The question may be considered in relation to the German nation. As will be pointed out in a later chapter, the structure of that nation was, before the Great War, a menace to European civilisation. If the Germans had succeeded in their aims and had conquered Europe or the world, their individual interests would have been vastly promoted; they would have enjoyed immense material prosperity and a proud consciousness of having been chosen by God to rule the rest of mankind for their good. And this would have confirmed the nation in all its vices and would have finally crushed out of it all its potentialities for developing into a well-organised nation of the higher type, fitted to play an honourable part in the future evolution of mankind. The same truth appears if we consider the problem of the responsibility of the German nation for the War. So long as that people might retain its former organisation, which, I repeat, rendered it a menace to the civilisation and culture of the whole world, its antagonists could only treat it as a criminal and an outlaw to be repressed at all costs and punished and kept down with the utmost severity. But, if it should achieve a new organisation, one which will give preponderance to the better and saner elements and traditions still preserved within it, then, although it will consist of the same individuals in the main, it will have become a new or at least a transformed nation, one with which the other nations could enter into normal relations of amity or at least of mutual toleration, one which could be admitted to a place in the greater society which the League of Nations is to become. In other words, the same population would in virtue of a changed organisation, have become a different nation.