their taking such a course as will
lead to a compact of the kind needed to safeguard the peace of the
country. The business interests have much to say in the counsels of the
Americans, and these business interests look to short-term
gains--American business interests particularly--to be derived from the
country's necessities. It is likely to appear that the business
interests, through representatives in Congress and elsewhere, will
disapprove of any peace compact that does not involve an increase of the
national armament and a prospective demand for munitions and an
increased expenditure of the national funds.

With or without the adherence of America, the pacific nations of Europe
will doubtless endeavour to form a league or alliance designed to keep
the peace. If America does not come into the arrangement it may well
come to nothing much more than a further continued defensive alliance of
the belligerent nations now opposed to the German coalition. In any case
it is still a point in doubt whether the league so projected is to be
merely a compact of defensive armament against a common enemy--in which
case it will necessarily be transient, perhaps ephemeral--or a more
inclusive coalition of a closer character designed to avoid any breach
of the peace, by disarmament and by disallowance and disclaimer of such
national pretensions and punctilio as the patriotic sentiment of the
contracting parties will consent to dispense with. The nature of the
resulting peace, therefore, as well as its chances of duration, will in
great measure be conditioned on the fashion of peace-compact on which it
is to rest; which will be conditioned in good part on the degree in
which the warlike coalition under German Imperial control is effectually
to be eliminated from the situation as a prospective disturber of the
peace; which, in turn, is a question somewhat closely bound up with the
further duration of the war, as has already been indicated in an earlier
passage.

CHAPTER VII

PEACE AND THE PRICE SYSTEM

Evidently the conception of peace on which its various spokesmen are
proceeding is by no means the same for all of them. In the current
German conception, e.g., as seen in the utterances of its many and
urgent spokesmen, peace appears to be of the general nature of a truce
between nations, whose God-given destiny it is, in time, to adjust a
claim to precedence by wager of battle. They will sometimes speak of it,
euphemistical