desire
but see to the accomplishment of their desire.

And here again one is likely to meet an active and influential
opposition. Though the general will and welfare may point to the future
management of international relations through a world congress, the
whole mass of those whose business has been the direction of
international relations is likely to be either skeptical or actively
hostile to such an experiment. All the foreign offices and foreign
ministers, the diplomatists universally, the politicians who have
specialized in national assertion, and the courts that have symbolized
and embodied it, all the people, in fact, who will be in control of the
settlement, are likely to be against so revolutionary a change.

For it would be an entirely revolutionary change. It would put an end to
secrecy. It would end all that is usually understood by diplomacy. It
would clear the world altogether of those private understandings and
provisional secret agreements, those intrigues, wire-pullings, and
quasi-financial operations that have been the very substance of
international relations hitherto. To these able and interested people,
for the most part highly seasoned by the present conditions, finished
and elaborated players at the old game, this is to propose a new, crude,
difficult, and unsympathetic game. They may all of them, or most of
them, hate war, but they will cling to the belief that their method of
operating may now, after a new settlement, be able to prevent or
palliate war.

All men get set in a way of living, and it is as little in human nature
to give up cheerfully in the middle of life a familiar method of dealing
with things in favor of a new and untried one as it is to change one's
language or emigrate to an entirely different land. I realize what this
proposal means to diplomatists when I try to suppose myself united to
assist in the abolition of written books and journalism in favor of the
gramophone and the cinematograph. Or united to adopt German as my means
of expression. It is only by an enormous pressure of opinion in the
world behind these monarchs, ministers, and representatives that they
will be induced even to consider the possibility of adapting themselves
to this novel style of international dealing through a permanent
congress. It is only the consideration of its enormous hopefulness for
the rest of the world that gives one the courage to advocate it.

In the question of the possible abolitio