These two statements have had a wonderfully unifying force. The
Pacificists (that is to say, all except the very extreme and most capricious sort) have no longer any raison d'are. All parties, all classes, all schools of thought, are behind the Allies' terms of peace as they have been freshly defined. If all this is a great gain for the Allies at the opening of the year, it also brings Germany to a supreme test. She knows now that there is no idea whatever of destroying her as a Great Power. All that is asked of her is that she shall consent to the removal of all obvious causes of friction from the world. If she does not consent to this, she will prove that her object is not to be a great leader of culture, a great commercial Empire, or a great exemplar of progress and of an ascending civilization, but (what we gravely fear she still means to be) an arbitrary Power dominating her neighbours by the weight of a brutal military authority.
