All these seem to Americans unnecessary,
inexpedient, and unjustifiable methods of warfare, sure to breed hatred
and contempt toward the nation that uses them, and therefore to make it
difficult for future generations to maintain peace and order in Europe.
They cannot help imagining the losses civilization would suffer if the
Russians should ever carry into Western Europe the kind of war which the
Germans are now waging in Belgium and France. They have supposed that
war was to be waged in this century only against public, armed forces
and their supplies and shelters.
These opinions and prepossessions on the part of the American people
have obviously grown out of the ideals which the early English colonists
carried with them to the American wilderness in the seventeenth century,
out of the long fighting and public discussion which preceded the
adoption of the Constitution of the United States in the eighteenth
century, and out of the peculiar experiences of the free Commonwealths
which make up the United States, as they have spread across the almost
uninhabited continent during the past 125 years.
The experience and the situation of modern Germany have been utterly
different.
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