rs, and still less can you keep his
submarines out of the sea. You can, of course, make reprisals, but you
can not hold him powerless as it was once possible to do. He can work
his bloody mischief on your civil life to the very end of the war, and
you must set your teeth and stick to your main attack. To that pitch
this war has come, and to that pitch every subsequent war will come.
The civil life will be treated as a hostage, and as it becomes more
and more accessible, as it will do, to the antagonist it will be more
and more destroyed. The sinking of the Lusitania is just a sign and a
sample of what war now becomes, its rich and ever richer opportunities
of unforgettable exasperation. Germany is resolved to hurt and destroy
to the utmost, every exasperated militarism will come naturally to
such resolves, and only by pain and destruction, by hurting, shaming
and damaging Germany to the point of breaking the German spirit can
this inflamed and war-mad people be made to relinquish their gigantic
aggression upon the world. Germany, that great camp of warriors, must
be broken as the Red Indians and the Zulus were broken, if
civilization is to have another chance, and its breaking cannot be
done without unparalleled resentments. War is war, and it is not the
Allies who have forced its logic to this bitter end.

Unless this war does help to bring about a lasting peace in the world,
it is idle to pretend that it will have been anything else but a
monstrous experience of evil. If at the end of it we cannot bring
about some worldwide political synthesis, unanimous enough and
powerful enough to prohibit further wars by a stupendous array of
moral and material force, then all this terrible year of stress and
suffering has been no more than a waste of life, and our sons and
brothers and friends and allies have died in vain. If we cannot summon
enough good-will and wisdom in the world to establish a world alliance
and a world congress to control the clash of "legitimate national
aspirations" and "conflicting interests" and to abolish all the
forensic trickeries of diplomacy, then this will be neither the last
war, nor will it be the worst, and men must prepare themselves to face
a harsh and terrible future, to harden their spirits against
continuing and increasing adversity, and to steel their children to
cruelty and danger. Revenge will become the burden of history. That is
the price men will pay for clinging to their little separ