never distinguish
the cause of France from that of humanity. It is just because I am
French that I leave to our Prussian enemies the motto: "_Oderint, dum
metuant._" I wish France to be loved, I wish her to be victorious not
only by force, not only by right (that would be difficult enough), but
by that large and generous heart which is pre-eminently hers. I wish her
to be strong enough to fight without hatred and to regard even those
against whom she is forced to fight as misguided brothers who must be
pitied when they have been rendered harmless.

Our soldiers know it well, and I say nothing here of letters from the
front which tell us of compassion and kindness between the combatants.
But the civilians who are outside the combat, who do not fight, but
talk, who write and embroil themselves in a factitious and lunatic
agitation and are never exhausted; these are delivered over to the winds
of feverish violence. And there is the danger. For they form opinion,
the only opinion that can be expressed (all others are forbidden). It
is for these that I write, not for those who are fighting (they have no
need of us!).

And when I hear the publicists trying to rouse the energies of the
nation by all the stimulants at their disposal for this one object, the
total crushing of the enemy nation, I think it my duty to rise in
opposition to what I believe to be at once a moral and a political
error. You make war against a State, not against a people. It would be
monstrous to hold sixty-five million men responsible for the acts of
some thousands--perhaps some hundreds. Here in French Switzerland, so
passionately in sympathy with France, so eager both in its sympathies
and in the duty of restraining them, I have been able for three months,
by reading German letters and pamphlets, to examine closely the
conscience of the German nation. And I have been able thus to take
account of a good many facts which escape the greater part of the French
people. The first, the most striking, the most ignored, is that there is
not in Germany as a whole any real hatred of France (all the hatred is
turned against England). The especial pathos of the situation lies in
the fact that the French spirit only really began to exercise an
attraction upon Germany some two or three years ago. Germany was
beginning to discover the true France, the France of work and of faith.
The new generations, the young classes that they have just led to the
abattoir of Ypre