great inconvenience, unhappiness, disgrace, and loss. We and France have
to live with Germany after the war; and the sooner we make up our mind
to do it generously, the better. The word after the fight must be _sans
rancune_; for without peace between France, Germany, and England, there
can be no peace in the world.

3. War, as a school of character and a nurse of virtue, must be formally
shut up and discharged by all the belligerents when this war is over. It
is quite true that ill-bred and swinish nations can be roused to a
serious consideration of their position and their destiny only by
earthquakes, pestilences, famines, comets' tails, Titanic shipwrecks,
and devastating wars, just as it is true that African chiefs cannot make
themselves respected unless they bury virgins alive beneath the
doorposts of their hut-palaces, and Tartar Khans find that the
exhibition of a pyramid of chopped-off heads is a short way to impress
their subjects with a convenient conception of their divine right to
rule. Ivan the Terrible did undoubtedly make his subjects feel very
serious indeed; and stupid people are apt to believe that this sort of
terror-stiffened seriousness is virtue. It is not. Any person who should
set-to deliberately to contrive artificial earthquakes, scuttle liners,
and start epidemics with a view to the moral elevation of his
countrymen, would very soon find himself in the dock. Those who plan
wars with the same object should be removed with equal firmness to
Hanwell or Bethlehem Hospital. A nation so degraded as to be capable of
responding to no higher stimulus than that of horror had better be
exterminated, by Prussian war lords or anyone else foolish enough to
waste powder on them instead of leaving them to perish of their own
worthlessness.

4. Neither England nor Germany must claim any moral superiority in the