no World-State, with the power to enforce
a World-law between the nations, the possibility of war, with all its
contingent horrors, should have been before our eyes all the time. The
_occasion_ of this war was no doubt a surprise. But that it could happen at
all should not be a surprise to us, still less a disillusionment. It does
not mark a backward step in human civilisation. It only registers the
fact that civilisation is still grievously incomplete and unconsolidated.
Terrible as this war is in its effect on individual lives and happiness, it
ought not to depress us--even if, in our blindness, we imagined the world
to be a far better organised place than it actually is. The fact that many
of the combatants regard war as an anachronism adds to the tragedy, but
also to the hope, of the struggle. It shows that civilised opinion is
gathering strength for that deepening and extension of the meaning and
range of citizenship which alone can make war between the nations of the
world as obsolete as it has become between the nations of the British
Empire or between the component parts of the United States.

It was perhaps inevitable that British citizens in particular, removed from
the storm centres of Continental Europe, and never very logical in their
thinking, should have failed to realise the possibility of another great
war, similar to the Napoleonic struggle of a hundred years ago. For nearly
half a century the great European States had been at peace: and we had come
to look upon their condition, and the attachment of their peoples, as being
as ancient and as stable as our own. We had grown used to the map of Europe
as it had been left by the great convulsions between 1848 and 1871. Upon
the basis of that map and of the governments represented on it, and in
response to the growing needs of the world as a whole, we had embarked on
every kind of international co-operation and cosmopolitan effort. The Hague
Congress, convened by the Tsar of Russia, looked forward to the day when
war, and the causes of war, should be obsolete. The Socialist Movement, a
growing force in all industrial communities, stood for the same ideal, and
for the international comradeship of the working class. Law and medicine,
science and scholarship followed suit; and every summer, in quest of
health and change, thousands of plain citizens have crossed international
frontiers with scarcely greater sense of change than in moving from
province to province