sanctions--a thing they are very unlikely to demand--that is what
"Germany" will signify at the conference. And what is true of Germany
will be true, more or less, of several other of the allied powers.

A conference confined purely to the belligerents will be, in fact, a
conference not even representative of the belligerents. And it will be
tainted with all the traditional policies, aggressions, suspicions, and
subterfuges that led up to the war. It will not be the end of the old
game, but the readjustment of the old game, the old game which is such
an abominable nuisance to the development of modern civilization. The
idealism of the great alliance will certainly be subjected to enormous
strains, and the whole energy of the Central European diplomatists will
be directed to developing and utilizing these stresses.

This, I think, must be manifest even to the foreign offices most
concerned. They must see already ahead of them a terrible puzzle of
arrangement, a puzzle their own bad traditions will certainly never
permit them to solve. "God save us," they may very well pray, "from our
own cleverness and sharp dealing," and they may even welcome the promise
of an enlarged outlook that the entry of the neutral powers would bring
with it.

Every foreign office has its ugly, evil elements, and probably every
foreign office dreads those elements. There are certainly Russian fools
who dream about India, German fools who dream about Canada and South
America, British fools who dream about Africa and the East;
aggressionists in the blood, people who can no more let nations live in
peace than kleptomaniacs can keep their hands in their own pockets. But
quite conceivably there are honest monarchs and sane foreign ministers
very ready to snatch at the chance of swamping the evil in their own