d and the whole attitude of the world
in respect to international as well as private conduct shall be that the
covenants and conventions shall become, in a degree, unnecessary.

"Already it is apparent that the entire world, including the peoples of
the nations at war as well as the peoples of the nations remaining
happily at peace, have, begun to think these thoughts and reflect upon
their momentous importance.

"Shocked and stunned as never before by a calamity for which we find no
measure in past human experience, mankind is bound to take at this
moment a more sober view, a broader and more rational view, of the
problems of responsibility and collective conduct than it hitherto has
been able even to attempt.

"The world is sure to ask what things make for sobriety of judgment and
integrity of purpose. It is sure in future more carefully to weigh
relative values, and will be disposed to count as unimportant many
things for which hitherto the armed men of nations have rushed into war.

"In a word, this war has made the whole world think as no one thing ever
has made it think before, and, after all, it is upon the habit of
thought that we must depend for all rational progress.

"Other wars and other great events have fostered sentiment, much of
which has been hopeful and useful; they have accomplished far-reaching
economic changes, many of them necessary.

"But the reactions of this war will surely go beyond all previous
experience. They already are and must be, in a far greater measure,
profoundly intellectual, and one of the consequences of this fact
inevitably will be the broadening and deepening of the democratic
current.

"When peace returns it will be seen that democracy has received a
hitherto unimagined impetus. Then it will be understood that democracy,
in one of its most important aspects, is popular thinking, that it is
the widest possible extension of the sense of responsibility.

"A democratic world will be, all in all, a peace-loving world.

"We may confidently expect far-reaching changes in the internal
political organization of the nations now involved. In every nation of
Europe the people are asking: What, after all, is this conflict all
about?

"They will ask this many times, and however they may answer it they
will, by consequence, follow the question with another: Shall we go on
fighting wars about the necessity, expedience, and righteousness of
which we have not been consulted?

"And t