Germany must fight, not merely to defeat the British fleet of to-day, but to neutralize the British fleet of to-morrow.  Leave Ireland to Great Britain and that can never be.  Neutralize Ireland and it is already accomplished.

One of the conditions of peace, and for this reason the most important condition of peace that a victorious Germany must impose upon her defeated antagonist is that Ireland shall be separated and erected into an independent European State under international guarantees.  England, obviously would resist such conditions to the last, but then the last has already come before England would consent to any peace save on terms she dictated.

A defeated England is a starved England.  She would have to accept whatever terms Germany imposed unless those terms provoked external intervention on behalf of the defeated power.

The prize Germany seeks to win from victory is not immediate territorial aggrandizement obtained from annexing British possessions, not a heavy money indemnity wrung from British finance and trade (although this she might have), but German freedom throughout the world on equal terms with Britain.  This is a prize worth fighting for, for once gained the rest follows as a matter of course.

German civilization released from the restricted confines and unequal position in which Britain had sought to pen it must, of itself win its way to the front, and of necessity acquire those favoured spots necessary to its wide development.

“This is the meaning of his (the German’s) will for power; safety from interference with his individual and national development.  Only one thing is left to the nations that do not want to be left behind in the peaceful rivalry of human progress—­that is to become the equals of Germany in untiring industry, in scientific thoroughness, in sense of duty, in patient persistence, in intelligent, voluntary submission to organization.” (History of German Civilization, by Ernst Richard, Columbia University, New York.)

Once she had reduced Great Britain to an opposition based on peaceful rivalry in human progress, Germany would find the path of success hers to tread on more than equal terms, and many fields of expansion now closed would readily open to German enterprise without that people incurring and inflicting the loss and injury that an attempted invasion of the great self-governing dominions would so needlessly involve.  Most of the British self-governing colonies are to-day great States, well able to defend themselves from overseas attack.  The defeat of the British navy would make scarcely at all easier the landing of German troops in, say, Australia, South Africa or New Zealand.  A war of conquest of those far-distant regions would be, for Germany, an impossible and a stupidly impossible task.