I say, “It seems;” I say, “We are entitled to believe.”  The fact is that the ordeal is not yet past.  Even on the day when the war is ended and when victory is in our hands, destiny will not yet be conquered.  It has happened—­seldom, it is true, but still it has happened twice or thrice—­that a nation has compelled the course of fate to turn aside or to fall back.  The nation congratulated herself, even as we believe that we have the right to do.  But events were not slow in proving that she had congratulated herself too soon.  Fatality, that is to say, the enormous mass of causes and effects of which we have no understanding, was not overcome; it was only delayed, it awaited its revenge and its day, or at least what we call its day, which may extend over a hundred years and more where nations are concerned, for fatality does not reckon in the manner of men, but after the fashion of the great movements of nature.  It is important at this time to know whether we shall be able to escape that revenge and that day.  If men and nations were swayed only by reason, if, after being so often the absolute masters of their happiness and their future, they had not so often destroyed that which they had just achieved, then we might say—­and indeed ought to say—­that our escape depends only upon ourselves.  In point of fact, three-quarters of the risk are run and the fourth is in our power; we have only to keep it so.  Almost all the chances of the fight are on our side at last; and, when the war is over, there will be nothing but our wisdom and our will confronting a destiny which from that time onward will be powerless to take its course, unless it first succeed in blinding and perverting them.

In this hour all that lies hidden under that mysterious word will be waiting on our decision, waiting to know if victory is with us or with it.  It is after we have won that we must really vanquish; it is in the hour of peace that the actual war will begin against an invisible foe, a hundred times as dangerous as the one of whom we have seen too much.  If at that hour we do not profit by all our advantages; if we do not destroy, root and branch, the military power of an enemy who is in secret alliance with the evil influences of the earth; if we do not here and now, by an irrevocable compact, forearm ourselves against our sense of pity and generosity, our weakness, our imprudence, our future rivalries and discords; if we leave a single outlet to the beast at bay; if, through our negligence, we give it a single hope, a single opportunity of coming to the surface and taking breath, then the vigilant fatality which has but one fixed idea will resume its progress and pursue its way, dragging history with it and laughing over its shoulder at man once more tricked and discomfited.  Everything that we have done and suffered, the ruins, the sacrifices, the nameless tortures and the numberless dead, will have served no purpose and will be lost beyond redemption.  Everything will not have to be done over again, for nothing is ever done over again and fortunate opportunities do not occur twice; but everything except our woes and all their consequences will be as though it had never been.