The Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers of the Entente,
assembled in London, feel it to be their bounden duty to
take note of the political crimes, which, under the name of
a German peace, have been committed against the Russian
people.
Russia was unarmed. Forgetting that for four years Germany
had been fighting against the independence of the nations
and the rights of mankind, the Russian government, in a mood
of singular credulity, expected to obtain by persuasion that
“democratic peace” which it had failed to obtain by war.
The results were immediate. The armistice had not expired
before the German command, though pledged not to alter the
disposition of its troops, transferred them en masse to the western front: and so
weak did Russia find herself that she dared raise no protest
against this flagrant violation of Germany’s plighted
word.
What followed was of like character. When the “German peace”
was translated into action, it was found to involve the
invasion of Russian territory, the destruction or capture of
all Russia’s means of defence, and the organization of
Russian lands for Germany’s profit—a proceeding which did
not differ from “annexation” because the word itself was
carefully avoided.
Meanwhile those very Russians who had made military
operations impossible found diplomacy impotent. Their
representatives were compelled to proclaim that, while they
refused to read the treaty presented to them, they had no
choice but to sign it: so they signed it, not knowing
whether, in its true significance, it meant peace or war,
nor measuring the degree to which Russian national life was
reduced by it to a shadow.
For us of the Entente Governments the judgment which the free
peoples of the world will pass on these transactions could
never be in doubt. Why waste time over German pledges, when
we see that at no period in her history of conquest—not when
she overran Silesia, not when she partitioned Poland—has she
exhibited herself so cynically as the destroyer of national
independence, the implacable enemy of the rights of man and
the dignity of civilized nations.
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Poland, whose heroic spirit has survived the cruelest of
national tragedies, is threatened with a fourth partition:
and to aggravate her wrongs the devices by which the last
trace of her independence is to be crushed are based on
fraudulent promises of freedom.
What is true of Russia and Poland is not less true of
Rumania, overwhelmed like them in the flood of a merciless
passion for domination.
Peace is loudly advertised, but under the thin disguise of
verbal professions lurk the brutal realities of war and the
untempered rule of lawless force.
Peace treaties such as these we do not, and cannot,
acknowledge. Our own ends are very different; we are
fighting, and mean to continue fighting, in order to finish
once for all with this policy of plunder, and to establish
in its place the peaceful reign of organized justice.
As the incidents of this long war unroll themselves before
our eyes, more and more clearly do we perceive that the
battles for freedom are everywhere interdependent; that no
separate enumeration of them is needed; that in every case
the single but all sufficient appeal is to justice and
right.
Are justice and right going to win? In so far as the issue
depends on battles yet to come, the nations whose fate is in
the balance may surely put their trust in armies which, even
under conditions more difficult than the present, shewed
themselves more than equal to the great cause entrusted to
their valour.
