No doubt every aspect will be taken into consideration. It will be noted that from the moment Germany decided to establish a colonial Empire her envious hatred of Great Britain took root. She realised that at the British Empire's expense alone could she fully develop her ideal. This feeling has grown and intensified until, in recent years, she had barely cloaked her ambitious design to replace us as a world Power. When the final word is spoken, and compensation for loss in life and treasure is forced on us by her unscrupulous action is discussed, it will, I think, be ruled that we are more than justified in absorbing, as part payment, those possessions which she had designed to expand at the expense of ours. Again, British and French Foreign Office dispatches, at the outbreak of war and subsequently, go to show that German diplomacy has been deeply tinged with covetousness and that special kind of hatred born of envy; that she has brushed aside all honourable and humanitarian considerations, and ignored that international code to which she herself had set her seal in favour of a ruthless and unscrupulous application of the principle of brute force. Nor in this case can she offer the "first offenders'" plea. Before the Bar of History she is confronted by Mary Therese and Francis Joseph of Austria, by the quondam Kingdom of Poland, by Denmark and France. Each and all give evidence of forced war as a step towards Prussian expansion. Can a nation so deeply impregnated with such principles since its cradle days so far reform its political methods as to give reasonable assurance that in thirty or forty years hence she will not reintroduce into the life of nations that spirit and practice of mediaeval barbarism (now better known as "_kultur_") which at present racks the civilised world? We may leave it to the Ethiopian and the leopard may reply. Popular opinion at present seems to indicate an almost unanimous opinion that the roar of the last cannon will ring down the curtain on the German Empire of to-day. That Prussia's Polish province and Alsace-Lorraine will cease to be German may be assumed. Should Denmark recover Schleswig-Holstein, should Hanover regain her independence, and Bavaria repudiate Prussia's uncongenial overlordship it would--in the event of a non-annexation policy being adopted--be difficult to decide to whom the present German Colonies belong--this, of course, irrespective of conquests which have been or may be effected in the meantime, and which, in accordance with the German theory that "might is right," will, _ipso facto_, have been transferred to the Allies with a "clean title."