e, who has
seen the Lens district, and the deliberate and cruel destruction of
the French industrial north, will feel many qualms about the Saar
valley. We may hold a personal opinion that it might have been wiser
for France in her own interests to claim the coal only. But it is for
France to decide, and it will be for the League of Nations to watch
over the solution she has insisted on, in the common interest. But
concessions as to Upper Silesia and East Prussia would be received, I
have little doubt, with general relief and assent; and the common
sense of Europe will certainly see both the wisdom and expediency of
setting German industry to work again as speedily as possible, and of
so arranging and facilitating the payment of her huge money debt to
the Allies that it should not weigh too intolerably on the life of an
unborn generation--an innocent generation, who will grow up, as it is,
inevitably, under one of the darkest shadows ever cast by history.

Meanwhile now that the just and stern verdict of Europe has been given
on the war and its authors, the second and greater half of the Allied
task remains. Vast questions are left to the League of Nations,
outside the Peace; the re-settlement, politically, of large tracts of
Europe; the whole problem of disarmament, involving the future of
British and American sea-power; the responsibilities of America in
Europe; the economic adjustment of the world. But perhaps the greatest
problem of all is the ethical one. How long shall we keep our wrath?
Germany has done things in this war which shame civilisation, and seem
to make a mockery of all ideas of human progress. But yet!--we must
still believe in them; or the sun will go out in heaven. We must still
believe that in the long run hatred kills the civilised mind, and to
put it at its lowest, is a mortal waste of human energies. Has
Christianity, swathed as it is in half-decayed beliefs, any longer
power to help us? Yet whatever else in the Christian system is
breaking down, the Christian idea of a common fellowship of man holds
the field as never before. And both the Christian idea and common
sense tell us that till there is again some sort of international life
in Europe, Europe will be unsound and her wounds unhealed. We call it
impossible. But the good man, the just man, the merciful man is still
among us, and--

"What he wills, he does; and does so much
That proof is called impossibility."

MARY A. WARD.