'Time after time I saw excellent opportunities of universal peace deliberately rejected. There was somebody to wreck every Prinkipo, every Spa. It was almost with dismay that all Europeans who had kept their intelligence unclouded saw the frustration of peace, and heard the peoples applaud the men who frustrated peace. I care not whether they still enjoy esteem: history will judge them harshly and will judge harshly the turbulence which men plumed themselves on creating two years after the War.' As to the future:-- 'If it is certain that France must force another fight with Germany in a short span of years, if she pursues her present policy of implacable antagonism; if it is certain that England is already carefully seeking the European equilibrium, and that a responsible minister has already written of the possibility of a military accord with Germany; if there has been seen, owing to the foolish belief of the Allies in force--a belief which increases in inverse ratio to the Allied possession of effective force--the re-birth of Russian militarism, as there will assuredly be seen the re-birth of German militarism; if there are quarrels between Greece and Italy, between Italy and the Jugo-Slavs, between Hungary and Austria, between every tiny nation and its neighbour, even between England and France, it is because, when war has once been invoked, it cannot easily be exorcised. It will linger long in Europe: the straw will smoulder and at any moment may break into flame.... 'This is not lurid imagining: it is as logical as a piece of Euclidean reasoning. Only by a violent effort to change our fashion of seeing things can it be averted. War-making is now a habit.' And as to the outcome on the mind of the people:-- 'The war has killed elasticity of mind, independence of judgment, and liberty of expression. We think not so much of the truth as of conforming to the tacitly accepted fiction of the hour.[78] Sir Philip Gibbs renders on the whole a similar verdict. He says:--