Fighting and making up, alternate friends and foes, the nations of Europe have come in a thousand years to know one another fairly well. There was a short time when Napoleon’s threatened invasion awakened in England’s breast a hearty and healthy abhorrence of France. There was a long time when the phrase, “virgin of English,” applied to a few perilously placed French seaports (Saint-Malo, for example), revealed, as only such proud and burning words can ever reveal, the national hatred of England. Over and over again history taught the same lesson; that the will of a people is stout to repel the invader, and that a foreign alliance offers no stable foundation for policy. But a great deal is learned from contact, whether it be friendly or inimical; and the close call of the Great War has left behind it a legacy of percipience. It was an Englishman who discovered during those years that the French officers snored “with a certain politeness.” It was a great American who said that France had “saved the soul of the world.” It was a Frenchman who wrote comprehensively: “To disregard danger, to stand under fire, is not for an Englishman an act of courage; it is part of a good education.” When gratitude is forgotten, as all things which clamour for remembrance should be, and sentimentalism has dissolved under the pitiless rays of reality, there remains, and will remain, a good understanding which is the basis of good will. At present the nations that were drawn together by a common peril are a little tired of one another’s company, and more than a little irritated by one another’s grievances. The natural result of this weariness and irritation is an increase of sympathy for Germany, who now finds herself detested by her former allies, and smiled upon by at least some of her former foes. All that she says, and she has a great deal to say, is listened to urbanely. General Ludendorff has assured the American public that Prussia was innocent of even a desire to injure England. What she sought was peace “on conditions acceptable and inoffensive to both parties.” The Crown Prince’s memoirs, which have been appreciatively reviewed, set forth in eloquent language the Arthurian blamelessness of the Hohenzollerns. “The results of the excessive Viennese demand upon Serbia involved us in the war against our will.”