e of the British
Empire has been impartially open to all the world. The extra-national
"possessions," the so-called "subject nations" in the Empires of
Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, are, in fact, possessions held in
trust against the day when the League of Free Nations will inherit for
mankind.

Is it to be union by conquest or is it to be union by league? For any
sort of man except the German the question is, Will you be a free
citizen or will you be an underling to the German imperialism? For the
German now the question is a far graver and more tragic one. For him it
is this: "You belong to a people not now increasing very rapidly, a
numerous people, but not so numerous as some of the great peoples of the
world, a people very highly trained, very well drilled and well armed,
perhaps as well trained and drilled and equipped as ever it will be. The
collapse of Russian imperialism has made you safe if now you can get
peace, and you _can_ get a peace now that will neither destroy you nor
humiliate you nor open up the prospect of fresh wars. The Allies offer
you such a peace. To accept it, we must warn you plainly, means refusing
to go on with the manifest intentions of your present rulers, which are
to launch you and your children and your children's children upon a
career of struggle for war predominance, which may no doubt inflict
untold deprivations and miseries upon the rest of mankind, but whose end
in the long run, for Germany and things German, can be only Judgment and
Death."

In such terms as these the Oceanic Allies could now state their war-will
and carry the world straightway into a new phase of human history. They
could but they do not. For alas! not one of them is free from the
entanglements of past things; when we look for the wisdom of statesmen
we find the cunning of politicians; when open speech and plain reason
might save the world, courts, bureaucrats, financiers and profiteers
conspire.

VII

THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY

From the very outset of this war it was manifest to the clear-headed
observer that only the complete victory of German imperialism could save
the dynastic system in Europe from the fate that it had challenged. That
curious system had been the natural and unplanned development of the
political complications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two
systems of monarchies, the Bourbon system and the German, then ruled
Europe between them. With the latter was associa