carcely misleading to speak of the peoples of Christendom as one
community in these respects. The sciences and the arts are held as a
joint stock among these peoples, in their elements, and measurably also
in their working-out. It is true, these interests and achievements of
the race are not cultivated with the same assiduity or with identical
effect throughout; but it is equally true that no effectual bar could
profitably be interposed, or would be tolerated in the long run in this
field, where men have had occasion to learn that unlimited collusion is
more to the purpose than a clannish discrimination.

* * * * *

It is, no doubt, beyond reasonable hope that these democratic peoples
could be brought forthwith to concerted action on the lines of such a
plan of peace by neutralisation of all outstanding national pretensions.
Both the French and the English-speaking peoples are too eagerly set on
national aims and national prestige, to allow such a plan to come to a
hearing, even if something of the kind should be spoken for by their
most trusted leaders. By settled habit they are thinking in terms of
nationality, and just now they are all under the handicap of an inflamed
national pride. Advocacy of such a plan, of course, does not enter
seriously into the purpose of this inquiry; which is concerned with the
conditions under which peace is sought today, with the further
conditions requisite to its perpetuation, and with the probable effects
of such a peace on the fortunes of these peoples in case peace is
established and effectually maintained.

It is a reasonable question, and one to which a provisional answer may
be found, whether the drift of circumstances in the present and for the
immediate future may be counted on to set in the direction of a
progressive neutralisation of the character spoken of above, and
therefore possibly toward a perpetuation of that peace that is to follow
the present season of war. So also is it an open and interesting
question whether the drift in that direction, if such is the set of it,
can be counted on to prove sufficiently swift and massive, so as not to
be overtaken and overborne by the push of agencies that make for
dissension and warlike enterprise.

Anything like a categorical answer to these questions would have to be a
work of vaticination or of effrontery,--possibly as much to the point
the one as the other. But there are certain conditions prec