men trimmed
their ship, touched the rudder, and sailed toward downright absolutism.

The effect of such utterances and acts on the minds of the peoples are
distinctly mischievous. For they tend to obliterate the sense of public
right, which is the main foundation of international intercourse among
progressive nations.

And already it had been shaken and weakened by the campaigns of the past
fifty years, and in particular by the last war. In the relations of
nation to nation there were certain principles--derivatives of ethics
diluted with maxims of expediency--which kept the various governments
from too flagrant breaches of faith. These checks were the only
substitute for morality in politics. Their highest power was connoted by
the word Europeanism, which stood for a supposed feeling of solidarity
among all the peoples of the old Continent, and for a certain respect
for the treaties on which the state-system reposed. But it existed
mainly among defeated nations when apprehensive of being isolated or
chastised by their victors. None the less, the idea marked a certain
advance toward an ethical bond of union.

Now this embryonic sense, together with respect for the binding force of
a nation's plighted troth, were numbered by the demoralizing influence
of the wars of the last fifty years. And one of the first and peremptory
needs of the world was their restoration. This could be effected only by
bringing the peoples, not merely of Europe, but of the world, more
closely together, by engrafting on them a feeling of close solidarity,
and impressing them with the necessity of making common cause in the one
struggle worth their while waging--resistance to the forces that
militate against human welfare and progress. The feeling was widespread
that the way to effect this was by some form of internationalism, by the
broadening, deepening, and quickening all that was implied by
Europeanism, by co-ordinating the collective energies of all progressive
peoples, and causing them to converge toward a common and worthy goal.
For the working classes this conception in a restricted form had long
possessed a commanding attraction. What they aimed at, however, was no
more than the catholicity of labor. They fancied that after the passage
of the tidal wave of destructiveness the ground was cleared of most of
the obstacles which had encumbered it, and that the forward advance
might begin forthwith.

What they failed to take sufficiently