic Emperors of the Middle Ages, whose fame
Gen. von Bernhardi is fond of recalling. They did not enter Italy as
conquerors, claiming her by right of the strongest; they came on the
faith of a legal title which, however fantastic it may seem to us today,
the Italians themselves, and, indeed, the whole of Latin Christendom,
admitted. Dante, the greatest and most patriotic of Italians, welcomed
the Emperor Henry VII. into Italy, and wrote a famous book to prove his
claims, vindicating them on the ground that he, as heir of Rome, stood
for law and right and peace. The noblest title which these Emperors
chose to bear was that of Imperator Pacificus.

In the Middle Ages, when men were always fighting, they appreciated the
blessings of war much less than does Gen. von Bernhardi, and they valued
peace, not war, as a means to civilization and culture. They had not
learned in the school of Treitschke that peace means decadence and war
is the true civilizing influence.

Great Achievements of Small States.

The doctrines above stated are, as I have tried to point out, well
calculated to alarm small States which prize their liberty and their
individuality, and have been thriving under the safeguard of treaties;
but there are other considerations affecting those States which ough