ting of boundaries
and slight readjustment of procedure, while in nearly every other aspect
of life there had been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and
an enormous enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdities of courts
and the indignities of representative parliamentary government, coupled
with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other directions, had
withdrawn the best intelligences more and more from public affairs.
The ostensible governments of the world in the twentieth century were
following in the wake of the ostensible religions. They were ceasing to
command the services of any but second-rate men. After the middle of
the eighteenth century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the
world's memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.
Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted,
common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new
possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the past.

Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the
boundaries of the various 'sovereign states,' and the conception of a
general predominance in human affairs on the part of some one particular
state. The memory of the empires of Rome and Alexander squatted, an
unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human imagination--it bored into the
human brain like some grisly parasite and filled it with disordered
thoughts and violent impulses. For more than a century the French
system exhausted its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the
infection passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and
centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages were
to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this obsession, the
intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the infinite knowingness of
the political writer, the cunning refusals to accept plain facts, the
strategic devices, the tactical manoeuvres, the records of mobilisations
and counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon as
it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their state
craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning, and, in spite
of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and shadows, still
wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of Europe and the world.

It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions of men
and women outside the world of these specialists sympathised and agreed
wit