,
and guarantees that nothing of the sort shall happen again. There is as
yet no mention of the nature of these guarantees. Just exactly what is
to happen to Poland, Austria, and the Turkish Empire does not appear in
this prospectus. The German Chancellor is equally elusive. The Kaiser
has stampeded the peace-at-any-price people of Great Britain by
proclaiming that Germany wants peace. We knew that. But what sort
of peace? It would seem that we are promised vaguely evacuation and
reparation on the western frontier, and in addition there are to be
guarantees--but it is quite evident that they are altogether different
guarantees from Mr. Asquith's--that nothing of the sort is ever to
happen again. The programme of the British and their Allies seems
to contemplate something like a forcible disarmament and military
occupation of Belgium, the desertion of Serbia and Russia, and the
surrender to Germany of every facility for a later and more successful
German offensive in the west. But it is clear that on these terms as
stated the war must go on to the definite defeat of one side or the
other, or a European chaos. They are irreconcilable sets of terms.

Yet it is hard to say how they can be modified on either side, if the
war is to be decided only between the belligerents and by standards of
national interest only, without reference to any other considerations.
Our Allies would be insane to leave the Hohenzollern at the end of
the war with a knife in his hand, after the display he has made of
his quality. To surrender his knife means for the Hohenzollern the
abandonment of his dreams, the repudiation of the entire education and
training of Germany for half a century. When we realise the fatality of
this antagonism, we realise how it is that, in this present anticipation
of hell, the weary, wasted and tormented nations must still sustain
their monstrous dreary struggle. And that is why this thought that
possible there may be a side way out, a sort of turning over of the
present endlessly hopeless game into a new and different and manageable
game through the introduction of some external factor, creeps and
spreads as I find it creeping and spreading.

That is what the finer intelligences of America are beginning to
realise, and why men in Europe continually turn their eyes to America,
with a surmise, with a doubt.

A point of departure for very much thinking in this matter is the recent
speech of President Wilson that herald