ncidence of the
required retribution effectually to bear on them. The outcome might, not
inconceivably, be the virtual erasure of the Imperial dynasty, together
with the pedigreed-class rule on which it rests and the apparatus of
irresponsible coercion through which it works, in the Fatherland and in
its subsidiaries and dependencies.

With a sufficiently urgent realisation of their need of peace and
security, and with a realisation also that the way to avoid war is to
avoid the ways and means of international jealousy and of the national
discriminations out of which international jealousy grows, it is
conceivable that a government which should reflect the British temper
and the British hopes might go so far in insisting on a neutralisation
of the peoples of the Fatherland as would leave them without the
dynastic apparatus with which warlike enterprise is set afoot, and so
leave them also perforce in a pacific frame of mind. In time, in the
absence of their dearly beloved leavings of feudalism, an enforced
reliance on their own discretion and initiative, and an enforced respite
from the rant and prance of warlike swagger, would reasonably be
expected to grow into a popular habit. The German people are by no means
less capable of tolerance and neighbourly decorum than their British or
Scandinavian neighbours of the same blood,--if they can only be left to
their own devices, untroubled by the maggoty conceit of national
domination.

There is no intention herewith to express an expectation that this
out-and-out neutralisation of the Fatherland's international relations
and of its dynastic government will come to pass on the return of peace,
or that the German people will, as a precaution against recurrent
Imperial rabies, be organised on a democratic pattern by constraint of
the pacific nations of the league. The point is only that this measure
of neutralisation appears to be the necessary condition, in the absence
of which no such neutral league can succeed, and that so long as the war
goes on there is something of a chance that the British community may in
time reach a frame of mind combining such settled determination to
safeguard the peace at all costs, with such a degree of disregard for
outworn conventions, that their spokesmen in the negotiations may push
the neutralisation of these peoples to that length.

The achievement of such an outcome would evidently take time as well as
harsh experience, more time and har