Three Vital Points.

Compared to disarmament, all remaining questions whatsoever affecting peace are simple and secondary.  Indemnities for France or Russia, or both, a Polish Kingdom, a Balkan United States, the precise number of nations into which Austria-Hungary is to be shattered, the ownership of the east coast of the Adriatic, even the reparation of the infamy by which Denmark was robbed of Schleswig-Holstein—­what are these but favorable ground for the art of compromise?  The vital points, at any rate for us Westerners, are only three:  Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and disarmament. * * * Stay, there is another.  It is vital to Great Britain’s reputation that she should accept nothing—­neither indemnity, nor colonies; not a single pound, not a single square mile.

Many persons, I gather, find it hard to believe that Prussia will ever admit that she is beaten or consent to her own humiliation.  Naturally her conduct will depend upon the degree to which she is beaten.  She has admitted defeat and swallowed the leek before, though it is a long time ago.  Meanwhile she has forgotten, and her opponents seem to have forgotten also, that though her name is Prussia she is subject to the limitations of the human race.  Out of her prodigious score off little Denmark, her thrashing of Austria—­a country which never wins a war—­and her victory over France, there grew a legend that Prussia, and therefore Germany, was not as other nations.  This legend is contrary to fact.  Every nation must yield to force—­here, indeed, is Germany’s contribution to our common knowledge.

If in July, 1870, it had been prophesied that France would give up Alsace-Lorraine and pay two hundred millions to get rid of a foreign army of occupation, France would have protested that she would fight to the last man and to the last franc first.  But nations don’t do these things.  If Germany won the present war and fulfilled her dream of establishing an army in this island, we should yield, and we should submit to her terms, we who have never been beaten save by our own colonies—­that is a scientific certainty.  And Germany’s terms would not be amusing; in their terribleness they would outrun our poor Anglo-Saxon imagination.  Similarly, if Germany is beaten, she will bow the head, and to precisely the extent to which she is walloped.  We need not worry about that.  Were she recalcitrant we need not even murmur in her ear:  “What would you have extorted if you’d won?” A gesture of the still uplifted sword would suffice to convince her that facts are facts.

Assuming that the tide turns not again, the chances of a thorough, workmanlike common sense peace can only be imperiled by one thing—­the deep desire of France and of Belgium for repose and recuperation.  We in England do not know what war is.  We have not lived in hell.  Our plains have not been devastated, nor our women and children shot, nor our ears deafened by the boom of cannon, nor our cathedrals shelled,