No people has always been victorious; the peoples who have fought most wars in modern Europe, English, French and Germans, have had alternate victories and defeats.  A defeat often carries in its train reconsideration which is followed by renewed energy:  the greatness of England is largely due to its steadfast determination to destroy the Napoleonic Empire.  What elevates men is this steadfast and persevering effort, and a series of such collective efforts carries a nation to a high place.

There is nothing lasting in the existing groupings.  At the moment of common danger eternal union and unbreakable solidarity are proclaimed; but both are mere literary expressions.

Great Britain, the country which has the least need to make war, has been at war for centuries with nearly all the European countries.  There is one country only against which it has never made war, not even when a commercial challenge from the mercantile Republics of Italy seemed possible.  That country is Italy.  That shows that between the action of Italy there is not, nor can there be, contrast, and indeed that between the two nations there is complete agreement in European continental policy.  It is the common desire of the two nations, though perhaps for different reasons, that no one State shall have hegemony on the continent.  But between the years 1688 and 1815 Great Britain and France were at war for seventy years:  for seventy years, that is, out of a hundred and twenty-seven there was a state of deadly hostility between the two countries.

General progress, evinced in various ways, above all in respect for and in the autonomy of other peoples, is a guarantee for all.  No peoples are always victorious, none always conquered.  In the time of Napoleon the First the French derided the lack of righting spirit in the German peoples, producers of any number of philosophers and writers.  They would have laughed at anyone who suggested the possibility of any early German military triumph.  After 1815 the countries of the Holy Alliance would never have believed in the possibility of the revolutionary spirit recovering; they were sure of lasting peace in Europe.  In 1871 the Germans had no doubt at all that they had surely smothered France; now the Entente thinks that it has surely smothered Germany.

But civilization has gained something:  it has gained that collection of rules, moral conditions, sentiments, international regulations, which tend both to mitigate violence and to regulate in a form which is tolerable, if not always just, relations between conquerors and conquered, above all, a respect for the liberty and autonomy of the latter.

Now, the treaties which have been made are, from the moral point of view, immeasurably worse than any consummated in former days, in that they carry Europe back to a phase of civilization which was thought to be over and done with centuries ago.  They are a danger too.  For as everyone who takes vengeance does so in a degree greater than the damage suffered, if one supposes for a moment that the conquered of to-day may be the conquerors of to-morrow, to what lengths of violence, degradation and barbarism may not Europe be dragged?