No treaty of peace can end that hate, and so long as Germany sees fit to identify herself with Hohenzollern dreams of empire and a warfare of massacre and assassination, there must be war henceforth, open, or but thinly masked, against Germany.  It will be but the elementary common sense of the situation for all the Allies to plan tariffs, exclusions, special laws against German shipping and shareholders and immigrants for so long a period as every German remains a potential servant of that system.

Whatever Germany may think of the Hohenzollerns, the world outside Germany regards them as the embodiment of homicidal nationalism.  And the settlement of Europe after the war, if it is to be a settlement with the Hohenzollerns and not with the German people, must include the virtual disarming of those robber murderers against any renewal of their attack.  It would be the most obvious folly to stop anywhere short of that.  With Germany we would welcome peace to-morrow; we would welcome her shipping on the seas and her flag about the world; against the Hohenzollerns it must obviously be war to the bitter end.

But the ultimate of all sane European policy, as distinguished from oligarchic and dynastic foolery, is the establishment of the natural map of Europe.  There exists no school of thought that can claim a moment’s consideration among the Allies which aims at the disintegration of the essential Germany or the subjugation of any Germans to an alien rule.  Nor does anyone grudge Germany wealth, trade, shipping, or anything else that goes with the politician’s phrase of “legitimate expansion” for its own sake.  If we do now set our minds to deprive Germany of these things in their fullness, it is in exactly the same spirit as that in which one might remove that legitimate and peaceful implement, a bread knife, from the hand of a homicidal maniac.  Let but Germany cure herself of her Hohenzollern taint, and the world will grudge her wealth and economic pre-eminence as little as it grudges wealth and economic pre-eminence to the United States.

Now the probabilities of a German revolution open questions too complex and subtle for our present speculation.  I would merely remark in passing that in Great Britain at least those possibilities seem to me to be enormously underrated.  For our present purpose it will be most convenient to indicate a sort of maximum and minimum, depending upon the decision of Germany to be entirely Hohenzollern or wholly or in part European.  But in either case we are going to assume that it is Germany which has been most exhausted by the war, and which is seeking peace from the Allies, who have also, we will assume, excellent internal reasons for desiring it.

With the Hohenzollerns it is mere nonsense to dream of any enduring peace, but whether we are making a lasting and friendly peace with Germany or merely a sort of truce of military operations that will be no truce in the economic war against Hohenzollern resources, the same essential idea will, I think, guide all the peace-desiring Powers.  They will try to draw the boundaries as near as they can to those of the natural map of mankind.