of complete victory.

We refused this stipulation, not because we were after those colonies,
but because a so-called neutral power tried to impose conditions upon us
she would never have dreamed of asking from France.

If we were hankering after conquest we would have made war long ago. We
would have done so during the Morocco crisis, when Russia had not yet
recovered from the Japanese war; when Turkey was still a mighty empire,
ready to take our side, overawing the Balkan States and threatening
Russia; when Rumania was our ally and when France, trying to swallow up
the independent States of Morocco, but put herself morally in the wrong.

We refrained from war not because England supported France. The
developments of the last week have shown that we are ready to face
England, too, when needs must be. We decided for peace because we were
convinced that no amount of colonial aggrandizement could compensate us
for the dangers and horrors of a big European war.

Our diplomatic methods during those days may have been brusque and
annoying, but our aim was peace. Though we are held up continually as
the disturber of European peace, driven on by a mad desire for
territorial aggrandizement, we are the only big European nation which
has not increased her territory during the last twenty-five years.

Russia tried to steal the Far East and is now going half shares with
England in Persia. England annexed the Boer republics and is playing
with Russia for the Persian States.

France has taken Morocco; Italy, Tripoli; Austria-Hungary has formally
annexed Bosnia.

Even little Servia, who is praised just now as the most just and
God-fearing nation, has succeeded in wresting a large part of Macedonia,
inhabited by Bulgarians, from her Bulgarian allies.

The only conquest we went in for was an exchange of a strip of West
Africa, which we got from France as a kind of hush money, for her
Morocco policy, England, Italy, and Spain having taken their payment in
advance.

We have led no war of aggression for new territories, and we are held up
to moral contempt by all those nations who have taken their shares.

We went to war because we had to keep faith with Austria. We do not and
we did not approve of every step our ally has taken. But our idea of a
faithful alliance is not that you can chuck your partner whenever he has
made a mistake, but that you must stick to him through good and evil.

You may upbraid him privately if you dis