want us to call you now, since
you repudiate the title of barbarians? Are you the grandsons of Goethe
or of Attila? Are you making war on enemies or on the human spirit? Kill
men if you like, but respect masterpieces. They are the patrimony of the
human race. You, like all the rest of us, are its depositories; in
pillaging it, as you do, you show yourselves unworthy of our great
heritage, unworthy to take your place in that little European army which
is civilization's guard of honor.

It is not to the opinion of the rest of the world that I address myself
in challenging you, Hauptmann. In the name of our Europe, of which you
have hitherto been one of the most illustrious champions, in the name of
that civilization for which the greatest of men have striven all down
the ages, in the name of the very honor of your Germanic race, Gerhart
Hauptmann, I abjure you, I challenge you, you and the intellectuals of
Germany, amongst whom I reckon so many friends, to protest with all your
energy against this crime which is recoiling upon you.

If you fail to do this, you will prove one of two things: either that
you approve what has been done--and in that case may the opinion of
mankind crush you--or else that you are powerless to raise a protest
against the Huns who command you. If this be so, by what title can you
still claim, as you have claimed, that you fight for the cause of
liberty and human progress? You are giving the world a proof that,
incapable of defending the liberty of the world, you are even incapable
of defending your own, and that the best of Germany is helpless beneath
a vile despotism which mutilates masterpieces and murders the spirit of
man.

I am expecting an answer from you, Hauptmann, an answer that may be an
act. The opinion of Europe awaits it as I do. Think about it: at such a
time silence itself is an act.

_Journal de Geneve_, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1914.

II. PRO ARIS[5]

Among the many crimes of this infamous war which are all odious to us,
why have we chosen for protest the crimes against things and not against
men, the destruction of works and not of lives?

Many are surprised by this, and have even reproached us for it--as if we
have not as much pity as they for the bodies and hearts of the thousands
of victims who are crucified! Yet over the armies which fall, there
flies the vision of their love, and of _la Patrie_, to which they
sacrifice themselves--over these lives which are passi