126 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL

war to peace is victory. Victories are more or less absolute
and occur in different degrees of completeness. The type
of victory that is of special importance for the succeeding
peace is the one that results, not exclusively from the preponderance
 of the one party, but in part at least from the
resignation of the other. This confession of inferiority and
acknowledgment of defeat before actual exhaustion is not
always a simple phenomenon. It may be induced by various
 motives, such as a tendency toward self-humiliation,
a feeling that it is worthier to yield than to speculate on an
improbable chance, and a feeling that the confession of defeat
 is a gift to the conqueror and, as such, a last act of
strength.
The termination of a conflict by compromise is completely
 different from a termination by victory. The fact
that certain conflicts can be terminated by compromise
places them in a class by themselves separate and distinct
from conflicts which must be fought for a victory. Conficts
 induced by hatred or revenge allow no compromise.
In primitive times, conflicts fought for a single specific object
 could not be terminated if the object was indivisible.
That this is none the less possible today is one of the great
advances of civilization. It has resulted from the differentiation
 between the value of an object and the object itself.
 Tt took the invention of exchange as a practical synthesis
 of gift and theft, the earliest forms of transferring
values, to make this possible. Once this differentiation
had been accomplished, the possibility was created of terminating
 conflicts about objects through an exchange of
values.
In contrast to compromise, which is an objective means
of terminating conflict, conciliation is a purely subjective
means. What is referred to here is not the sort of conciliation
 that often follows a compromise or any other termina-