r help to make the ending of the German
threat more conclusive, and link herself definitely with the grand
alliance of the Western Powers? Now she could make a very good bargain
indeed. If she inquired she would find Britain ready enough to
guarantee the integrity and protection of Holland's colonial empire
forever by the British fleet. All the four Western Powers, France,
Belgium, Holland, Britain, would be willing to make the most binding
pledges for such mutual protection. It is the manifest common-sense of
the settlement that they should set up such a collective guarantee.
And, in addition, there are those Frisian Islands, and East Friesland,
and that dangerous wedge that Germany drives into Holland along the
Rhine. It is not difficult to map a very much improved Dutch frontier
along the Ems, and thence striking down to the Rhine and meeting the
iron country on the left bank of the Rhine, whose annexation and
exploitation is Belgium's legitimate compensation for her devastation
and sufferings. Here are the makings of a safer Greater Holland!
Thousands of Dutchmen must be looking on the map at the present time
and thinking such things as this. There, clearly and attractively, is
the price of alliance.

The price of neutrality is an intact Holland--and a certain isolation
in the years ahead. But still, I admit, a not unhappy Holland, Dutch
and free. Until a fresh Anglo-German struggle begins. Yet, be it
noted, a Holland a little helpless and friendless if some renascent
Asiatic Power should presently covet her Eastern possessions.

The price of participation with Germany, on the other hand, is
complete envelopment in the warm embrace of the "good German
brotherhood"--the gradual substitution of the German language for the
Dutch, and a Germanization of such colonies as the Allies may still
leave for Holland, frequent State visits from Kaisers, and the
subordination of Dutch mercantile interests to those of Hamburg and
Altona and (Germanized) Antwerp. And--the everlasting howling
everywhere of "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles."

(No! No! They will never fight for the Germans. No sane people will
ever fight for the Germans if they can possibly avoid it. Not even our
press censorship, not even the Maximilian Krafts in our silliest
weekly papers will provoke Holland to that.)

But I have a sort of feeling, for the reasons I have stated, that even
without any serious breach of Dutch neutrality by the Germans, Holla