rn Asia dangerous to the
peace of the whole world? Why, finally, to press Prince Buelow's logic home,
if members of different nationalities cannot live side by side without
playing the game of Hammer and Anvil together, are not the English spending
the whole of their energy fighting the Welsh, the Scotch, and the Irish in
the United Kingdom, the Dutch in South Africa, and the French in Canada,
not to speak of the Jews in every part of the British Empire? The fact is
that the statesmen of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and of Russia also, have
missed the chief lesson of recent history and politics: that in the growing
complexity of world-relations power is falling more and more, of necessity,
into the hands of States which are not Nations but Commonwealths of
Nations, States composed, like the British Empire and the United States, of
a variety of nationalities and "cultures," living peacefully, each with its
own institutions, under a single law and a single central government.

But the time is not ripe yet for a Commonwealth of Europe. The peoples of
Europe have yet to win their liberties before they can be free to dream of
a United States of Europe. So long as the Emperors and statesmen of Central
Europe believe, like the Mahomedans of old, that propaganda can be imposed
by the sword, they can only be met by the sword, and controlled by the
sword. Not till they have been conquered and rendered harmless, or
displaced by the better mind of the peoples whom they have indoctrinated,
can Europe proceed along the natural course of her development.

So far we have been concerned--as we shall be concerned throughout this
book--with the _political_ causes underlying the war. But it would not be
right to ignore the fact that there are other deeper causes, unconnected
with the actions of governments, for which we in this country are jointly
responsible with the rest of the civilised world.

This war is not simply a conflict between governments and nations for the
attainment of certain political ends, Freedom and Nationality on the one
side and Conquest and Tyranny on the other. It is also a great outburst
of pent-up feeling, breaking like lava through the thin crust of European
civilisation. On the _political_ side, as we have said just now, the war
reveals the fact that civilisation is still incomplete and ill-organised.
But on the _moral_ side it reveals the fact that modern society has broken
down, that the forces and passions th