The little dressmaker said: "My husband has been fighting at the front for months. It would be natural for me to wish the war to end to-morrow, no matter on what terms, if I could get my husband back before he is killed. But I want the war to go on until the 'Boches' are crushed; otherwise in another ten years or so there will be a new war, and then they will come and take away not only my husband, but my son as well." In England the same line of reasoning prevailed. And the fact cannot be too strongly emphasized that this reasoning did not take the shape of stock arguments devised by politicians to bolster up some expedient course and drilled into the people for parrot-like repetition. The arguments were the spontaneous expression of the heartfelt convictions of all these people. Intelligent opinion in England ranges between the two statements made to me, respectively, by a very famous Tory statesman and administrator, and by one of the best-known Liberal statesmen in English public life to-day. The first of these was terse and to the point: "It is the greatest mistake for your Government to feel that the United States can, by remaining neutral, help to bring the war to a close. This war will be fought to a point where no mediation will be possible or needed. No peace with Germany, signed with a Hohenzollern in power, would be worth more than twenty years' peace to the world. To make Germany's promises binding on her, her people have got to have a share in her foreign policy, and that they cannot have under the present dynasty or system." The second statement was: "The best information that I can obtain from Germany is that, if she wins, the advanced party, which is in the ascendancy, plans to erect Poland into a semi-independent kingdom, contributing to it that portion of Poland which Germany herself now possesses. She will annex Belgium, probably a strip of Northern France, and possibly enough of Holland to give her command of the mouths of the Scheldt and Rhine. "Personally I cannot feel it to be unreasonable from her point of view that she should plan to correct a situation where her great water artery, the Rhine, is bottled up at its outlet. She will also take all Courland, and this, too, is not so unreasonable, since the population is far more German than Russian. Nevertheless, if such geographical and ethnological changes as these were accomplished and to be maintained, who can conceivably imagine that Germany can afford to modify her militarism? "My own views as to what the general terms of peace should be if the Allies win are shared by men in both England and France whose opinions will have weight in the peace negotiations. They are: