Well, it would strike an unprejudiced person that if this were true, there is a great deal of doubt put upon Mr. Lloyd George's former statements by Mr. Lloyd George himself. Persons who plot carefully, skilfully, insidiously and clandestinely, do not glide; they do not stagger or stumble, especially through folly. They keep going, as we in America were assured that the German Government did keep going, right up to The Day of their own choosing. Moreover, they are not likely to be headed off by discussion; highwaymen are notoriously curt in their speech and if one attempts discussion with them they become irritable and peremptory. This is the invariable habit of highwaymen. Besides, if discussion would have averted war in 1914, why was it not forthcoming? Certainly not through any fault of the Austrian Government, which made every concession, as the British Ambassador's report shows, notwithstanding its grievance against Serbia was a just one. Certainly not through any fault of the German Government, which never refused discussion and held its hand with all the restraint possible under the circumstances just described. Well, then, how is it so clear that German responsibility for the war should be treated as a _chose jugée_? VII People who have a clear and simple case do not talk in this fashion. Picking now at random among the utterances of politicians and propagandists, we find an assorted job-lot of aims assigned and causes alleged, and in all of them there is that curious, incomprehensible and callous disregard of the power of conviction that a straight story always exercises, if you have one to tell. In November, 1917, when the Foreign Office was being pestered by demands for a statement of the Allied war-aims, Lord Robert Cecil said in the House of Commons, that the restitution of Alsace and Lorraine to France was a "well-understood war-aim from the moment we entered the war." As things have turned out, it is an odd coincidence how so many of these places that have iron or coal or oil in them seem to represent a well-understood war-aim. Less than a month before, in October, 1917, General Smuts said that to his mind the one great dominating war-aim was "the end of militarism, the end of standing armies." Well, the Allies won the war, but judging by results, this dominating war-aim seems rather to have been lost sight of. Mr. Lloyd George again on another occasion, said in the House of Commons that "self-determination was one of the principles for which we entered the war ... a principle from which we have never departed since the beginning of the war." This, too, seems an aim that for some reason the victorious nations have not quite realized; indeed in some cases, as in Ireland, for example, there has been no great alacrity shown about trying to realize it. Viscount Bryce said that the war sprang from the strife of races and religions in the Balkan countries, and from the