But she could
hardly have controlled them even had she passionately desired to do so.
And she did not passionately desire to do so because, however little the
mass of the people outside Paris may have wished to massacre the
adherents of the old regime, the people as a whole welcomed deliverance
from calamity, even at the price of violent action.

We judge the French nation wholly differently to-day from the way we
judged it then, and it judges us differently. Yet it would have been
well had we not in the end of the eighteenth century taken an
exaggerated view of the French state of mind. We now realize that even
so great a man as Burke mistook a fragment for the whole. Much blood and
treasure might have been spared, and Napoleon might never have come into
existence, had we and others been less hasty.

It is therefore a good thing to keep before us that it is at least
possible that the verdict of mankind will be hereafter that when the
victory was theirs the Allies judged the people of Germany in a hurry
and reflected this judgment in the spirit in which certain of the terms
of peace were declared. The war had its proximate origin in the Near
East. It arose out of a supposed menace to Teuton by Slav. The Slavs
were not easy people to deal with, and the Teutons were not easy people
either. It was easy to drift into war. It may well prove true that no
one really desired this, and that it was miscalculation about the
likelihood of securing peace by a determined attitude that led to
disaster. It is certain that the German Government was deeply
responsible for the consequences. In the face of its traditional policy
and of utterances that came from Berlin the members of that Government
can not plead a mere blunder. None the less, a great deal may have been
due to sheer ineptitude in estimating human nature. How much this was
so, or how much an immoral tradition had its natural results, we can not
as yet fully tell, for we have not the whole of the records before us.
No one disputes that we were bound to impose heavy terms on the Central
Powers. The Allies have won the war and they were entitled to
reparation. This the Germans do not appear to controvert. They are a
people with whom logic is held in high esteem. But we have to do
something more than define the mere consequences of victory. We have
also to make plain on what footing we shall be willing to live with the
German nation in days that lie ahead. And here some enlarg