10 
LAND 6? WATER 
October 31, 1916 
should sec that our duty here runs with our interest, and 
that it is part of our duty to piake Germany reahse that 
commercial success and prosperity is not the result of disloyal 
competition and trickery, but of mutual service and co- 
operation. 
Here, then, I might tlose the general case for the conditions 
of peace ; but the recent exchange of notes between the 
American and German Governments has brought up other 
issues, and it is idle to hide from oneself that great uncer- 
tainty and anxiety has been excited. It arises in this way. 
The Germans, .as a' preliminary to asking for an armistice, 
informed President Wilson that they accepted as a basis of 
peace the fourteen points of January and the four points 
of his later speech. In the last note from President Wilson 
to the Foreign Secretary it was stated that exceptional 
guarantees were necessary before an armistice could be 
granted because, the recent constitutional changes notwith- 
standing, the German Government was still essentially under 
the domination of the King of Prussia. These two features 
have given rise to a large number of questions and protests 
from correspondents. The following are some of them. 
Are the Allies now tied down to insist on no reparation 
at the peace, except such as the fourteen points provide ? 
The Germans have bound themselves to the fourteen points, 
but to no others. Do they limit us just rs tl.ey bind them ? 
Arc we, therefore, debarred from asking for compensation 
for our lost tonnage ? Again, do the fourteen points bind 
us to adopt the doctrine of the freedom of the seas ? Have 
we abandoned our rights to search and capture ? Is the 
British Navy henceforth powerless unless the League of 
Nations permits it to act ? Is the immedia.te establishment 
of a League of Nations with German}', Austria, and Turkey 
as members a necessary part of the peace arrangement ? 
Is the ultimate destination of the German colonies to be 
discussed as if it were a question to be settled either in the 
German or the British interest alone ? And, finally, if 
Germany adopts a constitution unquestionably democratic, 
must we take this as tantamount to saying that whatever 
the new Germany undertakes it will carry out, so that a 
political reform will be held to be equivalent to the military 
occupation and enforcement of our terms ? 
Behind these questions there is a misunderstanding, 
both of the position which President Wilson has assumed 
in the war, and of his actual attitude in the recent 
correspondence. It must, then, be made unmistakably clear 
that the Chief Magistrate of America speaks for the United 
States only, for they are- not, technically, in alliance with 
France, Great Britain, Italy, Serbia, and Montenegro, the 
last survivors of the original combination. They are asso- 
ciated, but not allied with us. The fourteen points were put 
forward by President Wilson without concert or consultation 
with the Allied Governments, and represent not the Allied 
maximum, but the American minimum. They set out in 
clauses 5 to 13 what seems to an impartial critic of singular 
acumen, a resettlement of the broad European issues that is 
at once equitable and necessary. But they do not profess 
to exhaust what other Powers may see to be indispensable 
both to justice and security. They do not exclude further 
■conditions, further compensations, further indemnities. These 
the several Powers bound by the pact of London must agree 
amongst themselves and put forward with the authority of 
all the Allies behind them. First, then, let us establish the 
point that President Wilson has not professed to exhaust 
the Allied case. 
"Next, in the recent exchange of notes, he has kept per- 
fectly correctly to his technical position. Up to the last of 
them it is assumed not only that the Allies are not parties 
to the correspondence, but are even ofificially ignorant of its 
existence. What the President proposes to communicate to 
them is not his observations on the German proposal, but 
the German proposal itself. The Allies, then, take into 
cognisance one matter only, viz., that the Germans have 
applied to President Wilson for an armistice and that the 
President has forwarded the request. Here again the most 
punctilious care has been taken not to bind, fetter, or limit 
either the Allied Governments or their naval and military 
advisers in the smallest degree. 
But much more than this, of course, has happened. 
Two fundamental truths have been brought home to Ger- 
many, and have shaken the nation to its foundations. Every 
German who can read now knows, both by the admissions of 
his own Government and by the masterful tone of Mr. Wilson, 
that the attempt of the rulers of Germany to conquer has 
recoiled upon themselves and their subjects. Every German 
now knows that it is his country, and not those which his 
rulers have attacked^ that is on the eve of overwhelming 
defeat. Next, he has learned that the kind of government 
capable of creating such a war and of carrying it on by the 
methods that' Germany has applauded, is one with which 
America, at least, will have no civil dealings at all. Militarism, 
therefore, now appears in its true light to the nation that has 
so long been its exponent. It is not only an unsuccessful 
and futile thing : it is a horror which excites such disgust 
in other peoples that, except at the sword's point, no traffic 
of any kind can be held with it. Thus, while the political 
and military positions have been in every respect most strictly 
maintained, a moral offensive possibly of a decisive kind 
has been burst upon the German home front. 
" Freedom of the Seas " 
We need then have no misgivings as to Mr. Wilson having 
compromised the AUies, cither by his courtesy or by his 
candour ; but the questions which my correspondents have 
raised deserve discussion, quite apart from this implication. 
There are three that are vitally important : freedom of the 
seas, the limitation of indemnities to restoring invaded 
territories, and the question of the military' occupation and 
constraint of Germany. I have only space to deal here with 
the first of the.se question?. 
The second of the fourteen points runs as follows : 
"Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas outside 
territorial waters alike in peace and in war, except as the 
seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action 
for the enforcement of international covenants." 
It obviously becomes operative only when a League of 
Nations is established. As it stands, it changes nothing in 
sea law as it is to-day. It is, in fact, the suggestion of a rule 
which a League of Nations should adopt when war in defence 
of national rights will not be the affair of the country whose 
interests are jeopardised, but of the whole community of 
nations, who have bound themselves in a mutual obligation 
to see that justice is done to each. Until, then, we have 
settled the major point of entrusting the sea defence of 
the British Empire to a common navy, instead of to the 
British Navy, we do not have to concern ourselves over 
any diminution of the British Navy's admitted rights and 
powers. 
But, rightly looked at, clause 2 seems to me to mean 
exactly the opposite of what it is popularly supposed to 
import. For the President sets it out that when the League* 
as a league embarks on naval war, it will be able to decree 
the partial or entire suspension of sea trade with its enemy, 
thus assuming precisely those maritime rights in war on 
which the British Navy has all along insisted. Clause 2, 
in fact, is a vindication of and not a proposed infringement of 
our broad contentions as to the legitimate use of sea- 
power. 
The fourteen points are silent on Germany's eccnomic 
liability for the disastrous results of her piratical war 
on shipping. The President's silence on this point is 
very easily explained. As a simple historical fact, it was 
the submarine, and nothing else, that brought America into 
the war. But it was America's moral repudiation of this 
iniquity, and not her material losses by it, that determined 
her action. The submarine campaign, instead of diminishing 
the merchant tonnage of America, has already resulted in 
measures which have increased it enormously, and these 
measures will go forward until in a very few years the American 
merchant marine will be at least double what Germany's was 
before the war, and more than half of the highest figure that 
Great Britain has ever attained. The British position is 
entirely different. Our merchant tonnage has been at the 
full war service of all the Allies, and for the last eighteen 
months of America. It has afforded the most targets to the 
submarine ; it has paid most highly in consequence. But 
the service of our sea tonnage has been only part of our 
naval contribution. We have had to maintain an impreg- 
nable fleet ; we have had to supply more than 90 per cent, 
of the craft necessary for fighting the submarine. And, quite 
unexpectedly, our military contribution, instead of being tl;«' 
three or four army corps suggested before hostilities began, 
had to run to millions almost from the very start. As a 
consequence, our ship3'ai"ds were depleted of their most 
spirited and efficient labour, and the half-manned yards had 
to meet the whole demands both of the surface navy and 
of the new navy called into being to fight the under-water 
piracy. . Never in our history, then, have we been so poorh- 
equipped to make good the losses that we have suffered. 
It follows, then, that our equitable claim, not only to the 
whole of the existing German merchant tonnage, but to the 
service of the German shipyards for a considerable nimiber 
of years is one that no impartial arbiter could refuse. It is 
quite certain that President Wilson never intended and that 
Americans will never require our dernands in this matter 
to be questioned. 
