to see the accomplishment of those aims.  The aims with which Britain entered on the War appealed irresistibly to the people of the whole Empire, and not least to the imagination of the Indian races.  An Indian friend of wide experience and calm and independent judgment wrote to me at the time, saying he had never seen anything like the spirit of intense loyalty called out by the belief of Indians that Britain was taking up a heavy burden to protect weaker nations from aggression and to maintain justice.[4] Let us keep those aims pure to the end.  It would, of course, be affectation to suggest that our object in the War is now simply a chivalrous desire to protect the weak or maintain justice.  We now know that it is also to preserve our own existence as a nation, and that it would be better for us and our children that Britain should be sunk beneath the sea than that Germany should achieve a complete victory.

It must be reiterated that until Germans and Austrians can be admitted to free intercourse with other nations we can have no complete world peace.  For such admission the conditions precedent above stated are essential.  But if these are complied with, we must make our choice between the possibility of general peace with a League of Nations embracing all and a state of “veiled and suspended warfare.”  This pregnant phrase caught my eye after the foregoing paragraphs were written.  It is one to be remembered.

Although there is no sign at present of a changed spirit in the German rulers, or in the party which is now dominant in Germany, the prospect of an alteration in the spirit of the German people is not hopeless, unless they emerge from the War victorious.  A significant passage from a German paper is quoted by Sir Dugald Clerk in the most valuable and encouraging address on the “Stability of Britain,” delivered by him to the Royal Society of Arts in 1916.  “So the Germans are awakening to a consciousness of the futility of their dream of domination founded upon the idea of might, irrespective of the rights of other nations, and they will ultimately be forced to accept the idea, so strange to them hitherto, that honesty between nations is as necessary as between man and man.”  The whole address should be read as an antidote by any who take a “gloomy joy in depreciation,” as a tonic by those who are depressed by our failures and apprehensive of our future.

To maintain a real peace based on goodwill, we want to get rid of the jealous spirit which regards the prosperity of one nation as an injury to others.  “The economic and financial strength of this country is founded upon the welfare not merely of the British people, but practically of all countries.”  “Commerce is not a war.  It will be found that wealth increases simultaneously in industrious nations.”  “We must not even forget that a poverty-stricken Germany and Austria would react on the whole world.”  “Punish the Germans and Austrians by all means—­they thoroughly