states and to their people, that a war is inevitable, that it must come.  It will be asked:  “Are you so sure of it?  Who knows?” If we finally come to the point of making the attack, all the weight of the imponderables, which weigh much more than the material weights, will be on the side of our antagonist whom we have attacked.  “Holy Russia” will be filled with indignation at the attack.  France will glisten with weapons to the Pyrenees.  The same thing will happen everywhere.  A war into which we are not borne by the will of the people—­such a war will of course be carried on, if in the last instance the established authorities consider and have declared it to be necessary.  It will be carried on with energy and perhaps victoriously, as soon as the men come under fire and have seen blood; but there will not be back of it, from the start, the same dash and heat as in a war in which we are attacked....

I do not believe—­to sum up—­that any disturbance of the peace is in immediate prospect; and I ask you to deal with the law that lies before you, independently of any such idea or apprehension, simply as a means for making the great force which God has lodged in the German nation completely available in the event of our needing it.  If we do not need it, we shall not call for it.  We seek to avoid the chance of our needing it.  This effort on our part is still, in some degree, impeded by threatening newspaper articles from foreign countries; and I wish to address to foreign countries especially the admonition to discontinue these threats.  They lead to nothing.  The threat which we receive, not from the foreign government, but in the press, is really a piece of incredible stupidity, if you think what it means—­that by a certain combination of words, by a certain threatening shape given to printer’s ink, a great and proud power like the German Empire is assumed to be capable of intimidation.  This should be discontinued; and then it would be made easier for us to assume a more conciliatory and obliging attitude toward our two neighbors.  Every country is responsible in the long run, somehow and at some time, for the windows broken by its press; the bill is presented some day or other, in the ill-humor of the other country.  We can easily be influenced by love and good-will,—­too easily perhaps,—­but most assuredly not by threats.  We Germans fear God, but nothing else in the world; and it is the fear of God that makes us love and cherish peace.  But whoever, despite this, breaks it, will find that the warlike patriotism that in 1813, when Prussia was weak, small, and exhausted by plunder, brought her whole population under her banners, has to-day become the common heritage of the whole German nation; and whoever attacks the German nation will find it united in arms, and in every soldier’s heart the firm faith “God will be with us.”

BJOeRNSTJERNE BJOeRNSON

(1832-)