he individual German
citizen is more like the individual Anglo-Saxon than he is different
from him. The same hopes and the same fears animate him, and he is
sober and industrious quite as much as we are. He has similar problems
and similar interests.

Time must pass before the angry feeling that a great struggle produces
can die down. But there are already indications that this feeling is not
as intense with us as it was even a short time ago. Germany made a
colossal and unjustifiable blunder. She is responsible for the action of
her late Government. We think so, and we are not likely to change our
opinion on this point. The grief of our people over their dead, over the
lives that were laid down for the nation from the highest kind of
inspiration, will keep the public mind fixed on this conclusion. And so
will the waste and misery to the whole world which an unnecessary war
has brought in its train. But presently we shall ask ourselves, in
moments of reflection, whether this ought to be our final word, and
also, perhaps, whether some want of care on our own part, and certain
deficiencies of which we are now more conscious than we used to be, may
not have had something to do with the failure of other people to divine
our real mood and intentions. I am not sure that in days that are to
come we shall give ourselves the whole benefit of the doubt. However
this may be, we are in no case a vindictive people.

But in any view something serious is at stake. It will be a bad thing
for us, and it will be a bad thing for the world, if the people of the
vanquished nations are left to feel that they have no hope of being
restored to decent conditions of existence. At present despair is
threatening them. Their estimate is that the crushing burden of the
terms of peace, if carried out to their full possibilities, bars them
from the prospect of a better future. Their only way of deliverance may
well come to seem to them to lie in the grouping of the discontented
nationalities, and the faith that by this means, at some time which may
come hereafter, a new balance of power may begin to be set up.

Now this is not a good prospect, and the sooner we succeed in softening
the sense of real hardship out of which it arises the better. Germany
and Austria must pay the penalty they have incurred before the tribunal
of international justice. But that penalty ought to be tempered by
something that depends on even more than mercy. It is intended