get better terms from the Allies than a Germany still facing them,
militant, imperialist, and wicked? He would have no reason for believing
anything of the sort. If we Allies are honest, then if a revolution
started in Germany to-day we should if anything lower the price of peace
to Germany. But these people who pretend to lead us will state nothing
of the sort. For them a revolution in Germany would be the signal for
putting up the price of peace. At any risk they are resolved that that
German revolution shall not happen. Your sane, good German, let me
assert, is up against that as hard as if he was a wicked one. And so,
poor devil, he has to put his revolutionary ideas away, they are
hopeless ideas for him because of the power of the British reactionary,
they are hopeless because of the line we as a nation take in this
matter, and he has to go on fighting for his masters.

A plain statement of our war aims that did no more than set out honestly
and convincingly the terms the Allies would make with a democratic
republican Germany--republican I say, because where a scrap of
Hohenzollern is left to-day there will be a fresh militarism
to-morrow--would absolutely revolutionize the internal psychology of
Germany. We should no longer face a solid people. We should have
replaced the false issue of Germany and Britain fighting for the
hegemony of Europe, the lie upon which the German Government has always
traded, and in which our extreme Tory Press has always supported the
German Government, by the true issue, which is freedom versus
imperialism, the League of Nations versus that net of diplomatic roguery
and of aristocratic, plutocratic, and autocratic greed and conceit which
dragged us all into this vast welter of bloodshed and loss.