Those of us who see in the Peace a supreme failure in constructive statesmanship do not take that view because we are pacifists or have some sentimental wish “to be kind to Germany.” So long as the issue of the war hung in doubt it was our duty to make war to the last man and the last shilling. With the evil spirit dominating Imperial Germany, neither truce nor parley was possible. The effort frequently made in pacifist circles to represent the war as a general dog-fight, for which all the nations involved have a common responsibility, is not only bad history but bad morality. Victory creates, however, a wholly new situation. War, in certain terrible cases, is the necessary prelude to a settlement. But of itself it settles nothing, any more than an operation essential to check the spread of disease is a natural or healthy process. The surgeon’s knife is merely a means to an end--the recovery of normal life by a normal and healthy body. The knife is not kept flourished permanently over the patient’s head or turned periodically in the wound. The great charge against the Peace is its failure to envisage a normal and healthy life for Europe. Our quarrel against its provisions is that they are in many cases fully as short-sighted and as lacking in imagination as what Prussians themselves might have evolved. The precedents of Brest-Litovsk, at which we raised our hands in justifiable horror, are not agreeable ones to follow. The fatal flaw of the Peace is that it does not look beyond the period of punishment and reparation to an ultimate pacification of Europe. It lays down no principles for the establishment of good relations between nations. Its economic provisions are a nightmare calculated to lay a strangle-hold on any possible recovery of European trade and commerce. With a world crying out for goods and that increased production which can alone bring about a drop in prices, the Peace Treaty is directed to keeping one of the greatest producers, namely Germany, in chains, while a group of little states, erected as military buffers of the most futile character, are allowed to distract themselves and their neighbours by the erection of tariff walls behind which they carry on crazy forms of economic guerilla warfare.