LAND &? WATER 
October 31, 1918 
principle that ivars are fought not ultimately for military, 
but for political objects: 
The whole of military effort is but a means to an end, 
and tliat end is a civihan end. It is true to say that the 
difference between the very great soldiers in history and the 
lesser ones — or, again, the difference between the greatest 
period of a great soldier's career and its lesser, and often 
disastrous, sequel — is the difference between a man who 
understands that arms are subordinate to the general life of 
the ,State and a man who does not understand, or forgets, 
that truth. 
Well, then, what was the political object of the Allies 
when they accepted the Prussian challenge ? 
It was exactly the same as the object of your private 
citizen when he accepts the challenge of a murderer or of 
a robber. 
The Allies accepted the challenge because- they had no 
choice save to accept it. A Power for the moment stronger 
than themselves had determined to make itself stronger 
still, to m-.ike itself completely master ; it was no longer 
content to be merely the strongest State in Europe. It 
proposed to govern. Prussia, with her ring of allies and 
dependents controlling immediately on the declaration of 
war 120 ipilHon of highly organised population, and a few 
months later 150 million, then a little later again 160 million, 
challeiTged the civilisation of the West, well knowing that 
the imperfect development of the Russian Empire would not 
permanently affect her plans. In one phrase, which has 
been thought rhetorical, but which is perfectly true, France 
and England fought for their lives. 
FUTURE SAFEGUARDS 
Now, when you fight for your life against a man that would 
destroy you, your object is not merely to prevent your 
destruction, and then, having thrown him off, to stand 
opposed to him during some uncertain period of repose. 
Your object is to prevent the recurrence of such an outrage. 
The less tolerable, the more inhuman, the more treacherous 
your opponent's means, the more violent his objects, the 
more is it your purpose not — most emphatically not — to 
defend yourself, but to render him incapable of any such 
further action, to produce a relation between yourself and 
him such that he certainly shall be impotent for such deeds 
in the future ; and by his example to destroy the inclina- 
tion towards such deeds in general. 
Our political object may therefore be thus defined : the 
reduction of the aggressor to a condition such that renewed 
aggression on his part is impossible, and, by the example 
made of him, to reduce or eliminate the peril of such aggression. 
That is the problem. The solution of that problem con- 
notes two very distinct branches of functions, and it is the 
neglect of one or the other which leads to insufficiency in 
our judgment to-day. The first branch is the present, what 
the mechanicians call the static, reduction of our opponents ; 
the second branch is the continuous or dynamic reduction of 
his evil power. Those who are content with the immediate 
impotence of the aggressor have done nothing. Those who 
forget the importance of his immediate impotence and rely 
only upon ultimate effect have done something indeed, but 
have done it imperfectly and have left themselves in peril. 
It is the universal experience of mankind that when you 
set out to eliminate some crime you must both act so as to 
make the crime immediately ceascand to render the criminal 
impotent, and also act so as to create a state of mitid in him 
and in others in which the renewal of the crime shall be far 
more difficult or impossible ; and this experience we sum up 
in the simple phrase "the necessity for punishment." 
Punishment is not merely deterrent, it is also expiatory. 
It is not only expiatory, it is also convertive. Its intention 
is (i) to impede by example the repetition of, the crime, 
(2) to cause the criminal, through his own interest and person, 
to make redress for the crime— that is, to make him feel in 
himself what he has made others feel, to make him realise 
his guilt — and (3) by such action to change not only his 
mind, but the relation which we bear towards him and he 
to us. 
.; DESTRUCTION OF THE PRUSSIAN SYSTEM 
We have, then, to consider what that is from the aggres- 
sion of which we have suffered, and what punishment it is 
whiedi will fulfil all these conditions in his regard. Until we 
are dear upon these two points we do not know our principal 
political object, and we do not know how to define our com- 
plete victory — that is, how to use the complete military 
success. 
The aggressor whom it is our business to destroy is that 
system — for it is not a nation — called Prussia; in lesser degree 
we must weaken, because they have voluntarily and even 
enthusiastically put themselves at the service of Prussia, 
such of the various German tribes as have accepted Prussian 
ideals and the Prussian rule ; in a lesser degree again, the 
Allies of the Prussianised German P2mpire. 
Prussia, however, is the heart of the whole affair. Were 
we denied the power— which happily we are not — to act 
upon any other of the factors opposing our civilisation, we 
should have accomplished the greater part of our task if 
we were to dissolve the system of Prussia. 
Now that system is not only purely military, but has a 
strong military tradition (by which it lives) of immediate 
success as a necessity of its life. The Prussian idea is that 
of a single dynasty, the Hohenzollern, surrounded by a small 
group of large landowners and servants, ultimately origi- 
nating in one of the outer, less fertile, and less creative 
provinces of Europe, strengthening itself by submitting to 
an exact discipline those whom it dragged under its rule, 
and persuaded that military power, no matter how acquired, 
and no matter hdw exercised, was the essential of the State. 
The doctrine was grossly eri-oneous for it forgot chivalry and 
humour, and, indeed, all the stuff of life. It was the very 
negation of the military tradition in civilised Europe. It 
had no idea of ^lory, for instance, nor of fruitful rule. No 
Prussian conquest has ever attracted the conquered. For 
the same reason it has been incapable of any creative effort 
in the arts. 
It is to all *this emptiness of soul that one must ascribe 
the strange phenomenon of necessary success : the strange 
fact that Prussia cannot exist save in an atmosphere of 
victory. 
Never has Prussia lost a decisive battle or campaign 
without complete collapse. There is a legend, naturall}' 
flattering to the Prussians, propagated in this country by 
Carlyle, that Frederick the Great, and in the next century 
the group of men who worked after Jena, knew how to turn 
defeat into victory. It is a myth. Frederick the Great, 
defeated, was lost save for quarrels between his much more 
powerful neighbours. After Jena, Prussia completely sub- 
mitted — -submitted in a fashion more abject than any other 
State — to the French. She did not react until Napoleon's 
army had been destroyed in Russia, and even then she 
hesitated with absurd timidity before deciding to abandon 
her new and recent master. 
It is a lesson of history which will prove very hard for us 
to learn because it has been universally opposed for three 
generations in our academies ; but it is true. Germans, 
as a whole, are not tenacious, and in particular Prussia 
defeated suffers the moral consequence of defeat more than 
any other military organism we know. 
The converse truth is that Prussia must suffer obvious and 
emphasised defeat before she accepts its moral consequence 
and breaks down. 
SEVEN CARDINAL POINTS 
Let us, therefore, set down this as the first agreed point 
in our list of the things that constitute a true victory. 
1. Prussia must suffer full military defeat. ' 
Complete military defeat means the undoing of the armed 
machine whereby your enemy can make war. It matters 
nothing whether you surround him and force him to lay 
down his arms in that way — Sedan, for example — or whether 
you obtain his arms by his voluntary surrender in the face 
of a hopeless situation, political or military — Bulgaria, for 
instance, the other day. Complete defeat involves complete 
disarmament. If you have not disarmed Prussia you have 
not defeated her. If you leave a Prussian army in being, 
you have not impressed upon the Prussian mind the sense of 
absolute defeat, nor made an example and a spectacle of 
Prussia to those who only served her because they believed 
in her invincibility. 
2. The converse side to this. By so much as it is Prussia 
which is the core of our attack, the political target of the 
whole war, the keystone of the arch which we are throwing 
down, by so much must we vary in the degree of our dealings 
with those attached in varying degree to the Prussian cause. 
Those most nearty attached have been, of course, a majority 
of the various German peoples, more or less voluntarily 
subjected to Prussian rule, and organised under the Prussian 
system. Such organisation has called itself for over forty 
years the German Empire, a thing modern, and let us hope 
ephemeral ; long mechanical, inorganic, and therefore 
inhuman. 
These States have been as guilty, in actual practice, as 
the master State which gathered them together. It is true 
they drew their guilt from Prussia ; it is true that the evil 
