There can be little doubt that Russia will gain the enormous advantage of a free opening into the Mediterranean and that the battle of the Marne turned the fortunes of France from disaster to expansion.  But the rest of the settlement is still vague and uncertain, and German imperialism, at least, is already working hard and intelligently for a favorable situation at the climax, a situation that will enable this militarist empire to emerge still strong, still capable of recuperation and of a renewal at no very remote date of the struggle for European predominance.  This is a thing as little for the good of the saner German people as it is for the rest of the world, but it is the only way in which militant imperialism can survive at all.

The alternative of an imperialism shorn of the glamour of aggression, becoming constitutional and democratic—­the alternative, that is to say, of a great liberal Germany—­is one that will be as distasteful almost to the people who control the destinies of Germany today, and who will speak and act for Germany in the final settlement, as a complete submission to a Serbian conqueror would be.

At the final conference of settlement Germany will not be really represented at all.  The Prussian militarist empire will still be in existence, and it will sit at the council, working primarily for its own survival.  Unless the Allies insist upon the presence of representatives of Saxony, Bavaria, and so forth, and demand the evidence of popular sanctions—­a thing they are very unlikely to demand—­that is what “Germany” will signify at the conference.  And what is true of Germany will be true, more or less, of several other of the allied powers.

A conference confined purely to the belligerents will be, in fact, a conference not even representative of the belligerents.  And it will be tainted with all the traditional policies, aggressions, suspicions, and subterfuges that led up to the war.  It will not be the end of the old game, but the readjustment of the old game, the old game which is such an abominable nuisance to the development of modern civilization.  The idealism of the great alliance will certainly be subjected to enormous strains, and the whole energy of the Central European diplomatists will be directed to developing and utilizing these stresses.

This, I think, must be manifest even to the foreign offices most concerned.  They must see already ahead of them a terrible puzzle of arrangement, a puzzle their own bad traditions will certainly never permit them to solve.  “God save us,” they may very well pray, “from our own cleverness and sharp dealing,” and they may even welcome the promise of an enlarged outlook that the entry of the neutral powers would bring with it.

Every foreign office has its ugly, evil elements, and probably every foreign office dreads those elements.  There are certainly Russian fools who dream about India, German fools who dream about Canada and South America, British fools who dream about Africa and the East; aggressionists in the blood, people who can no more let nations live in peace than kleptomaniacs can keep their hands in their own pockets.  But quite conceivably there are honest monarchs and sane foreign ministers very ready to snatch at the chance of swamping the evil in their own Chancelleries.