of the war, and, while it fought the enemy, fed and succoured at the same time 800,000 French civilians—­men and officers dividing their rations with starving women and children, and in every pause of fighting, spending all their energies in comforting the weak, the hungry, and the sick:—­that very Army is sorry now for the German women and children, as it sees them in the German towns.  It is our own soldiers who have been demanding food and pity.

The Allies, indeed, have been for some time sending food to their starving enemies.  Mr. Hoover—­all honour to the great man!—­is ceaselessly at work.  If only no hitch in the Peace interrupts the food-trains and the incoming ships, so that no more children die!

Some modifications in the Peace Terms would, clearly, be accepted by the public opinion of the Allied countries.  No one, I believe, who has seen the Lens district, and the deliberate and cruel destruction of the French industrial north, will feel many qualms about the Saar valley.  We may hold a personal opinion that it might have been wiser for France in her own interests to claim the coal only.  But it is for France to decide, and it will be for the League of Nations to watch over the solution she has insisted on, in the common interest.  But concessions as to Upper Silesia and East Prussia would be received, I have little doubt, with general relief and assent; and the common sense of Europe will certainly see both the wisdom and expediency of setting German industry to work again as speedily as possible, and of so arranging and facilitating the payment of her huge money debt to the Allies that it should not weigh too intolerably on the life of an unborn generation—­an innocent generation, who will grow up, as it is, inevitably, under one of the darkest shadows ever cast by history.

Meanwhile now that the just and stern verdict of Europe has been given on the war and its authors, the second and greater half of the Allied task remains.  Vast questions are left to the League of Nations, outside the Peace; the re-settlement, politically, of large tracts of Europe; the whole problem of disarmament, involving the future of British and American sea-power; the responsibilities of America in Europe; the economic adjustment of the world.  But perhaps the greatest problem of all is the ethical one.  How long shall we keep our wrath?  Germany has done things in this war which shame civilisation, and seem to make a mockery of all ideas of human progress.  But yet!—­we must still believe in them; or the sun will go out in heaven.  We must still believe that in the long run hatred kills the civilised mind, and to put it at its lowest, is a mortal waste of human energies.  Has Christianity, swathed as it is in half-decayed beliefs, any longer power to help us?  Yet whatever else in the Christian system is breaking down, the Christian idea of a common fellowship of man holds the field as never before.  And both the Christian idea and common sense tell us that till there is again some sort of international life in Europe, Europe will be unsound and her wounds unhealed.  We call it impossible.  But the good man, the just man, the merciful man is still among us, and—­