THE GRAND ALLIANCE
IF we are to realize the ideal of an international organization, such as that for which the liberals of America and other nations are striving, we may find in the present alliance opposed to Germany and in the economic and political concert which that alliance has been forced to adopt, an embryonic form, which in the years after the war may develop a relatively permanent and more or less complete unity.
There have been other Grand Alliances, pretentious and feeble, but being mere accumulations of soldiers, they have meant nothing. This Alliance is a totally new thing. It is a union, at least in aspiration, of peoples and not of kings. It is a coalition, economic and political, of states that had formerly lived an independent life.
To gauge this Alliance properly we must look at it from a distance. There are innumerable seams and crevices in it and unlike things are joined incontinently instead of being fused. But these shortcomings are inevitable.1 The marvellous thing is that there should be an alliance at all.
____________________" Napoleon was not so great as we all thought. After all he only fought coalitions." Premier Clemenceau, quoted by Paul U. Kellogg, The Survey, New York, March 19, 1918
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