Whatever may be the result of this war on the field of battle, to France indeed it can bring only one end.  For her there is no future save that of a military empire.  Her life blood is dried up.  This war will sweep away all power of recuperation.  She will remain impotent to increase her race, sterile of new forces for good, her young men’s blood gone to win the barren fields of Alsace.  Her one purpose in the new Europe will be to hold a sword, not her own, over the struggling form of a resurgent Germany in the interests of another people.  Let Germany lose 1,000,000 men in the fighting of to-day, she can recover them in two years of peace.  But to France the losses of this war, whether she win or lose, cannot be made good in a quarter of a century of child births.  Whatever comes to Russia, to England, France as a great free power is gone.  Her future function will be to act in a subordinate capacity alone; supported and encouraged by England she will be forced to keep up a great army in order that the most capable people of the continent, with a population no defeat can arrest, shall not fill the place in Europe and in the world they are called on surely to fill, and one that conflicts only with British aims and appetites.

German expansion was no threat to France.  It was directed to other fields, chiefly those of commerce.  In order to keep it from those fields England fanned the dying fires of French resentment and strove by every agency to kindle a natural sentiment into an active passion.

The historian of the future will record that whatever the immediate fate of Germany may be, the permanent victim was France.

The day England won her to an active policy of vengeance against the victor of 1870, she wooed her to abiding loss.  Her true place in Europe was one of friendship with Germany.  But that meant, inevitably, the discovery by Europe that the chief barrier to European concord lay not in the armies of the powers, but in the ring of hostile battleships that constrained her peoples into armed camps.

European militarism rests on English navalism.  English navalism requires for its continued existence a disunited Europe; and a Europe kept apart is a Europe armed, anxious and watchful, bent on mutual attack, its eyes fixed on the earth.  Europe must lift its eyes to the sea.  There lies the highway of the nations, the only road to freedom—­the sole path to peace.

For the pent millions of Europe there can be no peace, no laying aside of arms, no sincere development of trade or culture while one people, in Europe but not of Europe, immune themselves from all attack, and sure that whatever suffering they inflict on others can never be visited on their own shores, have it in their power to foment strife with impunity and to call up war from the ends of the earth while they themselves enjoy the blessing of peace.

England, the soul and brain of this confederacy of war abroad remains at peace at home.  As I write these words a despatch from Sir Alfred Sharpe, the correspondent of a London paper in France, comes to hand.  It should be placarded in every Foreign Office of the world, in every temple of justice, in every house of prayer.