But consent to the substitution of “trade” for “honour” as our device, and mark the malign transformation. Some of our less well-inspired publicists have already done something to communicate to the _bloc_ of enemy countries a unity which does not inhere in its nature. Things breaking up from within may be held together by pressure from without, and such pressure has been in some measure supplied by those to whom reference is made. By steadily ignoring every impulse of disintegration, racial, economic and moral, they have plastered over although they have not sealed up the structural cracks. The new programme, if adopted, will, however, go far to harden the plaster into cement. The spokesmen of Prussianism will be presented with a complete triumph over any faint voice of civilisation that may still be lifted within the enemy realms. They will say quite legitimately: “Our opponents babbled of honour, and moral ideas. We said that that was all hypocrisy, and that their real aim was to isolate, impoverish, and if possible destroy the whole Germanic race. Who now is right? The shopkeepers’ programme has now been openly proclaimed. The struggle of the Germanies is now a struggle for the mere right to exist. What have you to say now in reply to the Kaiser’s resolve to arm every man and boy and woman, aye, and every cat and dog in the Fatherland before submitting to extinction?” In truth there would be nothing to say. Our ideal would have fallen in the common mud, the last hope of humanity would have perished, and the war must be indefinitely prolonged. If you have driven an enemy into a corner and hold your bayonet pointed at his breast; if he asks on what terms you will accept his surrender and your answer is that in that case he will be not bayoneted but hanged, you must expect resistance _à outrance_. It will become an affair not of courage but of mere sanity. Whatever the divagations of their statesmanship, the Allies will, of course, win. The nations, however stampeded, will not sacrifice the least element of their unity, and the armies, to whatever new deflection their inspiration be submitted, will fight their unwavering way to victory. But it will be a victory tainted with ambiguous and selfish ends. History will write of us that we began nobly, but that our purpose corrupted. The Great War for freedom will not, indeed, have been waged in vain; that is already decided: but it will have but half kept its promises. Blood and iron will have been once more established as the veritable masters of men, and nothing will open before the world save a vista of new wars. Transcriber’s Notes Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed. Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced. Two unclosed parentheses were silently corrected.