to the world, or leave that sweet satisfaction to your children; for certainly there never was a more fortunate opportunity nor a moment more favourable than the present, to silence all the passions and listen only to the sentiments of humanity and reason.  This moment once lost, what bounds can be ascribed to a war which all my efforts will not be able to terminate.  Your Majesty has gained more in ten years, both in territory and riches, than the whole extent of Europe.  Your nation is at the highest point of prosperity, what can it hope from war?  To form a coalition with some Powers on the Continent?  The Continent will remain tranquil; a coalition can only increase the preponderance and continental greatness of France.  To renew intestine troubles?  The times are no longer the same.  To destroy our finances?  Finances founded on a flourishing agriculture can never be destroyed.  To wrest from France her colonies?  The colonies are to France only a secondary object; and does not your Majesty already possess more than you know how to preserve?  If your Majesty would but reflect, you must perceive that the war is without an object; or any presumable result to yourself.  Alas!  What a melancholy prospect; to fight merely for the sake of fighting.  The world is sufficiently wide for our two nations to live in, and reason sufficiently powerful to discover the means of reconciling everything, when a wish for reconciliation exists on both sides.  I have, however, fulfilled a sacred duty, and one which is precious to my heart.

    I trust your Majesty will believe the sincerity of my
    sentiments, and my wish to give you every proof of the same,
    etc.

    (Signed) NAPOLEON.

This letter indicates the mind and heart of a great statesman.  The thinking people, and therefore the most reliable patriots, would receive a similar appeal to-day from the Kaiser in a different spirit than did the King and the Government of George III.

We believe that the war with Germany was forced upon us, and that Mr. Asquith’s Government, and especially Sir Edward Grey (his Foreign Secretary) used every honourable means to avoid it, but the cause and origin of it sprang out of the defects of managing and settling the wars that raged at the beginning of the last century, and Pitt, aided by those colleagues of his who were swayed by his magnetic influence, are responsible to a large degree in laying the foundation of the present menace to European concord.  Napoleon’s plan of unification would have kept Prussian militarism in check.  He looked, and saw into the future, while Pitt and his supporters had no vision at all.  They played the Prussian game by combining to bring about the fall of the monarch who should have been regarded as this country’s natural ally, and by undoing the many admirable safeguards which were designed to prevent Prussia from forcing other German States under her dominion.  Napoleon predicted