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 pre- 
ponderance 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 vari- 
ous 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 de- 
feat is a gift to the conqueror and, as such, a last act of 
strength. 
The termination of a conflict by compromise is com- 
pletely 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. Con- 
ficts induced by hatred or revenge allow no compromise. 
In primitive times, conflicts fought for a single specific ob- 
ject 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 differen- 
tiation between the value of an object and the object it- 
self. Tt took the invention of exchange as a practical syn- 
thesis 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 ter- 
minating 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 concilia- 
tion that often follows a compromise or any other termina-