ABSTRACT
The honest cooperation of Germany in the League of Nations, in disarmament, and in world reconstruction is, therefore, fundamentally necessary. The distinction between the German people and the German Government, as Balfour’s predecessor Sir Edward Grey made clear in a most judicious preface written in September 1917 to Gilbert Murray’s essays The Way Forward, was much more an American than a British strain. The principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states had been well put, and apropos Germany, on one particular occasion before the outbreak of war in 1914. The prevalence, during the war and at the peace, of the conviction that the Germans were incorrigible, that their mentality was in some sense fixed, set, by definition had excluded attempts at correcting, altering, moulding. In October 1918 the War Cabinet had received from the PID a memorandum called ‘The Situation in Germany and Peace Overtures’.
