After giving conclusive proof that in 1875, in the Schnäbele affair, as well as at Tangier, Morocco and Casablanca, Germany's policy had been to wound, weaken and irritate France, Clemenceau wound up as follows: "In all good faith we desire peace, we are eager for peace because we need it in order to build up our country. But if war is forced upon us we shall be there! The difficulty between Germany and ourselves is this: Germany believes the logical consequence of her victory is domination. We do not believe that the logical consequence of our defeat is vassalage. We are peaceful but we are not subjugated. We do not countersign the decree of abdication and downfall issued by our neighbours. We come of a great history and we mean to continue to be worthy of it. The dead have created the living: the living will remain faithful to the dead." This great speech was prophetic. Clemenceau knew what were the real intentions of Germany. It was this fact that made him so bitter against all who, honest, patriotic and self-sacrificing as they might be, were in favour of weakening France in the hour of her greatest danger. His warning against the financiers who were so solicitous that foreign policy should be guided by manipulators of loans, interest and discounts was also specially appropriate at a time when German influence was becoming dominant in many of the banks and pecuniary coteries of Paris. Such warnings were also timely in view of the strange hallucinations--or worse--which then dominated English politicians. For it was in this same year that Lord Haldane, having reduced the English artillery, full of sublime confidence in the rulers of Germany, returned from Berlin to tell us through Mr. Asquith and Viscount Grey that never were the relations between Germany and England better! It was in this same year, too, that Mr. Lloyd George and the whole Radical Party were convinced that Great Britain might safely reduce her armaments on land and on sea, and the Unionists themselves scarcely dared to take up the challenge. It was in this same year, again, that nearly all the leaders of the Labour Party convinced themselves that the Germans had the best of good feeling towards France and England. Having been most artistically and hospitably "put through" in the Fatherland, they returned to England brimful of zeal against all who, knowing Germany and Germans well for some fifty years, could not take the asseverations of the Kaiser, or of his trusted friend Lord Haldane, at their face value: a value which this legal nobleman admitted a few years later he knew at the time to be illusory, and not in accordance with what he then declared to be the truth.