run continue to prefer the ills of liberty to the afflictions of despotism is to doubt their political sanity.
Out of the disillusionment that has overtaken those who, viewing the war as a gigantic crusade, expected impossibilities has been born a grotesque fantasy—the notion that nobody won the war but that all were alike losers. The force which this idea has it owes to the fact that it is that most dangerous of all errors, a half-truth. The Allies did lose—they lost heavily in men and in money. But to argue from this fact that they would have lost no more by a different outcome of the struggle, that the result was really a matter of indifference, is to show an amazing forgetfulness of the alternative with which they were faced. Ten years ago we knew better.
Had the war ended in a stalemate Europe would have reverted to the armed camp which it had been for decades. The Kaiser and the military and naval clique around him would have been left without victory, but they would have been left without defeat also. The moral of the war, preached in every capital, would have been the necessity for still more effective preparation for Armageddon.
But a stalemate was not the alternative with which the Allies were confronted. That alternative was the triumph of the Central Powers.
