THE FIGHT IS NOT YET OVER

With the Germans it is not words that count, but deeds.

Prince Max of Baden’s ‘peace offer’ is not ‘the goods’.

But it does hearten us to strike home and compel the real peace.

Made at a moment when the Germans have lost the game, when they are falling back from the Flanders coast, have been driven from the Siegfried Line and are at risk of losing the railway to Constantinople, a request for an armistice means not peace, but trickery.

As if to prove this, there comes in the same breath with it news that the German army is burning the ancient city of Douai. this is a new atrocity.

Prince Max has uttered not a word of repentance for the crimes which the Germans have committed.

how could there be, when within the last few days German submarines have been sinking ships ‘without trace’, when German armies have just driven the civil population of St Quentin before them into slavery, and when the German Staff is destroying France?

there is no admission that German militarism is defeated and bankrupt. On the contrary, this relative of the hohenzollerns congratulates the German armies on maintaining the ‘unbroken front’.

this Reichstag which he parades as a people’s assembly is not a real parliament at all, but only a powerless debating society.

the Kaiser still holds the reins. the men who now applaud Prince Max are those who applauded the treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Prince Max offers, in short, proposals which are much less than the conditions that will be imposed by the Allies as the preliminaries to any discussion at all.

We did not allow Bulgaria to tell us what we were to do; and with Prussia and Austria we intend to act in precisely the same way.

if the German people are now sincere and wish to know what guarantee President Wilson and the Allies require, it may be embodied in two words: ‘Unconditional surrender.’

the Germans must leave the territories they have occupied, with Alsace-Lorraine, unredeemed italy, Serbia and Russia. they must restore the property they have stolen and pay for all the damage they have done.

the French Government, in a declaration on which it is to be congratulated, has told the German nation that ‘ conduct which is equally contrary to international law and the fundamental principles of all human civilisation will not go unpunished’.

in issuing this warning it takes the course which the Daily Mail has urged from day to day; and it is sure of support by all the Allies.