Whenever representatives of the belligerents shall meet to negotiate for peace, there will of course be many questions of first class importance to consider and discuss. But the one which must overshadow any other and of necessity carry the day, is that peace must be restored under conditions that will, if not forever, at least for many long years, protect Humanity and Civilization against a recurrence of such a calamity as ambitious and cruel Germany has criminally imposed upon the world. I urged my French Canadian readers to consider seriously how peace due to a compromise, accepted out of sheer discouragement, would soon develop into a still more trying ordeal than the one Canada had willingly and deliberately undertaken to fight out with the Allies. I forcibly explained to them that if the present war did not result in an international agreement to put an end to the extravagant and ruinous militarism which, under Prussian terrorism, was proving to be the curse of almost the whole universe, all the sacrifices of so many millions of lives, heroically given, of untold sufferings, of so much treasures, would have been made in vain if Germany was allowed to continue a permanent menace to general tranquillity. It was a wonder to me that any one could fail to understand that an armed peace would be only a truce during which militarism would be spreading with increased vigour and strength. It was evident--and still daily becoming more and more so--that Germany would only consent to it with the determination to renew, on a still much larger scale, her military organization with the purpose of a more gigantic effort at universal domination. Then was it not plain that labouring under the inevitable necessity of such an international situation, the Allied nations,--the British Empire as much as France, the United States and Italy--would by force be obliged to make the sacrifices required to maintain their military systems in such a state of efficiency as to be always ready to face their ambitious foe with good prospects of success. Such being the undeniable case, I affirmed--I am sure with the best of reasons--that Great Britain could not return to her ante-war policy of the enlistment of only a small standing territorial army, trusting as formerly to her Naval strength for her defence and the safe maintenance of her prestige and power. Like all the continental nations, England would have to incur the very heavy cost of keeping millions of men always fully armed.