And if we can, why is there all this voluminous, uneasy, unquenchable disputation about War Aims?

As to the first question, I would say that the gist of the dispute between the Central Powers and the world can be written easily without undue cramping in an ordinary handwriting upon a postcard.  It is the second question that needs answering.  And the reason why the second question has to be asked and answered is this, that several of the Allies, and particularly we British, are not being perfectly plain and simple-minded in our answer to the first, that there is a division among us and in our minds, and that our division is making us ambiguous in our behaviour, that it is weakening and dividing our action and strengthening and consolidating the enemy, and that unless we can drag this slurred-over division of aim and spirit into the light of day and settle it now, we are likely to remain double-minded to the end of the war, to split our strength while the war continues and to come out of the settlement at the end with nothing nearly worth the strain and sacrifice it has cost us.

And first, let us deal with that postcard and say what is the essential aim of the war, the aim to which all other aims are subsidiary.  It is, we have heard repeated again and again by every statesman of importance in every Allied country, to defeat and destroy military imperialism, to make the world safe for ever against any such deliberate aggression as Germany prepared for forty years and brought to a climax when she crossed the Belgian frontier in 1914.  We want to make anything of that kind on the part of Germany or of any other Power henceforth impossible in this world.  That is our great aim.  Whatever other objects may be sought in this war no responsible statesman dare claim them as anything but subsidiary to that; one can say, in fact, this is our sole aim, our other aims being but parts of it.  Better that millions should die now, we declare, than that hundreds of millions still unborn should go on living, generation after generation, under the black tyranny of this imperialist threat.

There is our common agreement.  So far, at any rate, we are united.  The question I would put to the reader is this:  Are we all logically, sincerely, and fully carrying out the plain implications of this War Aim?  Or are we to any extent muddling about with it in such a way as to confuse and disorganize our Allies, weaken our internal will, and strengthen the enemy?

Now the plain meaning of this supreme declared War Aim is that we are asking Germany to alter her ways.  We are asking Germany to become a different Germany.  Either Germany has to be utterly smashed up and destroyed or else Germany has to cease to be an aggressive military imperialism.  The former alternative is dismissed by most responsible statesmen.  They declare that they do not wish to destroy the German people or the German nationality or the civilized life of Germany.