ns against Great Britain; politicians,
Congressmen, Senators, Governors, Ministers, Preachers, clamouring for
war, for a theory as vague and as little practical as one could wish.

And we, of course, have had our like obsessions without number: "the
independence integrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe" is one. Just
think of it! Take in the full sound of the phrase: "the independence
integrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe!"

What, of course, makes these fantastic political doctrines possible,
what leads men to subscribe to them, are a few false general conceptions
to which they hold tenaciously--as all fundamental conceptions are held,
and ought to be. The general conceptions in question are precisely the
ones I have indicated: that nations are rival and struggling units, that
military force is consequently the determining factor of their relative
advantage; that enlargement of political frontiers is the supreme need,
and so on.

And the revision of these fundamental conceptions will, of course, be
the general work of Christendom, and given the conditions which now
obtain, the development will go on _pari passu_ in all nations or not
all. It will not be the work of "nations" at all; it will be the work of
individual men.

States do not think. It is the men who form the states who think, and
the number of those men who will act as pioneers in a better policy
must, of course, at first be small: a group here and a group there, the
best men of all countries--England, France, Germany,
America--influencing by their ideas finally the great mass. To say, as
so many do in this matter: "Let other nations do it first" is, of
course, to condemn us all to impotence--for the other nations use the
same language. To ask that one group of forty or seventy or ninety
million people shall by some sort of magic all find their way to a saner
doctrine before such doctrine has affected other groups is to talk the
language of childishness. Things do not happen in that in human affairs.
It is not in that way that opinion grows. It did not grow in that way
in any one of the steps that I have mentioned--in the abolition of
religious persecution, or slavery, or judicial torture. Unless the
individual man sees his responsibility for determining what is right and
knowing how and why it is right, there will be no progress; there cannot
even be a beginning.

We are to an even greater degree an integral part of European Society,
and a fact