ecessary to promote the
formation of an international group organised for the struggle against
imperialist, absolutist, and materialist principles, simultaneously, in
every land" (Chatenay).

2. World-wide Individualism.--We require a counterpoise to sociocracy.
We must beware of any organisation, be it internationalist or pacifist,
which claims to subjugate and atrophy the living forces of man. The
political ideal is a genuine federalism which shall respect
individualisms. As the old saying has it: Let everything be after its
kind!

3. World-wide Democracy.--In this matter the students display perfect
unanimity, for they have absolute faith in democracy. But with their
customary scrupulousness, their dread of pharisaism, they admit that
Switzerland is still far from being a true democracy. "To-day democracy
is purely formal; in our own time the principle of true democracy is, in
a sense, revolutionary."

They tell us some of their aspirations. They desire the democratic
control of foreign policy. They want pacifism on a democratic basis.
Almost universally in Europe, political power is in the control of a
handful of men who embody imperialist egoism. The people must share this
power. Each nation has the right to control its own destinies, in
accordance with its own ideas and the dictates of its own will.

But once more, no illusions! With a clear-sightedness which is rare at
this hour, these young men point out that "imperialism has become
democratic," saying: "The western democracies, closely examined, are
nothing more than the sovereignty of a capitalist and landowning caste."

The Russian revolution arouses new hopes. "The spectacle of the struggle
between the two democratic revolutions in Russia, one capitalist and
imperialist, the other anti-imperialist and socialist, illuminates the
problem of democracy and imperialism. This spectacle shows the Swiss
democracy its path and its mission." Above all, let Switzerland reject
the new evangel, made in Germany, of a democracy supine before the will
of a politico-economic power, a democracy which tends in home policy to
class rule, and in foreign policy to imperialism! "We need a new
orientation which shall deliver democratic thought from national
restrictions, and from the sinister contemporary trend towards the reign
of material force." True democracy, supra-national democracy, must take
its stand against "imperialism masquerading as democracy."

PART SIX.

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