November 8, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
provinces of Denmark and to the destruction of Poland still 
more wantonly seized by Prussia (and by Austria at the 
instigation of Prussia) subject for generations to an obscene 
tyranny, and partially, but thank God imperfectly, planted 
by their, ravisher. That is what restoration means. It means 
also the emancipation of the Roumanian, the Serb, the 
Italian populations which have remained unjustly subject to 
alien force through nothing more responsible than the con- 
ventions of politicians. It does not mean the evacuation of 
territory which happens to have been temporarily occupied 
by the accident of the present war. That has nothing to do 
with restoration. That is a mere matter of flux and reflux 
in the movement of military forces in the course of a cam- 
paign. It is no more than a momentary and military accident 
that the lines lie here or there. Tliey may subsequently be 
withdrawn well within enemy countries and yet the principle 
be no whit affected. What has got to be restored is the 
territories of European men taken without right and ruled by 
alien force : And this restoration is particularly and sacredly 
necessary where the rayisher has not only stolen the land, but 
depopulated it and attempted a colonisation of his own. 
Besides restoration there must be reparation. He that 
did the damage must labour to repair the damage ; directly 
by his work, or indirectly by the export of what his work 
produces, by heavy impoverishment in his power to 
consume (but not to produce), and the corresponding 
enrichment of his former victims, he must make good 
those material damages which alone it is in his power 
to make good. The moral evil he can never repair. He 
will pay for that in* the attitude which will be adopted 
towards him by mankind. If those who openly violate ad- 
mitted law go free under no penalty to restore what they have 
destroyed, the law loses its sanction and ceases to be of effect. 
In other words, if we do not achieve the material result of 
compelling the enemy to reparation, he has won ; for he has 
proved that he can at his will destroy wantonly and suffer no 
consequences therefrom. The third limb of the formula is the 
word " Guarantees," and tliat means hostages in persons, 
goods or land, or all three combined. 
If there is anyone who seriously believes that a mere 
promise to slave at reparation and to labour without thought 
of future aggression will be undertaken voluntarily by a 
(Germany not compelled to such justice, he may be left to his 
opinions, or better still asked to apply them in practice to the 
civil sphere of his own country, and to expect the sentence of 
the law without physical power in the State. 
The third consideration upon the conditions of victory is 
ihe consideration of a particular test by which we may know 
by a special instance whether victory has been achieved or no. 
In the first point, the fundamental one of all, we speak of 
military decision and the breaking of the evil will to which 
we are opposed. It is the largest point. In the second we 
speak of the general external effects of such victory : Restora- 
tion, Reparation and Guarantees. The third is a lesser point, 
but none the less a vital one. We need a test to which any 
one can turn : A sort of touchstone by which the simplest can 
discern whether victory has reallv been achieved or no. That 
test or touchstone, very unfamiliar to a modern audience in 
England and possibly unsympathetic to it, is Poland. 
There will be a Poland after this war. The resurrection of 
Poland is certain. Equally certainly it will be either a German 
Poland or a counter German Poland. Very well, the test is 
which of the two Polands shall arise. If the Poland that 
arises after the war is a German Poland, a Poland under 
the influence of Vienna and Berlin, then the enemy has 
won. He controls the East. He has erected his " Middle 
Europe " and is our master in materials and men. The futur^ 
is his. If, upon the contrary, we can so thoroughly win as to 
?rect a large and strong independent Polish state pressing 
upon the German borders and making a counter-weight to the 
.ierman body, cutting it off from the East and denying its 
monopoly of mineral resources and of the Baltic Sea; we have 
,von. It is the one clear, simple and practical test by which 
the issue of the war may be judged. 
Military Decision 
The first of these considerations, though the most important 
may be dealt with the most briefly. The evil will to which 
we are opposed must be destroyed, especially in the interests 
of this country, and it can only be destroyed in the field. 
It is a commonplace, but one perpetually forgotten, an 
obvious truth, but one continually hidden by metaphor and 
confused speech, that the springs of human action are in some- 
thing invisible. Those who are sn old-fashioned as to dishke 
the word " soul " may, if they like, use the word " mind." 
At any rate, it will be conceded that men's actions depend 
upon emotions and a mood. The architecture, the letters, 
the morals and manners of a community, the very existence 
of the community itself, that is of an organisation as distin- 
guished from 5. mere dust of individuals, depends upon this 
invisible factor. In war what affects this factor is victon,' or 
defeat. The instinct of every populace agrees to so simple a 
proposition ; the common sense of all cultivated men supports 
it, for history invariably supports it too. 
It is iierfectly true that great changes and often the 
greatest changes of all have taken place through an'action upon 
the mind with which arms had little to do. The propagation 
of Islam was an armed thing, but that of the Christian Church 
in the Roman Empire was not. It can be argued that arms 
might conceivably never enter into the process and it can be 
asserted that in some of the greatest examples they were 
absent. But when the element of a military challenge is 
present ; when one philosophy or religion or national claim 
just or unjust, has put it to the test of arms, then short of 
failure in arms the claim makes good or, failing in arms it also 
fails. To this I think there is no exception in all the known 
history of the world. It is indeed the weakness of thus 
appealing to arms alone that you risk all from mere 
material defeat, and upon suffering it will see your ideal 
destroyed as well as your physical structure. If Islam 
had conquered in the battlefield half way between Tours 
and Poitiers in the eightli century, France and Europe 
would be Mohammedan to-day. It was defeated, and with 
that military defeat went the beginning of its decline. If 
Carthage had conquered Rome, the civiHsation from which 
we spring would never have existed. All its ideas, which are 
to-day the atmosphere we breathe, would be as unfamiliar 
to us as are to-day the ideas of Baal and Moloch. 
The Material Challenge 
Now in this present debate the essential point is arms. 
There was not a conflict between two points of view, each of 
which was working against the other by persuasion ; there was 
a direct material challenge thrown down by one party to the 
other in set terms : " We will IJring armies against you at our 
own moment. Our armies are stronger than yours, and will 
destroy your armies. When we have so destroyed your 
armies we will impose what terms we choose." That 
was the German challenge. It was a challenge thrown 
down under the full certitude of victory (for those who 
threw it down have never fought odds and have never 
entertained the idea of fighting odds — it would seem to 
them mere foolishness, a part of all that chivalric tradition 
which they call false and despise). It was a challenge 
concerned with material force alone. If its authors remain 
undefeated in arms, they have conquered. To think that they 
have not conquered, simply because their full programme 
has not been achieved, is to misunderstand the whole nature 
of the problem. The point is that they felt themselves strong 
enough to deny the power of civilisation to restrain them. 
They thought that this impotence to restrain would also in- 
volve the fall of the civilisation they attacked. In that they 
were mistaken. But if they withdraw still undefeated, the 
core of their original pronouncement remains intact. The 
plain man puts it in very excellent language when he says : 
" There is nothing to prevent them beginning again — except 
fatigue, from which one can always recover." The historical 
philosopher puts it somewhat differently by saying that " the 
evil will is unbroken." Both are right. When the bar- 
barian is bought off in any fashion, you are not buying peace, 
you are buying a truce at usury. You are postponing the 
evil day at high interest, and all history is there to prove it. 
There has appeared during the latter stages of the war, that 
is, during the stages which are necessarily those of fatigue, 
an extraordinary doctrine to the effect that defeat is never 
conclusive. All histoiy is there again to prove the contrary. 
Defeat, whi,chever side may suffer it, will produce spiritual 
fruits of the most vigorous kind. If it be our party which 
suffers defeat and which accepts the claim of the enemy to 
violate law and to go unpunished, the sanctity* of law in 
Europe at once loses its force. Progressively and cunui- 
latively the loss of respect for law will proceed, and tliis will 
be felt not only in that large field of international relations 
with which the individual has so little to do, but gradually 
deeper and deeper down through all the phases of civil and 
even domestic life. 
But there is more 1;han this. Tlie defeated party loses 
confidence in its own institutions and loses heart, and there- 
fore energy. The thing appears ev^n where your modern 
industrial man least conceives it jjossible. It appears in the 
economic field. The defeated party in a great duel commonly, 
if history is any guide, declines in material civilisation, goes 
back and becomes more and more lethargic. In the matter 
of institutions the defeated party in losing faith losers stability. 
Every one of the successful constitutions of modern times, 
the British, the American, the modern German, has proceeded 
from a 00 of victory. It has not been some marvellous 
balance of their own, some consummate wisdom in their 
