When, in January, 1919, I resigned my commission and made my way out to Berlin as correspondent for the _Daily News_, I had two purposes in view. One was to find out to what extent we had really won the war--in the only way it could be won--by forcing the German people into revolution; and incidentally to take any opportunity that might offer of furthering that revolution. My second purpose was to find out what prospects there were of making a more or less permanent peace--in the only way it could be made--by establishing the forces of reform in Germany; and incidentally to point out any openings favourable to the furthering of such a peace. The following book brings together and sums up conclusions communicated to the _Daily News_ from time to time and is put forward as an answer to the double question: Have we won the war against Prussianism and have we made a permanent peace? The answer to this question was only to be got in Berlin. The first mistake made by the soldiers and workers who had won the war was in not insisting on their representatives making peace with the German people and at Berlin. An experience of twenty years in diplomacy, beginning with the arbitration treaties of Lord Pauncefote and ending with those of Lord Bryce, followed by two years of war experience, beginning with political secret service and ending in the ranks, had convinced me from the first that true peace could only be got by developing the forces of democracy of the defeated peoples centering in Berlin, and not by any bickerings between diplomatic formulæ of the victorious Governments collected in Paris. That is why I preferred going as a journalist to Berlin rather than in any other capacity to Paris. And that is why the following papers are published. They show that anyone who spent the first six months of 1919 in Berlin and the big German towns would have seen easily enough how it was that, in spite of military occupations and religious thanksgivings and bonfires and bonuses all round, we were not winning the war but losing it: and how, in spite of territorial partitions and financial reparations, and signatures with gold pens and the setting-up of a League of Nations, we were not making peace but manufacturing wars. We have not yet won the war because we have not as yet supported in Germany the progressive--that is, the revolutionary--elements and suppressed the Prussian--that is, the reactionary--spirit: while we have, of late, been really losing the war by actually assisting German reaction against German revolution. And we are doing this just from the ignorance of our democracy and the _insouciance_ of our diplomacy.