h and in the power to produce it.

In spite, therefore, of France's victorious issue from the present
struggle (with the aid, this time, of England and America), her future
position remained precarious in the eyes of one who took the view that
European civil war is to be regarded as a normal, or at least a
recurrent, state of affairs for the future, and that the sort of
conflicts between organized great powers which have occupied the past
hundred years will also engage the next. According to this vision of the
future, European history is to be a perpetual prize-fight, of which
France has won this round, but of which this round is certainly not the
last. From the belief that essentially the old order does not change,
being based on human nature which is always the same, and from a
consequent skepticism of all that class of doctrine which the League of
Nations stands for, the policy of France and of Clemenceau followed
logically. For a Peace of magnanimity or of fair and equal treatment,
based on such "ideology" as the Fourteen Points of the President, could
only have the effect of shortening the interval of Germany's recovery
and hastening the day when she will once again hurl at France her
greater numbers and her superior resources and technical skill. Hence
the necessity of "guarantees"; and each guarantee that was taken, by
increasing irritation and thus the probability of a subsequent
_Revanche_ by Germany, made necessary yet further provisions to crush.
Thus, as soon as this view of the world is adopted and the other
discarded, a demand for a Carthaginian Peace is inevitable, to the full
extent of the momentary power to impose it. For Clemenceau made no
pretense of considering himself bound by the Fourteen Points and left
chiefly to others such concoctions as were necessary from time to time
to save the scruples or the face of the President.

So far as possible, therefore, it was the policy of France to set the
clock back and to undo what, since 1870, the progress of Germany had
accomplished. By loss of territory and other measures her population was
to be curtailed; but chiefly the economic system, upon which she
depended for her new strength, the vast fabric built upon iron, coal,
and transport must be destroyed. If France could seize, even in part,
what Germany was compelled to drop, the inequality of strength between
the two rivals for European hegemony might be remedied for many
generations.

Hence sprang th