From ‘Chatter About Peace’, The Spectator, 19 June 1915:
THE student of foreign telegrams will not have failed to notice that during the past week there have been a good many hints as to the possibilities of peace, and the willingness of the Germans to end the war on what they consider would be reasonable terms. Especially are we told that in America German emissaries are talking about peace, and of Germany’s readiness to go back to the status quo ante bellum, if only she can in addition obtain, not for herself, of course, but for the world at large, what she terms “the freedom of the seas.” When this apparently innocent proposition, which it is suggested that the American people should join with Germany in forcing upon the British nation, is examined in detail, it will be seen to mean, not the liberty of all parsons to use the seas in peace for their lawful occasions, but nothing more nor less than a scheme for depriving Britain of the command of the sea, which we have so long held and which is absolutely vital to us as an island Power. “The freedom of the seas” in the context means that we should resign that maritime power which the present war has once again proved essential to our national existence. Without it we can neither defend ourselves nor strike an effective blow at our enemies. If therefore the Germans, or any of those who may be called Pig-headed Pacificists, think that Britain will entertain for a moment this naive endeavour on the part of Germany to gain by slyness what she cannot gain by war on the high seas, they are very greatly mistaken. The British people will not even discuss, far less agree to, any scheme for our undoing labelled “The freedom of the seas.”
The Allies are not going to make a peace which will merely restore the status quo, a peace of what we may call the eighteenth-century type. At that epoch nations often fought till they were tired, and then agreed that the players at the great and bloody game should go back to their places and all be as before. Neither we nor our allies wanted a war of that kind, or war of any sort. When the war was forced upon us, and the greatest crime in history was committed by the overrunning of Belgium and the giving up of her towns and ‘villages to military execution, it became obvious that, quite apart from moral grounds and the need of self-protection, the Allied Powers could never be satisfied with a status quo Peace. To make such a Peace, and leave the Germans and Austrians with the power to reconstruct their armies and navies at their leisure and come at us again, as the Romans came at the Carthaginians in the second Punic War, would be a mere act of national suicide. When Pitt was asked to state his object in carrying on the war with Napoleon and the Consulate in spite of all the sufferings entailed, he answered “Security.” It is because we must have security, and because we will not expose the next generation to the agony which we now endure, that we will not make a status quo Peace.
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