And the punishment, or even the
annihilation, of any one nation would leave those causes still subsisting.
Wipe out Germany from the map, and, if you do nothing else, the other
nations will be at one another's throats in the old way, for the old
causes. They would be quarrelling, if about nothing else, about the
division of the spoil. While nations continue to contend for power,
while they refuse to substitute law for force, there will continue to
be wars. And while they devote the best of their brains and the chief
of their resources to armaments and military and naval organization,
each war will become more terrible, more destructive, and more ruthless
than the last. This is irrefutable truth. I do not believe there is a
man or woman able to understand the statement who will deny it.
In the second place, the enemy nation cannot, in fact, be annihilated,
nor even so far weakened, relatively to the rest, as to be incapable of
recovering and putting up another fight. The notions of dividing up Germany
among the Allies, or of adding France and the British Empire to Germany,
are sheerly fantastic. There will remain, when all is done, the defeated
nations--if, indeed, any nation be defeated. Their territories cannot be
permanently occupied by enemy troops; they themselves cannot be permanently
prevented by physical force from building up new armaments.
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