If sheer brute force is to rule the world, it will not be worth living in.
If German bureaucratic brute force could conquer Europe, presently it would try to conquer the United States; and we should all go back to the era of war as man's chief industry and back to the domination of kings by divine right.

It seems to me, therefore, that the Hohenzollern idea must perish--be utterly strangled in the making of peace.
Just how to do this, it is not yet easy to say.

If the German defeat be emphatic enough and dramatic enough, the question may answer itself--how's the best way to be rid of the danger of the recurrence of a military bureaucracy?
But in any event, this thing must be killed forever--somehow.

I think that a firm insistence on this is the main task that mediation will bring.

The rest will be corollaries of this.
The danger, of course, as all the world is beginning to fear, is that the Kaiser, after a local victory--especially if he should yet take Paris--will propose peace, saying that he dreads the very sight of blood--propose peace in time, as he will hope, to save his throne, his dynasty, his system.