As for Germany, I can see little hope except in a sentence of outlawry. Mere black-listing of the names of responsible German commanders, although worth doing (and I have reason to believe that at the French War Office it is being done) with a view to retribution, is not going to change the German character. We shall have to revise our notions of both municipal and international law as regards her. The tendency of English law has long been, as an acute jurist has pointed out,[75] to lay more emphasis on domicile than on nationality, the disabilities of the alien have been diminished almost to vanishing-point, and British citizenship itself could be had almost for the asking. Not of it need the alien knocking at our hospitable doors say, in the words of the chief captain, “With a great sum obtained I this freedom.” It has been made disastrously cheap. All that is likely to be changed. It is not a little significant that already the courts have begun to take judicial notice of the peculiar morality of the German and have expressly made it the basis of a decision extending the conception of what constitutes a prisoner of war.[76] And alone among the emergency legislation the drastic Aliens Act is not limited in its preamble, as are the other Acts, to the duration of the war. These things are portents. It is impossible to believe that a revolution more catastrophic than anything through which Europe has passed, a revolution beside which the French Revolution assumes the proportions of a storm in a tea-cup, can leave our conceptions of law, whether municipal or international, unchanged.
I make no apology, and I trust that none is needed, for these speculations. Reports of atrocities can serve no useful purpose unless they move men to reflect no less resolutely than deeply upon what is to be done to deliver Europe from the scourge of their repetition. It may well be that my own reflections will seem cynical to one, depressing to another, arbitrary to a third. They are not the idols of the theatre, and in academic circles they may not be fashionable. But the catastrophe that has disturbed the dreams of the idealogues must teach jurists and statesmen to beware of the opiate of words and sacramental phrases. That, however, is a task which belongs to the future. The immediate enterprise is not for lawyers but for our gallant men in the field. They, and they alone, can lay the foundations of an enduring peace by an unremitting and inexorable war. They are the true ministers of justice.