Germany went into the war with a conviction that had been carefully instilled into her people.  It was that she was being ringed round with the intention that she should be crushed, and that presently it would be too late for her to deliver herself.  The lesson so taught to her was not a true one.  She might easily have obtained guarantees of peace which ought to have satisfied her, without undertaking a risk which in the end was to prove disastrous.  No one here wanted to ruin her, no one who counted seriously in this country.  And if we did not want to, no more in reality did France or Russia.  She brought her fate on her head by the unwisdom of her methods.  But her people hardly desired the dangers of unnecessary war, and her rulers dared not have ventured these dangers had they not first of all preached a wrong doctrine to those over whom they ruled.  They had their way in the end, and disaster to sixty-eight millions of Germans was the consequence.  The calculations of their chiefs were bad from the beginning.  It is almost certain that the best and most eminent among even these really desired peace.  They blundered in method.  It was not by continually flashing the saber that peace was to be secured.

It is scarcely likely that the conditions under which this war became possible will recur.  It is more than unlikely that they will recur in our time.  But it is none the less worth while to consider how the unlikelihood can be made to approach most nearly to a certainty.

Not, I think, by causing the millions of German-speaking people to feel that they are in chains without possibility of freedom.  More certainly, surely, by leading them to the faith that if they will play a part in the great world effort for permanent peace and for reconstruction they will be welcomed to the brotherhood of nations.  The individual German citizen is more like the individual Anglo-Saxon than he is different from him.  The same hopes and the same fears animate him, and he is sober and industrious quite as much as we are.  He has similar problems and similar interests.

Time must pass before the angry feeling that a great struggle produces can die down.  But there are already indications that this feeling is not as intense with us as it was even a short time ago.  Germany made a colossal and unjustifiable blunder.  She is responsible for the action of her late Government.  We think so, and we are not likely to change our opinion on this point.  The grief of our people over their dead, over the lives that were laid down for the nation from the highest kind of inspiration, will keep the public mind fixed on this conclusion.  And so will the waste and misery to the whole world which an unnecessary war has brought in its train.  But presently we shall ask ourselves, in moments of reflection, whether this ought to be our final word, and also, perhaps, whether some want of care on our own part, and certain deficiencies of which we are now more conscious than we used to be, may not have had something to do with the failure of other people to divine our real mood and intentions.  I am not sure that in days that are to come we shall give ourselves the whole benefit of the doubt.  However this may be, we are in no case a vindictive people.