But the real ground of defence for the liberal policy is not the existence of an abnormal if heretofore successfully disguised nobility on the part of the enemy, but of his very human if not very noble fears which, from our point of view, it is extremely important not to arouse or justify. If our 'punishment' of him creates in his mind the conviction that we are certain to use our power for commercial advantage, or that in any case our power is a positive danger to him, he _will_ use his recovered economic strength for the purpose of resisting it; and we should face a fact so dangerous and costly to us. To take cognisance of this fact, and to shape our policy accordingly is not to attribute to the enemy any particular nobility of motive. But almost always when that policy is attacked, it is attacked on the ground of its 'Sunday School' assumption of the accessibility of the enemy to gratitude or 'softening' in Colonel Roosevelt's phrase. We reach in the final analysis of the interplay of motive a very clear political pragmatism. Either policy will justify itself, and by the way it works out in practice, prove that it is right. Here is a statesman--Italian, say--who takes the 'realist' view, and comes to a Peace Conference which may settle for centuries the position of his country in the world--its strength, its capacity for defending itself, the extent of its resources. In the world as he knows it, a country has one thing, and one thing only, upon which it can depend for its national security and the defence of its due rights; and that thing is its own strength. Italy's adequate defence must include the naval command of the Adriatic and a strategic position in the Tyrol. This means deep harbours on the Dalmatian coast and the inclusion in the Tyrol of a very considerable non-Italian population. To take them may, it is true, not only violate the principle of nationality but shut off the new Yugo-Slav nation from access to the sea and exchange one irredentism for another. But what can the 'realist' Italian statesman, whose first duty is to his own country do? He is sorry, but his own nationality and its due protection are concerned; and the Italian nation will be insecure without those frontiers and those harbours. Self-preservation is the law of life for nations as for other living things. You have, unfortunately, a condition in which the security of one means the insecurity of another, and if a statesman in these circumstances has to choose which of the two is to be secure, he must choose his own country.