Probably peace might come more quickly if neither side should be absolutely victorious than otherwise. But for the moment I think that the agreement among the Allies is a very portentous thing, as far as the duration of the war is concerned. "Do you think that any secret agreement may exist; that France even now may have made an agreement with Germany?" Mr. Sloane was asked. I cannot think so. I think it very evident there is no such secret agreement. If one existed it would be much more likely to be between Russia and Germany. You remember the development of Prussia, which is, of course, the commanding State in the German Empire, occurred by its careful conservation of the policy which was laid down in the political will of Frederick the Great, that of keeping friends with Russia. The fact of the matter is, Prussia was saved in the Napoleonic wars by the act of Gen. Yorck at Tauroggen, when he suddenly abandoned the French and went over to the Prussians, and while Russia has within half a generation become intensely bitter against Germany, yet it is true that the Baltic Provinces, in which the gentry and the burghers are Germans, have furnished most important administrators to the Russian Empire, a fact that causes much of the jealousy in Russia on the part of the native-born Russians against the Germans of the Baltic Provinces. Nevertheless, self-interest is a very important thing, and if Russia thought for a moment that France was going to abandon her I think she would turn to Germany right away. As time has developed the nations of today, it has come to be understood by hard-headed statesmen that those who conduct their respective affairs can have no other guiding principle than the interest of their own State, no other. There is a persistent feeling throughout the world that there is an analogy between the individual man and organized society. There are books written to show that States must and do pass through the various stages through which an individual passes, namely, infancy, childhood, youth, middle age, old age, decay. By a perfectly natural parallel the majority of men apply the same morality to the State which they apply to the individual, and they insist upon it that a State must be moral in every respect; that it must have a conscience; that it must have virtue; that it must practice self-denial; that it must not lay its hands on what does not belong to it. In short, that it must as a State or as a nation be "good," in exactly the same sense in which a person is "good." In other words, they personify the State. I have never heard of any speaker or writer who would not approve of that as an ideal, and who would not desire that the millennium should come upon earth now, and that exactly the same virtues that are held up for personal ideals should be held up for national ideals.