You will say, as you did say, that you did not break the Triple Alliance, even for the sake of peace.  It was they who broke it for the sake of war.  You, obviously, had as much right to be consulted about Servia as Austria had; and on the mere chess-board of argument it is mate in one move.  Nor are they in the least fitted to make an appeal to the popular sentiment of your people.  The English, I dare say, and the French, have talked an amazing amount of nonsense about you; but they understand a little better.  They do not write exactly like this, which is from the most public and accepted Prussian political philosopher (Chamberlain).  “Who can live in Italy to-day and mix with its amiable and highly gifted inhabitants without feeling with pain that here a great nation is lost, irredeemably lost, because it lacks the inner driving power,” etc., which has brought Von Kluck so triumphantly through Paris.  Even a half-educated Englishman, who has heard of no Italian poet except Dante, knows that he was something more than amiable.  Even a positively illiterate Frenchman, who has heard of no Italian warrior except Napoleon, knows that it was not in “inner driving force” that the artilleryman in question was deficient.  “Who can live in Italy to-day?” Evidently the Prussian philosopher can’t.  His impressions are taken from Italian operas; not from Italian streets; certainly not from Italian fields.  As a matter of fact such images of Italy as burn in the memories of most open-minded Northerners who have been there, are of exactly the other kind.  I for one should be inclined to say, “Who can live in Italy to-day without feeling that a woman feeding children, or a man chopping wood, may almost touch him with fear with the fulness of their humanity:  so that he can almost smell blood, as one smells burning?” Italians often look lazy; that is, they look as if they would not move; but not as if they could not move, as many Germans do.  But even though this formula fitted the Italians, it seems scarcely calculated to please them.  For the Prussians, then, with the failure of their diplomacy, the failure of their philosophy, we may also place the failure of their appeals to a foreign people.  The Prussian writer may continue his attempts to soothe and charm you by telling you that you are irredeemably lost, and that all great Italians must have been something else.  But the method seems to me ill adapted to popular propaganda; and I cannot but say that on this third point of persuasion, the German attempt is not striking.

Now all this is important for this reason.  If you consider it carefully you will see why Europe must, at whatever cost, break Germany in battle:  and put an end to her military and material power to do things.  If we all have to fight for it, if we all have to die for it, it must be done.  If we find allies in the dwarfs of Greenland or the giants of Patagonia, it must be done.  And the reason is that unless it is literally and materially