It looks as if in Germany's case we had seriously underestimated one important feature of that job. For a long time we thought that we had got to beat only the military class--that they had merely fooled the kindly and modest Germans we used to know. As lately as this Spring, a British general told the present writer that his people did not expect the war to be ended by a military victory--that without an overwhelming superiority on either side, modern warfare has at last reached the degree of perfection long ago attained by the Kilkenny cats (only the general did not put it in that way), and that before, so to speak, the tails get through fighting, the kindly and modest German people would take matters into their own hands and stop the war, give up the plunder they have got from their weaker neighbors (for after all, barring their sudden occupation of a little of France, they have with all their boasting whipped only little or undeveloped peoples), and pay damages--as far as they can be paid. But it has come to look mightily as if the general and his people were mistaken--as if the kindly and modest German no longer exists, as if the madness has seized the whole nation, and as if there will be no way out before we give one side the overwhelming superiority which was the general's alternative. Plainly we can't be too quick about it. Before the conceit is whipped out of the Germans, they are not going to submit to any peace short of holding on to their plunder, and as long as they have enough of that to be visible, they are victors, and with all their conceit in them. It would drive them into another war as soon as they could get ready, and even meanwhile the conditions would be intolerable--intolerable not only for the small peoples they have conquered, but for the rest of us. But things are very respectably intolerable as they are. We have barely entered the war, and yet you are exceptionally fortunate if your income has not been pinched, your affairs generally disturbed, heavy anxieties thrown upon you, and perhaps, even thus early, mourning. Possibly you have found a grim consolation in realizing that most of the time since the beginning of human records, our present lot has been the lot of the greater portion of mankind. Perhaps you have found a consolation less grim in realizing that this state of affairs has been diminishing--very notably diminishing during the century preceding this war; and it is to be hoped that you have found a consolation almost triumphant in the realization that a large portion of the world at last realizes that such conditions can be put an end to, and are grimly determined to do it. But unless it is done thoroughly, unless the Kaiser and his gang are as safely disposed of as Napoleon and his gang were after Waterloo, these conditions are going to recur indefinitely.