An admirable running commentary by Mr. Balfour on the Allies'
Reply to President Wilson's Note was published in the papers of Thursday. It was written for the British Ambassador at Washington to communicate to the President. The British Government, says Mr. Balfour, entirely share the President's ideals, but they feel strongly that no stable system of international relations can be built on foundations which are hopelessly defective. If peace were made now, the old conditions of Europe—the very conditions which made the present calamities possible—would remaid. These conditions were
" the existence of a Great Power consumed with the lust of domination, in the midst of a community of nations ill prepared for defence, plentifully supplied, indeed, with international laws, but with no machinery for enforcing them, and weakened by the fact that neither the boundaries of the various States nor their internal constitution harmonized with the aspirations of their constituent races, or secured to them just and equal treatment."
Evidently the rearrangement of the map on " national " lines proposed by the Allies would greatly mitigate these con- ditions. Turkey is admittedly a ease apart, but she has proved herself impossible, and in the unparalleled massacres she has recently carried out in Armenia and Syria she has had fl* financial support of Germany.
