to
our shame, the partners of the Turk in his work of oppression.

And we must realise that mere good intent does not suffice; that
understanding, by which alone we can make headway, is not arrived at by
a pleasant emotion like that produced by a Beethoven Sonata; that we pay
for our progress in a little harder money than that, the money of hard
work, in which must be included hard thinking. And having got that far,
we must realise that sound ideas do not spread themselves. They are
spread by men. It is one of the astonishing things in the whole problem
of the breaking of war, that while men realise that if women are to have
votes, or men to be made temperate, or the White Slave Traffic to be
stopped, or for that matter, if battleships are to be built, or
conscription to be introduced, or soap or pills to be sold, effort,
organisation, time, money, must be put into these things. But the
greatest revolution that the world has known since mankind acquired the
right to freedom of opinion, will apparently get itself accomplished
without any of these things; or that at least the Government can quite
easily attend to it by asking other Governments to attend a Conference.
We must realise that a change of opinion, the recognition of a new fact,
or of facts heretofore not realised, is a slow and laborious work, even
in the relatively simple things which I have mentioned, and that you
cannot make savages into civilised men by collecting them round a table.
For the Powers of Europe, so far as their national policies are
concerned, are still uncivilised individuals. And their Conferences are
bound to fail, when each unit has the falsest conception concerning the
matters under discussion. Governments are the embodied expression of
general public opinion--and not the best public opinion at that; and
until opinion is modified, the embodiment of it will no more be capable
of the necessary common action, than would Red Indians be capable of
forming an efficient Court of Law, while knowing nothing of law or
jurisprudence, or worse still, having utterly false notions of the
principles upon which human society is based.

And the occasional conferences of private men still hazy as to these
principles are bound to be as ineffective. If the mere meeting and
contact of people cleared up misunderstandings, we should not have
Suffragettes and Anti-Suffragettes, or Mr. Lloyd George at grips with
the doctors.

These occasional conferences, whe