Mr. Balfour, speaking at Edinburgh on Thursday week, con- trasted
the Allies' war aims, as clearly expounded by President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George, -with the enemy's aims, which had never been defined, but which must, by inference, be the reverse of ours. He noted as a faint sign of grace the enemy's tardy admission that it might be a good thing to devise some scheme for preventing another war, though up to a year or two ago the Germans held that war was divinely ordained and "the great instrument of progress." One term of peace that the enemy rejected was the demand that he should compensate Belgium for the terrible wrongs done to her, under the shameless plea of "military necessity." Mr. Balfour insisted that there was no knight-errantry in our fight to free Alsace-Lorraine, Trieste, the Trentince Serbia„ and other lands It was a "hard practical necessity" to crush German ambitions* Before a League of Nations could be set up, with any prospect of success, we must have "an arrangement of territory which shall not too grossly violate equity and freedom." A German peace would leave foci of infection everywhere, with wrong triumphant, in a world far poorer and more embittered than it was before the war.
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