a new consecration. But here in England our land is
fruitful and productive, owing to the pressure of the submarine
campaign, as it never was before; British farming and the American
fields have cause to bless rather than to curse the war. Only in
France has the tormented and poisoned earth itself been blasted by the
war, and only in France, even where there are no trenches, have whole
countrysides gone out of cultivation, so that in the course of a long
motor drive, the sight of a solitary plough at work, or merely a strip
of newly ploughed land amid the rank and endless waste, makes one's
heart leap.

No!--France is quite right. Her suffering, her restoration, her future
safety, as against Germany, these should be, must be, the first
thought of the Allies in making peace. And it is difficult for those
of us who have not seen, _to feel_, as it is politically necessary, it
seems to me, we should feel.

Since I was in France, however, a fortnight ago, the proceedings in
connection with the extension of the Armistice, and the new
restrictions and obligations laid on Germany, have profoundly affected
the situation in the direction that France desires. And when the
President returns from the United States, whither he is now bound, he
will surely go--and not for a mere day or two!--to see for himself on
the spot what France has suffered. If so, some deep, popular instincts
in France will be at once appeased and softened, and Franco-American
relations, I believe, greatly improved.

No doubt, if the President made a mistake in not going at once to the
wrecked districts before the Peace Conference opened--and no one has
insisted on this more strongly than American correspondents--it is
clear that it was an idealist's mistake. Ruins, the President seems to
have said to himself, can wait; what is essential is that the League
of Nations idea, on which not Governments only, but _peoples_ are
hanging, should be rapidly "clothed upon" by some practical shape;
otherwise the war is morally and spiritually lost.

Certainly the whole grandiose conception of the League, so vague and
nebulous when the President arrived in Europe, has been marvellously
brought out of the mists into some sort of solidity, during these
January weeks. Not, I imagine, for some of the reasons that have been
given. An able American journalist, for instance, writing to the
_Times_, ascribes the advance of the League of Nations project
entirely to the close su