In many respects this war has been an amazing display of human inadaptability.  The military history of the war has still to be written, the grim story of machinery misunderstood, improvements resisted, antiquated methods persisted in; but the broad facts are already before the public mind.  After three years of war the air offensive, the only possible decisive blow, is still merely talked of.  Not once nor twice only have the Western Allies had victory within their grasp—­and failed to grip it.  The British cavalry generals wasted the great invention of the tanks as a careless child breaks a toy.  At least equally remarkable is the dragging inadaptability of European statecraft.  Everywhere the failure of ministers and statesmen to rise to the urgent definite necessities of the present time is glaringly conspicuous.  They seem to be incapable even of thinking how the war may be brought to an end.  They seem incapable of that plain speaking to the world audience which alone can bring about a peace.  They keep on with the tricks and feints of a departed age.  Both on the side of the Allies and on the side of the Germans the declarations of public policy remain childishly vague and disingenuous, childishly “diplomatic.”  They chaffer like happy imbeciles while civilization bleeds to death.  It was perhaps to be expected.  Few, if any, men of over five-and-forty completely readjust themselves to changed conditions, however novel and challenging the changes may be, and nearly all the leading figures in these affairs are elderly men trained in a tradition of diplomatic ineffectiveness, and now overworked and overstrained to a pitch of complete inelasticity.  They go on as if it were still 1913.  Could anything be more palpably shifty and unsatisfactory, more senile, more feebly artful, than the recent utterances of the German Chancellor?  And, on our own side—­

Let us examine the three leading points about this peace business in which this jaded statecraft is most apparent.

Let the reader ask himself the following questions:—­

Does he know what the Allies mean to do with the problem of Central Africa?  It is the clear common sense of the African situation that while these precious regions of raw material remain divided up between a number of competitive European imperialisms, each resolutely set upon the exploitation of its “possessions” to its own advantage and the disadvantage of the others, there can be no permanent peace in the world.  There can be permanent peace in the world only when tropical and sub-tropical Africa constitute a field free to the commercial enterprise of every one irrespective of nationality, when this is no longer an area of competition between nations.  This is possible only under some supreme international control.  It requires no special knowledge nor wisdom to see that.  A schoolboy can see it.  Any one but a statesman absolutely flaccid with overstrain can see that.  However difficult it may prove to work