Let us admit that the difficulties of the Peace were quite enormous and that mistakes and blunders were inevitable. Criticism is roused not so much by the practical provisions of the Treaty as by the general spirit animating it. It is, in effect, a peace of revenge uninspired by one generous gesture as regards the future. It is a peace of tired old men with their eyes fixed on the hatreds and animosities of the past, and their minds obsessed by the territorial jealousies of the old diplomacy. Consequently it has outraged and disgusted the young generation just stepping from school and college into the political arena. Youth is generous and impulsive; it is the age of chivalry and high ideals. The younger men and women ask what this Treaty is doing for the future, at what point it is binding up the wounds of Europe, what contribution it makes towards creating that “new world” of which politicians discoursed so eloquently. The rising generation has a right to demand an answer to these questions. It is their future which is at stake in the matter. The provisions of the Peace are burthens laid upon their shoulders. Naturally they are concerned with the contents of the load. But from no direction comes any satisfactory reply to these inquiries, only the dull echo returned by barriers of hatred and negation. Yet another consequence results from this state of affairs, the seriousness of which has not, I think, been fully grasped. The failures of democratic statesmen, so called, in this matter of the Peace have jeopardised the whole principle of democratic government. “If this is the best that the statesmen of the three great democracies can produce, then away with such a sham and failure as democracy has proved itself to be. Let us try something else.” This spirit is stirring in many quarters. It leads young minds, at once eager and disappointed, to explore the alternatives of anarchism, direct action, Bolshevism, and the rest. We may deplore the direction in which their ideas are moving. Let politicians in power recognise, however, that this spirit of revolt is rooted in the vast failures of the old diplomacy. Is there yet time to recognise the hopeless dead end into which we have blundered and to retrace our steps along a better way? The first condition is to purge our minds from some of the illusions which run riot among the men who control the machine. The peace of Europe cannot be secured by any variation of the old tortuous adjustments concerned with the balance of power. Strategical frontiers, military dispositions, the creation of buffer states, leave the problem exactly where it stood. Neither will the effort to reduce a feared and hated enemy to a condition perilously akin to that of economic servitude dispel the menace of a future appeal to arms. No nation can lay enduring shackles on the life of another, as the history of Germany from Jena to Leipzig proves conclusively. But as