And that would be true, if, indeed, we had learned the lesson, and were adopting a new policy. But we are not. We have merely in some measure exchanged passion for lassitude and indifference. Later on we shall plead that the lassitude was as 'inevitable' as the passion. On such a line of reasoning, it is no good reacting by a perception of consequences against a mood of the moment. That is bad psychology and disastrous politics. To realise what 'temperamental politics' have already involved us in, is the first step towards turning our present drift into a more consciously directed progress. Note where the drift has already carried us with reference to the problem of the new Germany which it was our declared object to create. There were weeks following the Armistice in Germany, when a faithful adherence to the spirit of the declarations made by the Allies during the War would have brought about the utter moral collapse of the Prussianism we had fought to destroy. The Prussian had said to the people: 'Only Germany's military power has stood between her and humiliating ruin. The Allies victorious will use their victory to deprive Germany of her vital rights.' Again and again had the Allies denied this, and Germany, especially young Germany, watched to see which should prove right. A blockade, falling mainly, as Mr Churchill complacently pointed out (months after an armistice whose terms had included a promise to take into consideration the food needs of Germany) upon the feeble, the helpless, the children, answered that question for millions in Germany. Her schools and universities teem with hundreds of thousands stricken in their health, to whom the words 'never again' mean that never more will they put their trust in the 'naïve innocence' of an internationalism that could so betray them. The militarism which morally was at so low an ebb at the Armistice, has been rehabilitated by such things as the blockade and its effects, the terms of the Treaty, and by minor but dramatic features like the retention of German prisoners long after Allied prisoners had returned home, and the occupation of German university town by African negroes. So that to-day a League of Nations offered by the Allies would probably be regarded with a contemptuous scepticism--somewhat similar to that with which America now regards the political beatitudes which it applauded in 1916-17. We are in fact modifying the Treaty. But those modifications will not meet the present situation, though they might well have met the situation in 1918. If we had done then what we are prepared to do _now_, Europe would have been set on the right road.