France may drive her from Alsace and Lorraine. Russia may
drive her from Poland. She knew when she opened fire that these were the
stakes in the game; and we are bound to support France and Russia until
they are won or lost, unless a stalemate reduces the whole method of
warfare to absurdity. Austria, too, knew that the Slav part of her
empire was at stake. By winning these stakes the Allies will wake the
Kaiser from his dream of a Holy Teuton Empire with Prussia as the Head
of its Church, and teach him to respect us; but that once done, we must
not allow our camp followers to undo it all again by spiteful
humiliations and exactions which could not seriously cripple Germany,
and would make bad blood between us for a whole generation, to our own
great inconvenience, unhappiness, disgrace, and loss. We and France have
to live with Germany after the war; and the sooner we make up our mind
to do it generously, the better. The word after the fight must be _sans
rancune_; for without peace between France, Germany, and England, there
can be no peace in the world.

3. War, as a school of character and a nurse of virtue, must be formally
shut up and discharged by all the belligerents when this war is over. It
is quite true that ill-bred and swinish nations can be roused to a
serious consideration of their position and their destiny only by
earthquakes, pestilences, famines, comets' tails, Titanic shipwrecks,
and devastating wars, just as it is true that African chiefs cannot make
themselves respected unless they bury virgins alive beneath the
doorposts of their hut-palaces, and Tartar Khans find that the
exhibition of a pyramid of chopped-off heads is a short way to impress
their subjects with a convenient conception of their divine right to
rule. Ivan the Terrible did undoubtedly make his subjects feel very
serious indeed; and stupid people are apt to believe that this sort of
terror-stiffened seriousness is virtue. It is not. Any person who should
set-to deliberately to contrive artificial earthquakes, scuttle liners,
and start epidemics with a view to the moral elevation of his
countrymen, would very soon find himself in the dock. Those who plan
wars with the same object should be removed with equal firmness to
Hanwell or Bethlehem Hospital. A nation so degraded as to be capable of
responding to no higher stimulus than that of horror had better be
exterminated, by Prussian war lords or anyone else foolish enough to
waste powd