births. Whatever comes to Russia, to England, France as a
great free power is gone. Her future function will be to act in a
subordinate capacity alone; supported and encouraged by England she
will be forced to keep up a great army in order that the most capable
people of the continent, with a population no defeat can arrest,
shall not fill the place in Europe and in the world they are called
on surely to fill, and one that conflicts only with British aims and
appetites.

German expansion was no threat to France. It was directed to other
fields, chiefly those of commerce. In order to keep it from those
fields England fanned the dying fires of French resentment and strove
by every agency to kindle a natural sentiment into an active passion.

The historian of the future will record that whatever the immediate
fate of Germany may be, the permanent victim was France.

The day England won her to an active policy of vengeance against
the victor of 1870, she wooed her to abiding loss. Her true place in
Europe was one of friendship with Germany. But that meant, inevitably,
the discovery by Europe that the chief barrier to European concord
lay not in the armies of the powers, but in the ring of hostile
battleships that constrained her peoples into armed camps.

European militarism rests on English navalism. English navalism
requires for its continued existence a disunited Europe; and a Europe
kept apart is a Europe armed, anxious and watchful, bent on mutual
attack, its eyes fixed on the _earth_. Europe must lift its eyes
to the sea. There lies the highway of the nations, the only road to
freedom--the sole path to peace.

For the pent millions of Europe there can be no peace, no laying aside
of arms, no sincere development of trade or culture while one people,
_in Europe but not of Europe_, immune themselves from all attack,
and sure that whatever suffering they inflict on others can never be
visited on their own shores, have it in their power to foment strife
with impunity and to call up war from the ends of the earth while they
themselves enjoy the blessing of peace.

England, the soul and brain of this confederacy of war abroad remains
at peace at home. As I write these words a despatch from Sir Alfred
Sharpe, the correspondent of a London paper in France, comes to hand.
It should be placarded in every Foreign Office of the world, in every
temple of justice, in every house of prayer.

"It is difficult for the people in