e
Marne turned the fortunes of France from disaster to expansion. But the
rest of the settlement is still vague and uncertain, and German
imperialism, at least, is already working hard and intelligently for a
favorable situation at the climax, a situation that will enable this
militarist empire to emerge still strong, still capable of recuperation
and of a renewal at no very remote date of the struggle for European
predominance. This is a thing as little for the good of the saner German
people as it is for the rest of the world, but it is the only way in
which militant imperialism can survive at all.

The alternative of an imperialism shorn of the glamour of aggression,
becoming constitutional and democratic--the alternative, that is to say,
of a great liberal Germany--is one that will be as distasteful almost to
the people who control the destinies of Germany today, and who will
speak and act for Germany in the final settlement, as a complete
submission to a Serbian conqueror would be.

At the final conference of settlement Germany will not be really
represented at all. The Prussian militarist empire will still be in
existence, and it will sit at the council, working primarily for its own
survival. Unless the Allies insist upon the presence of representatives
of Saxony, Bavaria, and so forth, and demand the evidence of popular
sanctions--a thing they are very unlikely to demand--that is what
"Germany" will signify at the conference. And what is true of Germany
will be true, more or less, of several other of the allied powers.

A conference confined purely to the belligerents will be, in fact, a
conference not even representative of the belligerents. And it will be
tainted with all the traditional policies, aggressions, suspicions, and
subterfuges that led up to the war. It will not be the end of the old
game, but the readjustment of the old game, the old game which is such
an abominable nuisance to the development of modern civilization. The
idealism of the great alliance will certainly be subjected to enormous
strains, and the whole energy of the Central European diplomatists will
be directed to developing and utilizing these stresses.

This, I think, must be manifest even to the foreign offices most
concerned. They must see already ahead of them a terrible puzzle of
arrangement, a puzzle their own bad traditions will certainly never
permit them to solve. "God save us," they may very well pray, "from our
own cleve