It is possible for two boys to build up a friendship on the basis of a clean fight. It is possible for two nations to build up a good understanding on the basis of a clean fight. The relations between Great Britain and South Africa constitute a case in point. Germany’s fighting was unclean from start to finish. Therefore, while there are many to feel commiseration for her, there are none to do her honour. The duration of the war has little to do with this strong sentiment of disesteem. Had it lasted four months instead of four years, the deeds done in Belgium and in France would have sterilized the seeds of friendship in the minds of all who remembered them. To an abnormal sense of superiority, Germany added an abnormal lack of humour, which made her regard all resistance as an unjustifiable and unpardonable affront. Her resentment that Belgians should have presumed to defend their country was like the resentment of that famous marauder, the Earl of Cassillis, when Allan Stewart refused to be tortured into signing away his patrimony. “You are the most obstinate man I ever saw to oblige me to use you thus,” said the justly indignant Earl. “I never thought to have treated any one as your stubbornness has made me treat you.” The emotional ebb-tide which followed the signing of the armistice was too natural to be deplored, save that it gave to obstructionists their chance to decry the matchless heroisms of the war. No people can be heroic over the problem of paying debts out of an empty treasury. Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness. Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process. If it were given to debtors to love their creditors, there would have been no persecution of the Jews. If it were given to creditors to love their debtors, there would be no poverty on earth. That all the nations, now presumably on friendly terms, should be following their own interests would seem to most of us the normal thing it is, if they did not so persistently affect to be amazed and grieved at one another’s behaviour, and if the mischief-makers of every land were not actively engaged in widening breaches into chasms. It is inevitable and logical that the men who were pacifists when the word had a sinister meaning should heartily detest their countries’ allies who helped them win the war. The English “Nation and Athenæum” wrote of France in 1922 as it might have written--but did not--of Germany in 1914. Poincaré it likened to Shylock, France to a butcher eager for the shambles. “French militarism at work in the Rhineland is a lash to every evil passion.” “Europe is kept in social and political disorder by the sheer selfishness of France.” “There _was_ a France of the mind. Victory killed it, and a long slow renovation of the soul must precede its resurrection.”