previous set of conditions, and to consider the claims of ability to use the material springs of wealth and power," with a view to its reasonable and legitimate satisfaction.

3. The third source of grievance has really to be sought in those peculiarly awkward relations between Germany and France, which Bismarck's policy in compelling the cession of Alsace-Lorraine was calculated to keep alive for the better welding of the newly confederated German Empire. This is just the kind of astuteness which is so apt to overreach itself. An outsider can but dimly measure the effect on FrancoGerman feeling, however he may long for its healing. But it seems palpable that, unless these relations had been so "difficult," it must have been impossible that the Anglo-French entente of 1903 could ever have come to be regarded by Germans as though it involved unfriendliness to them. Yet it is so regarded. And even now, when Franco-German conversations " have amicably ended, there remains a quite unreasonable disposition to make England the residuary legatee of the ill-feeling engendered during the process of settlement.

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How can it be supposed, even in Germany, that the fact of the entente's existence acted otherwise than as a moderating influence on both parties, after the Agadir incident, and during the subsequent FrancoGerman diplomatic battles? A peaceful conclusion was admittedly desired by France at least as earnestly as by Germany. Hence no friend of France could fail to favour the desired peace. And this pacific bias itself excludes the possibility of any kind of imagined interference with any equitable claim advanced on either side.

A timely protest against supposing England to have been actuated by ill-will to Germany in the exercise of her influence in the Moroccan crisis has just appeared from a quarter which cannot be suspected of anti-German bias, and therefore deserves the full weight attaching to independent opinion. I refer to the tribute to England's good-will made before a plenary sitting of the Austrian Delegations, meeting in Vienna on December 29, 1911, by Dr. Kramarz, a former Vice-President of the Austrian Parliament. The fact, of course, is that, from its very inception, the Anglo-French understanding has been untainted by any sort of unfriendly feeling or intention toward Germany. When the happy change inaugurated by King Edward took place in our relations with France, the British Statesmen who concluded the entente were thinking of Colonial and oversea interests, and not of European diplomacy. The new understanding cleared up various entanglements and controversies which hindered progress in Egypt and the Soudan. It ended bickerings over Newfoundland fisheries, and over boundaries in West Africa. Questions relating to Madagascar, Morocco, and Siam, became soluble in this clearer atmosphere. “When the agreement was published, some Englishmen said that British interests had been sacrificed to French, and some Frenchmen said that France had been too compliant to Britain; but no one imagined that an unfriendly act had been committed toward Germany, or foresaw the contention with Germany that was to arise out of it."

Nor is there any real ground for such contention. No less a person than Prince Bülow himself years ago

laid down the principle "that the division of Powers into groups for particular purposes did not preclude the most cordial relations between Powers in the different groups." And no injury appears to have been done to the intimacy of the two Courts and Governments of Germany and Russia by Russia's adherence to the Dual Alliance, nor vice versâ by a still closer intimacy between Germany and Austria. Why, then, should an Anglo-French entente appear as an offence in German eyes? "S" pleads, in The Westminster, for a détente. Let us have it, by all manner of means; with a rapprochement to follow as soon as possible after.

On the whole, the recent humours of the English and German peoples, however induced, are creditable to neither. When two great nations break away from the moorings of civility and forbearance, all their joint-relations fall out of gear. Everything becomes distorted. Nothing appears in true perspective. Instead of being able to co-operate for the betterment of the world, nations out of temper can only irritate each other. The least movement, on the part of either, at once creates friction. They remain “neighbours only in the sense in which two monster Dreadnoughts, gone adrift, may be so described while their iron sides are grating and grinding against each other.

Now, as Adolf Harnack, last year, in London, observed:

"Every man, and every people, has precious possessions which must be defended, and for which life itself must be laid down; but only the smallest fraction of the wars carried on upon earth have concerned those hallowed possessions. Strike out the

wars which have been undertaken from motives of covetousness and envy, ambition and pride; and we shall see how much occasion for war and bloodshed would then be left!"

That were indeed a dire and disgraceful day when it became so much as conceivable that, for any one of these last-named motives, or for any hell-broth mixture of them all, Germany and England might be found at war. It is positively unthinkable that the well-springs of good feeling could ever be so poisoned, and the natural bonds of brotherhood so broken, for two great peoples bound together by blood-relationship, by a national culture essentially the same amid all differences, and by centuries of continual interchange of intellectual and material wealth.

Germans and Britons have together fought on many battle-fields; but it were a new and horrible thing in history were they now to begin to shed each other's blood. Let them rather brace themselves for the wholesome and exhilarating emulations of industry and art, of science and philosophy. It is by these mankind is ennobled, and the progress of the world advanced. "The way of Righteousness is the way of life," whether for men or for nations. "Our plans, our hopes, our fears, must be regulated, not by things as they at first present themselves to us, but by those things rightly understood by reference to an ideal conception of a future which is to be framed by more perfect laws than the present."

Those last words were spoken by Mandell Creighton, at Sandringham, in 1899. The Kaiser, who was there on a visit, was sufficiently interested to get the Bishop to write out the sermon afterwards, in order that it might be printed. The address continues:

"Patriotism is doubtless a great and necessary virtue; it must always regulate much that we do; but it should not therefore narrow our aspirations. A nation must learn, as the individual learns, mainly by sympathetic intercourse with like-minded nations. On this gradual education of nations, more than anything else, the hope of the world's future depends. Nations with like ideas of righteousness go forth on their separate ways, not that they may emphasise the differences which arise from differing experience, but that they may bring the results of their experience to a common stock."

Now no two nations ever were to whom such words are more directly applicable than they are to Germany and England. Are all the endless vistas of possible greatness-with-goodness which open before a combined work for the amelioration of the world, to be clouded or closed; because each is wilfully determined, in a spirit of hostile separativeness, to follow the ignoble path of self-aggrandisement? Absit omen! Here are two countries, like Tennyson's two heroes, one great by land as the other is by sea. Each is a veritable Atlas, bending beneath an inalienable load of difficulties and duties. Is there no sense of giant comradeship in English and German hearts, which might gradually grow into a genuine longing to fulfil, now without friction, and perhaps some day in combination, the exceptional responsibilities of exceptional power?

Were some viper of Hatred, some corrosive ulcer of Ill-feeling, to turn healthy Anglo-German blood to gall; were two of the most massive Rocks of the world's Peace to sink down into the quicksands of War; nation after nation would become entangled and engulfed. And if every sane instinct of both peoples revolts from the very thought in horror,then let neither of us dally with suicidal possibilities. It must be a very different kind of man from