But in any view something serious is at stake.  It will be a bad thing for us, and it will be a bad thing for the world, if the people of the vanquished nations are left to feel that they have no hope of being restored to decent conditions of existence.  At present despair is threatening them.  Their estimate is that the crushing burden of the terms of peace, if carried out to their full possibilities, bars them from the prospect of a better future.  Their only way of deliverance may well come to seem to them to lie in the grouping of the discontented nationalities, and the faith that by this means, at some time which may come hereafter, a new balance of power may begin to be set up.

Now this is not a good prospect, and the sooner we succeed in softening the sense of real hardship out of which it arises the better.  Germany and Austria must pay the penalty they have incurred before the tribunal of international justice.  But that penalty ought to be tempered by something that depends on even more than mercy.  It is intended to be inflicted for the good of the world, and if it assumes a form which threatens the future safety of the world it is not wise to press it to its extreme consequences.  We have to work toward a better state of things than that which is promised to-day.  We have never hitherto kept up old animosities unduly long, and that has been one of the secrets of our strength in the world.  The lessons of history point to the expediency of trying to heal instead of to keep open the wound which exists.  Those who know the growth in the past of literature, of music, of science, of philosophy, of industry and of commerce, do not wish the German people to die out.  It is only the ignorant that can desire this, and, hitherto in the course of our history, the ignorant have neither proved to be safe guides nor have they prevailed.  To-day, as before, we must think of generations other than our own if we would preserve our strength.

I hope that a time is near in which we shall no longer proclaim old grievances, but instead cease to dwell on the past in this case, just as we have ceased in the cases of the French, the Spanish, the Russians, and the Boers.  It is best in every way that it should come to be so.

It is not with any hope that these pages will satisfy the extremists of to-day that they have been written.  They are intended for those who try to be dispassionate, and for them only, as a contribution to a vast heap of material that is being gathered together for consideration.  It is well that those who were in any way directly connected with the story to which they relate should place on record what they saw.  But the whole story in its fulness is beyond the knowledge of anyone of our time.  The history of the world is, as has been said, the judgment of the world.  It is therefore only after an interval that it can be sufficiently written.  The ultimate and real origin of this war, the greatest humanity has ever had to endure, was a set of colossal suspicions of each other by the nations concerned.  I do not mean that none of them were in the right or that some of them were not deeply in the wrong.  What I do mean is that if there had been insight sufficient all round the nations concerned would not have misinterpreted each other.