as regards the chief point, and on no account should either of the two great attacks be made dependent in any way on these minor ones.

We are quite convinced that in this way France may be overthrown and chastised whenever she thinks fit to put on that insolent air with which she has oppressed Europe for a hundred and fifty years. It is only on the other side of Paris, on the Loire, that those conditions can be wrung from her which are necessary for the peace of Europe. In this way alone the natural relation between 30 millions of men and 75 millions will quickly make itself known, but not if the country from Dunkirk to Genoa is to be surrounded in the way it has been for 150 years by a girdle of Armies, whilst fifty different small objects are aimed at, not one of which is powerful enough to overcome the inertia, friction, and extraneous influences which spring up and reproduce themselves everywhere, but more especially in allied Armies.

How little the provisional organisation of the German Federal Armies is adapted to such a disposition will strike the reader. By that organisation the federative part of Germany forms the nucleus of the German power, and Prussia and Austria, thus weakened, lose their natural influence. But a federative State is a very brittle nucleus in War--there is in it no unity, no energy, no rational choice of a Commander, no authority, no responsibility.

Austria and Prussia are the two natural centres of force of the German Empire; they form the pivot (or fulcrum), the forte of the sword; they are monarchical States, used to War; they have well defined interests, independence of power; they are predominant over the others. The organisation should follow these natural lineaments, and not a false notion about unity, which is an impossibility in such a case; and he who neglects the possible in quest of the impossible is a fool.