17 NOVEMBER 1917, Page 25

PREMATURE PEACE.

[To THE EDITOR or THE "SPECTATOR."]

&H,—The following quotation from Coleridge (written in 1609) seems apposite enough to deserve a plum in your columns :— " For a nation to make peace only because it is tired of war, and, as it were, in order just to take breath, is in direct subversion of the end and object of the war which was its sole justification. 'Tis like a poor way-sore foot traveller getting up behind a roach that is going the contrary• way to his."—(A ninon Poetae. p. 148.)