The German Government has not yet realized the strength of the moral forces it has ranged against itself by its wanton attack upon European civilization.  It appears to imagine that, after having been sufficiently “punished” for her temerity in opposing the Kaiser’s hosts, France would be open to a bargain, under which she would be “let off” lightly on condition that she should agree to become the ally of Germany.

This idea has been clearly expressed of late in the German press.  It is based on the belief that the war was prepared by skillful British intrigues inspired by jealousy of Germany.  German statesmen cannot conceive that nations should fight for any cause loftier than material “interests.”  Hence the constant mistakes of their diplomacy and its failure to foresee that little Belgium would resist German pretensions or that England would go to war for “a scrap of paper.”  Now they imagine that the determination of France to fight to the last in defense of her honor and her superior civilization can be undermined by an offer to mitigate the material losses she may suffer from the war.

The German view was most clearly expressed in the remarkable dispatch to the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant from its Berlin correspondent, which was reproduced in The Times of yesterday.  Politicians in Berlin, he wrote,

see in England the land which has brought about the outbreak of the war by finely played intrigue, in order to let dangerous Russia bleed herself to death, to the end that against Germany, even a victorious Germany, she may herself acquire great advantages, both in trade and on the sea, and in order to make France entirely dependent upon her.  The consequence of this opinion is in the highest degree remarkable.  Whether you speak with a politician or with a porter or shoemaker, the same wish will always be expressed.  We must, when we have beaten France, offer her peace on very acceptable terms in order to make her our ally to fight—­against England.

The German error, which the declaration of the Allies should go far to correct, is all the more remarkable in view of the stipulations of the Austro-German Treaty of Alliance.  Concluded in 1879 by Bismarck and Andrassy, this treaty still governs the relationship between Germany and Austria-Hungary.  Its first clause runs: 

Should, contrary to the hope and against the sincere wish of the two high contracting parties, one of the two empires be attacked by Russia, the high contracting parties are bound to stand by each other with the whole of the armed forces of their empires, and, in consequence thereof, only to conclude peace jointly and in agreement.

However low the German estimate of the moral cohesion of France, Russia, and England, German statesmen must be singularly lacking in shrewdness if they suppose the Allies to be less alive than were Bismarck and Andrassy to the need for complete co-operation between allies, not only in war, but also in the negotiation of peace.