ould be that all
wars would be won by the country which made the biggest preparation
for war in times of peace. A law passed by neutral countries
forbidding their merchants from selling munitions would leave a
non-military nation, which had not been getting ready for war,
absolutely at the mercy of a neighbor who for years had been storing
up shells and guns for the purpose of unrighteous conquest. So clear
was this right to sell munitions that Germany did not dare protest,
but ordered Austria to do so instead. In reply, our government was
able to point out cases where Austrian firms had sold guns, etc., to
Great Britain during the Boer War as you have already been told, and
Austria had no answer to give.

What is more, at all of the meetings of the diplomats of different
nations at the Hague, called for the purpose of trying to prevent
future wars, if possible, or at least to make them more humane and
less brutal to the women and children and others who were not actually
fighting, Germany had always upheld the right of neutral nations to
sell arms. Moreover, her representatives had fought strongly against
any proposals to settle disputes by arbitration and peaceful
agreements. At a time when many European nations signed treaties with
the United States agreeing to allow one year to elapse between a
dispute which might lead to war and the actual declaring of war
itself, Germany positively refused to consider such an agreement.

As for the English blockade, England was doing no more to Germany than
Germany or any other country would have done to England if the English
navy had not been so strong. In our own Civil War the North kept up a
like blockade of the South and no nation protested against it, for it
was recognized as an entirely legal act. In the Franco-Prussian war of
1871, the Germans were blockading the city of Paris and the country
around it. The Frenchmen tried to send their women and children
outside the lines to be fed. The Germans drove them back at the point
of the bayonet, and told them that they might "fry in their own fat."
According to the laws of war they were perfectly justified in what
they did. Then, too, the English blockade, which stopped ships which
were found to be loaded with supplies for Germany and took them
peaceably to an English port, where it was decided how much the owners
should be paid for the cargoes, was a very different matter from the
brutal drowning of helpless men, women, and c