rness and sharp dealing," and they may even welcome the promise
of an enlarged outlook that the entry of the neutral powers would bring
with it.

Every foreign office has its ugly, evil elements, and probably every
foreign office dreads those elements. There are certainly Russian fools
who dream about India, German fools who dream about Canada and South
America, British fools who dream about Africa and the East;
aggressionists in the blood, people who can no more let nations live in
peace than kleptomaniacs can keep their hands in their own pockets. But
quite conceivably there are honest monarchs and sane foreign ministers
very ready to snatch at the chance of swamping the evil in their own
Chancelleries.

It is just here that the value of neutral participation will come in.
Whatever ambitions the neutral powers may have of their own, it may be
said generally that they are keenly interested in preventing the
settlement from degenerating into a deal in points of vantage for any
further aggressions in any direction. Both the United States of America
and China are traditionally and incurably pacific powers, professing and
practicing an unaggressive policy, and the chief outstanding minor
States are equally concerned in securing a settlement that shall settle.

And moreover, so wide reaching now are all international agreements that
they have not only a claim to intervene juridically, but they have the
much more pressing claim to participate on the ground that no sort of
readjustment of Europe, Western Asia, and Africa can leave their own
futures unaffected. They are wanted not only in the interests of the
belligerent peoples, but for their own sakes and the welfare of the
world all together.

V.

Now a world conference, once it is assembled, can take up certain
questions that no partial treatment can ever hope to meet. The first of
the questions is disarmament. No one who has watched the politics of the
last forty years can doubt the very great share the business and finance
of armament manufacture has played in bringing about the present
horrible killing, and no one who has read accounts of the fighting can
doubt how much this industry has enhanced the torment, cruelty, and
monstrosity of war.

In the old warfare a man was either stabbed, shot, or thrust through
after an hour or so of excitement, and all the wounded on the field were
either comfortably murdered or attended to before the dawn of the next
day. One