ence on foreign affairs except
the opinions of a few bureaucrats in Petrograd. Our sympathy for
or hostility to Russia is determined by our opinion of the Russian
bureaucracy, and we never spare a thought for the hopes and fears and the
dumb but ardent beliefs of millions of Russian peasants. We are apt to
dismiss them from our minds as ignorant and superstitious villagers
tyrannised over by the Tsar, without troubling to enquire narrowly into the
real facts of Russian life. We thus make precisely the same mistake that
diplomatists too often make. We forget that the masses of peasants who flow
every year on pilgrimage to the shrines of their religion constitute a more
vital fact in the history of the world than the deliberations of the Duma
or the decisions of police magistrates.

Here we have a lesson to learn from Germany, for German statesmen,
strangely enough, have taken immense trouble to make their policy a
democratic one. The whole German nation is behind them because for
years and years they have taught the nation through the schools, the
universities, and the press, their own reading of history and their own
idea of what true civilisation is. They have adapted their teaching to the
fundamental characteristics and to the history of the German people. They
have taken pains to ally the interests alike of capital and labour to their
policy, and to fuse the whole nation by a uniform national education and by
a series of paternal social reforms imposed from above. The real strength
and danger of Germany is not what her statesmen or soldiers _do_, but what
Germans themselves _believe_. We are fighting not an army but a false idea;
and nothing will defeat a false idea but the knowledge of the truth.

When this war is over, whatever its outcome may be, we must try to
introduce a new era into the history of the world. But our fathers and our
fathers' fathers have tried to do this same thing, and we shall not succeed
if we go about the work in a spirit of self-sufficiency and hasty pride.
Only knowledge of the truth will enable us to succeed. Knowledge of the
truth is not an easy thing; it is a question of laborious thought, mental
discipline, the humility which is content to learn and the moral courage
which can face the truth when it is learnt. How are we to gain these
things?

First of all, by schools, universities, classes--all the machinery of our
national and private education.

Then, by the same means as popular