if he was a wicked one. And so,
poor devil, he has to put his revolutionary ideas away, they are
hopeless ideas for him because of the power of the British reactionary,
they are hopeless because of the line we as a nation take in this
matter, and he has to go on fighting for his masters.

A plain statement of our war aims that did no more than set out honestly
and convincingly the terms the Allies would make with a democratic
republican Germany--republican I say, because where a scrap of
Hohenzollern is left to-day there will be a fresh militarism
to-morrow--would absolutely revolutionize the internal psychology of
Germany. We should no longer face a solid people. We should have
replaced the false issue of Germany and Britain fighting for the
hegemony of Europe, the lie upon which the German Government has always
traded, and in which our extreme Tory Press has always supported the
German Government, by the true issue, which is freedom versus
imperialism, the League of Nations versus that net of diplomatic roguery
and of aristocratic, plutocratic, and autocratic greed and conceit which
dragged us all into this vast welter of bloodshed and loss.

VI

THE WAR AIMS OF THE WESTERN ALLIES

Here, quite compactly, is the plain statement of the essential cause and
process of the war to which I would like to see the Allied Foreign
Offices subscribe, and which I would like to have placed plainly before
the German mind. It embodies much that has been learnt and thought out
since this war began, and I think it is much truer and more fundamental
than that mere raging against German "militarism," upon which our
politicians and press still so largely subsist.

The enormous development of war methods and war material within the last
fifty years has made war so horrible and destructive that it is
impossible to contemplate a future for mankind from which it has not
been eliminated; the increased facilities of railway, steamship,
automobile travel and air navigation have brought mankind so close
together that ordinary human life is no longer safe anywhere in the
boundaries of the little states in which it was once secure. In some
fashion it is now necessary to achieve sufficient human unity to
establish a world peace and save the future of mankind.

In one or other of two ways only is that unification possible. Either
men may set up a common league to keep the peace of the earth, or one
state must ultimately become so great