The moral of this is twofold. We must, to begin with, be content for the present to remain in the stage at which all that can be done is to collect and assemble facts and personal impressions with as great care as we can. The whole truth we can not bring out or estimate until the later period, altho we may be sure enough of what we have before us to make us feel capable of doing justice of a rough kind, so far as necessary action is concerned.
And there is yet another deduction to be drawn. It is at all events possible that the wider view of a generation later than this may be one in which Germany will be judged more gently than the Allies can judge her to-day. We do not now look on the French Revolution as our forefathers looked on it. We see, because recent historians have impressed it on us, that it was a violent uprising against, not Louis XVI., but a Louis XIV. What France really made her great Revolution to bring about was the establishment of a Constitution. Horrible deeds were perpetrated in the name of Liberty, but it was not due to any horrible national spirit that they were perpetrated. France was responsible no doubt for the deeds of the men who acted in her name. But she could hardly have controlled them even had she passionately desired to do so. And she did not passionately desire to do so because, however little the mass of the people outside Paris may have wished to massacre the adherents of the old regime, the people as a whole welcomed deliverance from calamity, even at the price of violent action.
We judge the French nation wholly differently to-day from the way we judged it then, and it judges us differently. Yet it would have been well had we not in the end of the eighteenth century taken an exaggerated view of the French state of mind. We now realize that even so great a man as Burke mistook a fragment for the whole. Much blood and treasure might have been spared, and Napoleon might never have come into existence, had we and others been less hasty.
It is therefore a good thing to keep before us that it is at least possible that the verdict of mankind will be hereafter that when the victory was theirs the Allies judged the people of Germany in a hurry and reflected this judgment in the spirit in which certain of the terms of peace were declared. The war had its proximate origin in the Near East. It arose out of a supposed menace to Teuton by Slav. The Slavs were not easy people to deal with, and the Teutons were not easy people either. It was easy to drift into war. It may well prove true that no one really desired this, and that it was miscalculation about the likelihood of securing peace by a determined attitude that led to disaster. It is certain that the German Government was deeply responsible for the consequences. In the face of its traditional policy and of utterances that came from Berlin the members of that Government can not plead a mere blunder. None the less, a great deal may have been due to sheer ineptitude in estimating human nature. How much this was so, or how much an immoral tradition had its natural results, we can not as yet fully tell, for we have not the whole of the records before us. No one disputes that we were bound to impose heavy terms on the Central Powers. The Allies have won the war and they were entitled to reparation. This the Germans do not appear to controvert. They are a people with whom logic is held in high esteem. But we have to do something more than define the mere consequences of victory. We have also to make plain on what footing we shall be willing to live with the German nation in days that lie ahead. And here some enlargement of the spirit seems to be desirable in our own interests. We do not want to fall again into the mistake that Burke made.
