Let me put it to the reader exactly why our failure to say plainly and exactly and conclusively what we mean to do about a score of points, and particularly about German economic life after the war, paralyses the penitents and friends and helpers that we could now find in Germany.  Let me ask the reader to suppose himself a German in Germany at the present time.  Of course if he was, he is sure that he would hate the Kaiser as the source of this atrocious war, he would be bitterly ashamed of the Belgian iniquity, of the submarine murders, and a score of such stains upon his national honour; and he would want to alter his national system and make peace.  Hundreds of thousands of Germans are in that mood now.  But as most of us have had to learn, a man may be bitterly ashamed of this or that incident in his country’s history—­what Englishman, for instance, can be proud of Glencoe?—­he may disbelieve in half its institutions and still love his country far too much to suffer the thought of its destruction.  I prefer to see my country right, but if it comes to the pinch and my country sins I will fight to save her from the destruction her sins may have brought upon her.  That is the natural way of a man.

But suppose a German wished to try to start a revolutionary movement in Germany at the present time, have we given him any reason at all for supposing that a Germany liberated and democratized, but, of course, divided and weakened as she would be bound to be in the process, would get better terms from the Allies than a Germany still facing them, militant, imperialist, and wicked?  He would have no reason for believing anything of the sort.  If we Allies are honest, then if a revolution started in Germany to-day we should if anything lower the price of peace to Germany.  But these people who pretend to lead us will state nothing of the sort.  For them a revolution in Germany would be the signal for putting up the price of peace.  At any risk they are resolved that that German revolution shall not happen.  Your sane, good German, let me assert, is up against that as hard as if he was a wicked one.  And so, poor devil, he has to put his revolutionary ideas away, they are hopeless ideas for him because of the power of the British reactionary, they are hopeless because of the line we as a nation take in this matter, and he has to go on fighting for his masters.

A plain statement of our war aims that did no more than set out honestly and convincingly the terms the Allies would make with a democratic republican Germany—­republican I say, because where a scrap of Hohenzollern is left to-day there will be a fresh militarism to-morrow—­would absolutely revolutionize the internal psychology of Germany.  We should no longer face a solid people.  We should have replaced the false issue of Germany and Britain fighting for the hegemony of Europe, the lie upon which the German Government has always traded, and in which our extreme Tory Press has always supported the German Government, by the true issue, which is freedom versus imperialism, the League of Nations versus that net of diplomatic roguery and of aristocratic, plutocratic, and autocratic greed and conceit which dragged us all into this vast welter of bloodshed and loss.