common life of all Europe will have become--miserable. Conclusive blows
will have receded out of the imagination of the contending Powers. The
war will have reached its fourth and last stage as a war. The war of the
great attack will have given place to the war of the military deadlock;
the war of the deadlock will have gone on, and as the great combatants
have become enfeebled relatively to the smaller States, there will have
been a gradual shifting of the interest to the war of treasons and
diplomacies in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Quickly thereafter the last phase will be developing into predominance,
in which each group of nations will be most concerned, no longer about
victories or conquests, but about securing for itself the best chances
of rapid economic recuperation and social reconstruction. The commercial
treaties, the arrangements for future associated action, made by the
great Allies among themselves will appear more and more important to
them, and the mere question of boundaries less and less. It will dawn
upon Europe that she has already dissipated the resources that have
enabled her to levy the tribute paid for her investments in every
quarter of the earth, and that neither the Germans nor their antagonists
will be able for many years to go on with those projects for world
exploitation which lay at the root of the great war. Very jaded and
anaemic nations will sit about the table on which the new map of Europe
will be drawn.... Each of the diplomatists will come to that business
with a certain pre-occupation. Each will be thinking of his country as
one thinks of a patient of doubtful patience and temper who is coming-to
out of the drugged stupor of a crucial, ill-conceived, and unnecessary
operation ... Each will be thinking of Labour, wounded and perplexed,
returning to the disorganised or nationalised factories from which
Capital has gone a-fighting, and to which it may never return.