plutocratic tendencies. She has on foot the largest army in the world
in front of a helpless Germany. She sends coloured troops to occupy
the most cultured and progressive cities of Germany, abusing the
fruits of victory. She shows no respect for the principle of
nationality or for the right of self-determination.

Germany is in a helpless and broken condition to-day; she will not
make war; she cannot. But if to-morrow she should make war, how many
peoples would come to France's aid?

The policy which has set the people of Italy against one another, the
diffusion of nationalist violence, the crude persecutions of enemies,
excluded even from the League of Nations, have created an atmosphere
of distrust of France. Admirable in her political perceptiveness,
France, by reason of an error of exaltation, has lost almost all the
benefit of her victorious action.

A situation hedged with difficulties has been brought about. The
United States and Great Britain have no longer any treaty of alliance
of guarantee with France. The Anglo-Saxons, conquerors of the War and
the peace, have drawn themselves aside. Italy has no alliance and
cannot have any. No Italian politician could pledge his country, and
Parliament only desires that Italy follow a democratic, peaceful
policy, maintaining herself in Europe as a force for equilibrium and
life.

France, apart from her military alliance with Belgium, has a whole
system of alliances based largely on the newly formed States: shifting
sands like Poland, Russia's and Germany's enemy, whose fate no one can
prophesy when Germany is reconstructed and Russia risen again, unless
she finds a way of remedying her present mistakes, which are much more
numerous than her past misfortunes. Thus the more France increases her
army, the more she corners raw materials and increases her measures
against Germany, the more unquiet she becomes.

She has seen that Germany, mistress on land, and to a large extent on
the seas, after having carried everywhere her victorious flag, after
having organized her commerce and, by means of her bankers, merchants
and capitalists, made vast expansions and placed a regular network of
relations and intrigue round the earth, fell when she attempted her
act of imperialistic violence. France, when in difficulties, appealed
to the sentiment of the nations and found arms everywhere to help her.
What then is able organization worth to-day?

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