For that is the main difference between the Germans and ourselves to-day. They have been reduced to realities. The artificialities of their shoddy Kaiser and their shallow Kultur have fallen in ruins round them. The monstrous military machine they built up for their own protection, and used for the oppression of Europe, is smashed. There remains just the German burgher and the German worker, both slow-witted simple souls. So slow and simple indeed, that they have allowed a few hundred German bureaucrats to go on governing them; thereby giving us a wrong impression of what they are thinking and wanting. In reality the Germans to-day are like the Russians of two years ago, a molten mass awaiting a new mould, ready to be inspired by such new political ideas as may be instilled into them. In Germany now a new idea will take root, flower and bear fruit in a few days. I have watched the process myself with ideas imported from England. But instead of throwing open the western frontier of Germany to free commerce and communication we maintained our blockade and our boycott, thereby forcing New Germany to turn to the East for its ideals and institutions. And now comes this Treaty with a further development of this same policy of blockade and boycott. Germany is for a generation or so to be sentenced to loss of its sovereign rights, confiscation of its whole estate and penal servitude. We have overlooked the opportunity we had of making Germany a moral dependency, a natural ally looking at the world from our political point of view, absorbing our ideas and associating itself with our ideals; and we have abused the opening given us by unlimited military power in order to attempt the material exploitation of Germany. We might have made Germany a racial and regional border province of Anglo-Saxondom, and a barrier against the Asiatic irruption that is once again advancing against Europe across the Russian plains. We have preferred to try and reduce it to another Ireland--an Ireland of seventy millions with Russia at its back. I am reminded of the remark of a German politician: "Give us an open door and we shall be no worse than poor relations; build a Chinese wall against us and you will make us into Tartars." An adequate criticism of the Treaty that we are proposing to force on Germany would be as long as the Treaty itself. There are two main difficulties in such criticism; one is that, owing to the secret preparation of the Treaty and the public indifference as to its provisions, very few people in England have any idea even of what the financial and economic clauses amount to. German protests are ignored, of course, as mere "squealing." We have a general feeling that what is bad for the Germans is good for the world; and, anyway, we don't want to be bothered with Germany any more.