the present war and fulfilled her dream of
establishing an army in this island, we should yield, and we should
submit to her terms, we who have never been beaten save by our own
colonies--that is a scientific certainty. And Germany's terms would not
be amusing; in their terribleness they would outrun our poor Anglo-Saxon
imagination. Similarly, if Germany is beaten, she will bow the head, and
to precisely the extent to which she is walloped. We need not worry
about that. Were she recalcitrant we need not even murmur in her ear:
"What would you have extorted if you'd won?" A gesture of the still
uplifted sword would suffice to convince her that facts are facts.

Assuming that the tide turns not again, the chances of a thorough,
workmanlike common sense peace can only be imperiled by one thing--the
deep desire of France and of Belgium for repose and recuperation. We in
England do not know what war is. We have not lived in hell. Our plains
have not been devastated, nor our women and children shot, nor our ears
deafened by the boom of cannon, nor our cathedrals shelled, nor our land
turned into a vast and bloody hospital; and we have not experienced the
appalling terror and shame of the foe's absolute dominion in our streets
and lanes. We have suffered; we shall suffer; but our suffering is
nought and less than nought weighed against the suffering on the
Continent. Why, in the midst of a war of unparalleled horror, we grumble
if a train is late! We can talk calmly of fighting Germany to a
stand-still, even if the job takes two years, and it behooves us to talk
so, and to prepare for the task; and for myself I am convinced that we
could make good the word. But France and Belgium will not use that tone,
if Russia does. Once the German armies are across the frontiers, the
instinctive pressure in favor of peace would be enormous, and
considerations of the distant future, of the welfare of our descendants
and the progress of mankind, would count little in the scale. In that
moment, if it happily comes, our part and Russia's would be to sustain
and encourage and salve the supreme victims of fate. A tremendous factor
in our favor would be the exhaustion of Germany; and the measure of our
power and of the fear we inspire is the furious intensity of Germany's
anger against our inconvenient selves. Without us the war could not last
beyond the end of this year, and the peace would be unsatisfactory.

And even with us, insisting on our