And this principle must be proposed and adopted at once without any delay. If we waited to announce it until--the war being over--the congress of the Powers were assembled, we should be suspected of wishing to make justice serve the interest of the conquered. It is now, when the forces of the two sides are equal, that we must establish this primordial right which soars over all the armies. From this principle we can deduce an immediate application. Since the whole of Europe is disorganized let us profit by it to set in order this untidy house! For a long time injustices have been accumulating. The moment of settling the general account will be an opportunity of rectifying them. The duty of all of us who feel for the brotherhood of mankind is to stand for the rights of the small nations. There are some in both camps: Schleswig, Alsace, Lorraine, Poland, the Baltic nations, Armenia, the Jewish people. At the beginning of the war Russia made some generous promises. We have registered them in our minds; let her not forget them! We are as determined about Poland, torn by the claws of three imperial eagles, as we are about Belgium crucified. We remember all. It is because our fathers, obsessed by their narrow realism and by selfish fears, let the rights of the people of Eastern Europe be violated, that today the West is shattered, and the sword hangs over the small nations, over you, my friends, as over the country which is befriending me, Switzerland. Whoever harms one of us harms all the others. Let us unite! Above all race questions, which are for the most part a mask behind which pride crouches and the interests of the financial or aristocratic classes dissemble, there is a law of humanity, eternal and universal, of which we are all the servants and guardians; it is that of the right of a people to rule themselves. And he who violates shall be the enemy of all. R. R. _De Amsterdammer Weekblad voor Nederland_, January 24, 1915. XII. OUR NEIGHBOR THE ENEMY _March 15, 1915._ While the war tempest rages, uprooting the strongest souls and dragging them along in its furious cyclone, I continue my humble pilgrimage, trying to discover beneath the ruins the rare hearts who have remained faithful to the old ideal of human fraternity. What a sad joy I have in collecting and helping them! I know that each of their efforts--like mine--that each of their words of love, rouses and turns against them the hostility of the two hostile camps. The combatants, pitted against each other, agree in hating those who refuse to hate. Europe is like a besieged town. Fever is raging. Whoever will not rave like the rest is suspected. And in these hurried times when justice cannot wait to study evidence, every suspect is a traitor. Whoever insists, in the midst of war, on defending peace among men knows that he risks his own peace, his reputation, his friends, for his belief. But of what value is a belief for which no risks are run?