nies from the
opposing fronts have borne clear witness to the mutual desire of the
soldiers, though still fighting, to understand one another. Men who from
trench to enemy trench watch one another while taking aim, may remain
foes, but they are no longer strangers. At no distant day a union of the
nations of the west will form a new fatherland, which itself will be but
a stage upon the road leading to a still greater fatherland, that of
Europe. Do we not already see the dozen states of Europe, divided into
two camps, unwittingly attempting to build a federation wherein war
between nations will be no less sacrilegious than would now be war
between provinces; a federation in which the duty of to-day will be the
crime of to-morrow? Has not the need for this future union been affirmed
by the most conflicting voices: by William II, who spoke of the "United
States of Europe";[3] by Hanotaux, with his "European Confederation";[4]
by Ostwald, and Haeckel of lamentable memory, with their "Society of
States"? Each one, doubtless, worked for his own saint; but all these
saints served the same master!...

Nay more, the gigantic chaos wherein, as if amid the throes that
occurred when the earth was still molten, all the human elements from
the three continents of the Old World are clashing one against another,
is a racial alchemy preparing, alike by force and by spiritual factors,
alike by war and by peace, the coming fusion of the two halves of the
world, of the two hemispheres of thought, of Europe and Asia. I do not
talk utopia. For some years this drawing together has been preluded by a
thousand signs, by mutual attraction in the realms of thought and of
art, in the realms of politics and of commerce. The war has merely
accelerated the movement; and while the war yet rages, men are at work
on behalf of this cause. Two years ago, in one of the belligerent
states, there were founded great institutes for the comparative study of
the civilisations of Europe and of Asia, and to promote their mutual
penetration.

"The most striking phenomenon of our day," thus runs the program of one
of these institutes,[5] "is the formation of a universal civilisation,
issuing from a number of distinct civilisations handed down from earlier
days.... No past epoch has ever beheld a more powerful impetus animating
the human race than that which mankind has known during recent centuries
and the one we have now entered. There has been nothing comparable