Now the German-speaking peoples in the world amount to an enormous number, at least to a hundred millions if those outside Germany and Austria, and in the New World, as well as the Old, are taken into account.  It may be difficult for them to organize themselves for war, but it will be less difficult for them to develop a common spirit which may penetrate all over the world.  It is just this development that statesmen ought to watch carefully, for, given an interval long enough, it is impossible to predict what influence these hundred millions of people may not acquire and come to exercise.  We do not want to have a prolonged period of growing anxiety and unrest, such as obtained in our relations with the French, notwithstanding the peace established by the Treaty of Vienna.  Of the anxiety and unrest which were ours for more than one generation, the history of the Channel fortifications, of the Volunteer force and of several other great and often costly institutions, bears witness.  Let us therefore take thought while there is time to do so.  We do not wish to see repeated anything analogous to our former experience.  The one thing that can avert it is the spirit in which a League of Nations has been brought to birth.  That spirit alone can preclude the gradual nascence of desire to call into existence a new balance of power.  It is not enough to tell Germany and Austria that if they behave well they will be admitted to the League of Nations.  What really matters is the feeling and manner in which the invitation is given, and an obvious sincerity in the desire that they should work with us as equals in a common endeavor to make the best of a world which contains us both.  One is quite conscious of the difficulties that must attend the attempt to approach the question in the frame of mind that is requisite.  We may have to discipline ourselves considerably.  But the people of this country are capable of reflection, and so are the people of the American Continent.  The problem to be solved is one that presses on our great Allies in the United States, where the German-speaking population is very large, quite as much as it does on us.  France and Belgium have more to forgive, and France has a hard past from which to avert her eyes.  But she is a country of great intelligence, and it is for the sake of everybody, and not merely in the interest of our recent enemies, that enlargement of the spirit is requisite.

How the present situation is to be softened, how the people of the Central Powers are to be brought to feel that they are not to remain divided from us by an impassable gulf, this is not the occasion to suggest.  It is enough to repeat that the question is not one simply of the letter of a treaty but is one of the spirit in which it is made.  Conditions change in this world with a rapidity that is often startling.  The fashion of the day passes before we know that what is novel and was unexpected has come upon us.  The foundations of a peace that is to be enduring must therefore be sought in what is highest and most abiding in human nature.