They do not know what they want; or, rather, they want what they cannot help seeing to be incompatibles.

This is one of the reasons why their policy is so inconstant and so exceedingly futile.
The same conflict of purpose is apparent in the attitude of the Council of the Allies at Paris towards the present Government of Germany.

A victory of Spartacism in Germany might well he the prelude to Revolution everywhere: it would renew the forces of Bolshevism in Russia, and precipitate the dreaded union of Germany and Russia; it would certainly put an end to any expectations which have been built on the financial and economic clauses of the Treaty of Peace.

Therefore Paris does not love Spartacus.

But, on the other hand, a victory of reaction in Germany would be regarded by every one as a threat to the security of Europe, and as endangering the fruits of victory and the basis of the Peace.
Besides, a new military power establishing itself in the East, with its spiritual home in Brandenburg, drawing to itself all the military talent and all the military adventurers, all those who regret emperors and hate democracy, in the whole of Eastern and Central and South-Eastern Europe, a power which would be geographically inaccessible to the military forces of the Allies, might well found, at least in the anticipations of the timid, a new Napoleonic domination, rising, as a phoenix, from the ashes of cosmopolitan militarism.