If ever national military power, the sheer efficiency of the military instrument, could ensure a nation's political and economic security, Germany should have been secure. It was not any lack of the 'impulse to defence,' of the 'manly and virile qualities' so beloved of the militarist, no tendency to 'softness,' no 'emasculating internationalism' which betrayed her. She fell because she failed to realise that she too, for all her power, had need of a co-operation throughout the world, which her force could not compel; and that she must secure a certain moral co-operation in her purposes or be defeated. She failed, not for lack of 'intense nationalism,' but by reason of it, because the policy which guided the employment of her military instrument had in it too small a regard for the moral factors in the world at large, which might set in motion material forces against her. It is hardly possible to doubt that the easy victories of 1871 marked the point at which the German spirit took the wrong turning, and rendered her statesmen incapable of seeing the forces which were massing for her destruction. The presence in 1919 of German delegates at Versailles in the capacity of vanquished can only be adequately explained by recalling the presence there of German statesmen as victors in 1871. It took forty years for some of the moral fruits of victory to manifest themselves in the German spirit. But the very severity of the present German lot is one that lends itself to sophistry. It will be argued: 'You say that preponderant military power, victory, is ineffective to economic ends. Well, look at the difference between ourselves and Germany. The victors, though they may not flourish, are at least better off than the vanquished. If we are lean, they starve. Our military power is not economically futile.' If to bring about hardship to ourselves in order that some one else may suffer still greater hardship is an economic gain, then it is untrue to say that conquest is economically futile. But I had assumed that advantage or utility was to be measured by the good to us, not by the harm done to others at our cost. We are arguing for the moment the economic, and not the ethical aspect of the thing. Keep for a moment to those terms. If you were told that an enterprise was going to be extremely profitable and you lost half your fortune in it, you would certainly regard as curious the logic of the reply, that after all you _had_ gained, because others in the same enterprise had lost everything.