abide by "scraps
of paper" if they do not feel the _status quo (i.e._ the conditions under
which wage-contracts are made) to be equitable and inherently just.]

The other road may seem, in this hour of dreams and disaster, of extremes
of hope and disillusionment, a long and tedious track: it is the old slow
high road of civilisation, not the short cut across the fields. It looks
forward to abiding results, not through the mechanical co-operation of
governments, but through the growth of an organic citizenship, through the
education of the nations themselves to a sense of common duty and a common
life. It looks forward, not to the definite establishment, in our day, of
the World-State, but only to the definite refutation of the wicked
theory of the mutual incompatibility of nations. It looks forward to the
expression in the outward order of the world's government of what we may
call "the Principle of the Commonwealth," of Lord Acton's great principle
of the State composed of free nations, of the State as a living body which
lives through the organic union and free activity of its several national
members. And it finds its immediate field of action in the deepening and
extension of the obligations of citizenship among the peoples of the great,
free, just, peace-loving, supra-national Commonwealths whose patriotism has
been built up, not by precept and doctrine, but on a firm foundation of
older loyalties.

The principle of the Commonwealth is not a European principle: it is a
world-principle. It does not proceed upon the expectation of a United
States of Europe; for all the Great Powers of Europe except Austria-Hungary
(and some of the smaller, such as Holland, Belgium, and Portugal) are
extra-European Powers also. Indeed if we contract our view, with Gladstone
and Bismarck and the statesmen of the last generation, to European issues
alone, we shall be ignoring the chief political problem of our age--the
contact of races and nations with wide varieties of social experience and
at different levels of civilisation. It is this great and insistent problem
(call it the problem of East and West, or the problem of the colour-line)
in all its difficult ramifications, political, social, and, above all,
economic, which makes the development of the principle of the Commonwealth
the most pressing political need of our age. For the problems arising out
of the contact of races and nations can never be adjusted either by the
wise action