To enter into lengthy details in this connection would be to take up Your Majesty's time needlessly.
I allude only to the decrease in raw materials for the production of munitions, to the thoroughly exhausted human material, and, above all, to the dull despair that pervades all classes owing to under-nourishment and renders impossible any further endurance of the sufferings from the war.
Though I trust we shall succeed in holding out during the next few months and carry out a successful defence, I am nevertheless quite convinced that another winter campaign would be absolutely out of the question; in other words, that in the late summer or in the autumn an end must be put to the war at all costs.
Without a doubt, it will be most important to begin peace negotiations at a moment when the enemy has not yet grasped the fact of our waning strength.

If we approach the Entente at a moment when disturbances in the interior of the Empire reveal the coming breakdown every step will have been in vain, and the Entente will agree to no terms except such as would mean the absolute destruction of the Central Powers.

To begin at the right time is, therefore, of extreme importance.
I cannot here ignore the subject on which lies the crux of the whole argument.

That is, the danger of revolution which is rising on the horizon of all Europe and which, supported by England, is demonstrating a new mode of fighting.

Five monarchs have been dethroned in this war, and the amazing facility with which the strongest Monarchy in the world was overthrown may help to make us feel anxious and call to our memory the saying: _exempla trahunt_.
Let it not be said that in Germany or Austria-Hungary the conditions are different; let it not be contested that the firmly rooted monarchist tendencies in Berlin and Vienna exclude the possibility of such an event.