indeed that between the two nations there is complete agreement in
European continental policy. It is the common desire of the two
nations, though perhaps for different reasons, that no one State shall
have hegemony on the continent. But between the years 1688 and 1815
Great Britain and France were at war for seventy years: for seventy
years, that is, out of a hundred and twenty-seven there was a state of
deadly hostility between the two countries.

General progress, evinced in various ways, above all in respect for
and in the autonomy of other peoples, is a guarantee for all. No
peoples are always victorious, none always conquered. In the time of
Napoleon the First the French derided the lack of righting spirit
in the German peoples, producers of any number of philosophers
and writers. They would have laughed at anyone who suggested the
possibility of any early German military triumph. After 1815 the
countries of the Holy Alliance would never have believed in the
possibility of the revolutionary spirit recovering; they were sure of
lasting peace in Europe. In 1871 the Germans had no doubt at all that
they had surely smothered France; now the Entente thinks that it has
surely smothered Germany.

But civilization has gained something: it has gained that collection
of rules, moral conditions, sentiments, international regulations,
which tend both to mitigate violence and to regulate in a form which
is tolerable, if not always just, relations between conquerors and
conquered, above all, a respect for the liberty and autonomy of the
latter.

Now, the treaties which have been made are, from the moral point of
view, immeasurably worse than any consummated in former days, in that