smaller necessity for support from without. It
increases our home market, widens the home investment field and reduces
the intense sharpness of competition for the profits of the backward
countries. It affords the opportunity to be disinterested in foreign
policy and to work for the promotion of international peace. Equally
important is its effect upon the national psychology. It gives the
people a stake at home. A device, familiar to certain statesmen, is to
divert the people's minds from domestic affairs by arousing animosity
against the foreigner. Is it impossible to allay hatred of the
foreigner by concentrating interest on home concerns?

Psychologically this process is nothing but immunisation. A disease
may be resisted by the absence in the blood and tissues of substances
needed by the bacteria for their growth and increase. As we may
immunise the body, so we may immunise the mind of individual or nation.
We protect our children from error, not by forbidding the publication
of false doctrine but by creating in the child's mind a true knowledge
and a faculty of {194} criticism. Similarly to guard against the
infection of the war spirit a public opinion can be created in which
war bacteria will find no nutriment.

To immunise society is not, however, a mere juggler's trick; we cannot
ask Washington to legislate us into immunity. What is needed is a
potent social change, arousing enthusiasms and antagonisms, and
involving a new attitude towards business and politics, freedom and
discipline; a new efficiency; a new balance of power within society; a
new attitude towards the state; a new value placed upon the life of
each individual. Such a change involves a patriotism so exigent that
the nation will resent poverty in Fall River or Bethlehem as it resents
murder in Mexico. Many Americans would find such a revolution in our
conditions and attitudes uninteresting or worse; some, with vast
material interests at stake, would prefer a dozen wars. Against this
indifference and opposition, the change, if it comes, must make its way.

Such a progress would not, of course, create perpetual peace within the
community. We read much to-day of satiated nations, unwilling to fight
for more, but considered from within, there is no satiated society.
Everywhere groups fight for economic, political or social advancement.
In a democratic community the mass of the people, and especially the
manual workers, though in a mo