The German people are by no means less capable of tolerance and neighbourly decorum than their British or Scandinavian neighbours of the same blood,--if they can only be left to their own devices, untroubled by the maggoty conceit of national domination.
There is no intention herewith to express an expectation that this out-and-out neutralisation of the Fatherland's international relations and of its dynastic government will come to pass on the return of peace, or that the German people will, as a precaution against recurrent Imperial rabies, be organised on a democratic pattern by constraint of the pacific nations of the league.

The point is only that this measure of neutralisation appears to be the necessary condition, in the absence of which no such neutral league can succeed, and that so long as the war goes on there is something of a chance that the British community may in time reach a frame of mind combining such settled determination to safeguard the peace at all costs, with such a degree of disregard for outworn conventions, that their spokesmen in the negotiations may push the neutralisation of these peoples to that length.
The achievement of such an outcome would evidently take time as well as harsh experience, more time and harsher experience, perhaps, than one likes to contemplate.
Most men, therefore, would scarcely rate the chance of such an outcome at all high.

And yet it is to be called to mind that the war has lasted long and the effect of its demands and its experience has already gone far, and that the longer it lasts the greater are the chances of its prolongation and of its continued hardships, at least to the extent that with every month of war that passes the prospect of the allied nations making peace on any terms short of unconditional surrender grows less.
And unconditional surrender is the first step in the direction of an unconditional dispossession of the Imperial establishment and its war prophets,--depending primarily on the state of mind of the British people at the time.

And however unlikely, it is also always possible, as some contend, that in the course of further war experience the common man in the Fatherland may come to reflect on the use and value of the Imperial establishment, with the result of discarding and disowning it and all its works.

Such an expectation would doubtless underrate the force of ancient habit, and would also involve a misapprehension of the psychological incidence of a warlike experience.