We are not fighting, continued Mr. Asquith, to annihilate Germany
and the German people. We sought to destroy not a people but a system, "which has used as its instroment, first in Prussia, then in the rest of Germany, 'that two-handed engine '—the military and the bureaucratic machines carefully and cunningly interlocked." Prussian militarism, which has- enthroned Force as the sovereign authority, must come to an end. Germany inset learn that the system does not pay. Peace, when it comes, must rest not on a strap of paper but on "authentic proof that the German people are as ready as we are to set up the rule of common and equal right as the controlling authority in the world." As for the "freedom of the seas," Mr. Asquith said that he had sought in vain for a definition of the phrase. If it meant anything on German lips, it meant a limitation of our naval power unbalanced by any similar limitation of German military power. The only menace to the true freedom of the seas was the infamous German submarine campaign. If we may adapt Tacitus, we might say that "they sink without a trace and call it freedom."
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