ought to be, a precarious and regrettable interval between wars.  I do not discuss this view.  Those who hold it are not accessible to argument, and can only be met by action.  There are others, however, who do think war an evil, who do want a durable peace, but who genuinely believe that the way indicated is the best way to achieve it.  With them it is permitted to discuss, and it should be possible to do so without bitterness or rage on either side.  For as to the end, there is agreement; the difference of opinion is as to the means.  The position taken is this:  The enemy deliberately made this war of aggression against us, without provocation, in order to destroy us.  If it had not been for this wickedness there would have been no war.  The enemy, therefore, must be punished; and his punishment must make him permanently impotent to repeat the offence.  That having been done, Europe will have durable peace, for there will be no one left able to break it who will also want to break it.  Now, I believe all this to be demonstrably a miscalculation.  It is contradicted both by our knowledge of the way human nature works and by the evidence of history.  In the first place, wars do not arise because only one nation or group of nations is wicked, the others being good.  For the actual outbreak of this war, I believe, as I have already said, that a few powerful individuals in Austria and in Germany were responsible.  But the ultimate causes of war lie much deeper.  In them all States are implicated.  And the punishment, or even the annihilation, of any one nation would leave those causes still subsisting.  Wipe out Germany from the map, and, if you do nothing else, the other nations will be at one another’s throats in the old way, for the old causes.  They would be quarrelling, if about nothing else, about the division of the spoil.  While nations continue to contend for power, while they refuse to substitute law for force, there will continue to be wars.  And while they devote the best of their brains and the chief of their resources to armaments and military and naval organization, each war will become more terrible, more destructive, and more ruthless than the last.  This is irrefutable truth.  I do not believe there is a man or woman able to understand the statement who will deny it.

In the second place, the enemy nation cannot, in fact, be annihilated, nor even so far weakened, relatively to the rest, as to be incapable of recovering and putting up another fight.  The notions of dividing up Germany among the Allies, or of adding France and the British Empire to Germany, are sheerly fantastic.  There will remain, when all is done, the defeated nations—­if, indeed, any nation be defeated.  Their territories cannot be permanently occupied by enemy troops; they themselves cannot be permanently prevented by physical force from building up new armaments.  So long as they want their revenge, they will be able sooner or later to take it.  If evidence of this were wanted, the often-quoted case of Prussia after Jena will suffice.