y morally, but
strictly and technically, because there was then no nation a party to
the war which was not also a party to the Convention. The invasion of
Belgium was a breach of contract with us for the maintenance of a law
of nations.... The American Government failed to rise to the demands
of a great occasion. Gone were the old love of justice, the old
passion for liberty, the old sympathy with the oppressed, the old
ideals of an America helping the world towards a better future, and
there remained in the eyes of mankind only solicitude for trade and
profit and prosperity and wealth.'

Yes, humanity might mourn for Belgium, and the States stand aloof in
spite of its plighted word, but what of that when an election had to be
won and the Irish vote conciliated! The world being what it is there
can be no hope of deliverance along the road of treaties. There can be
no salvation by parchments. You cannot make a treaty when there is no
sense of truth and honour. You cannot make a treaty with paganism.
There is no truth or honour there for a treaty to rest on. And the
world is still overwhelmingly pagan. Europe may have been baptized and
America also, but Asia still dreams that its day will return. Japan is
haunted by the dreams of Potsdam, and the hunger of empire is in her
eyes. China, India, Africa, and the Turk are not yet even baptized!
And yet people think that we have arrived at last within sight of the
millennium. The characteristic of humanity is its credulous
simplicity. Men cannot rid themselves of the fond belief that they can
reform the jungle by manicuring the tiger's claws.

VI

The march of events is the proof that the woe of humanity is too deeply
seated to be healed by any human salve. There is no balm in any Gilead
for these wounds. The first step towards the rehabilitation of the
world would be the mutual cancelling of the nations' debts to each
other. The United States alone makes this impossible. Money that we
borrowed for our allies, and which we cannot recover from our allies,
America insists that we pay. And yet that money was spent to save
America as well as ourselves. To realise that one has only to think
what would have happened if Germany had won? The greatest day in the
history of Scotland was when the German fleet, its crimes against the
laws of Neptune for ever ended, came sailing into the Forth to
surrender. Through the mist that shrouded it there never moved a
pro