If, then, the ardent hopes of a regenerated Europe in the early years of the nineteenth century failed, the result was due in large measure to the fact that the business was committed to wrong hands. The organs for working the change were for the most part autocratic monarchs and old-world diplomatists--the last people in the world likely to bring about a workable millennium. A great crisis demands very careful manipulation. Cynicism must not be allowed to play any part in it. Traditional watchwords are not of much use. Theoretical idealism itself may turn out to be a most formidable stumbling-block. Yet no one can doubt that a solution of the problem, whenever it is arrived at, must come along the path of idealism. Long ago a man of the world was defined as a man who in every serious crisis is invariably wrong. He is wrong because he applies old-fashioned experience to a novel situation--old wine in new bottles--and because he has no faith in generous aspirations, having noted their continuous failure in the past. Yet, after all, it is only faith which can move mountains, and the Holy Alliance itself was not so much wrong in the principles to which it appealed as it was in the personages who signed it. We have noticed already that, like all other great ideas, it did not wholly die. The propaganda of peace, however futile may be some of the discussions of pacifists, is the heritage which even so wrong-headed a man as Alexander I has left to the world. The idea of arbitration between nations, the solution of difficulties by arguments rather than by swords, the power which democracies hold in their hands for guiding the future destinies of the world--all these in their various forms remain with us as legacies of that splendid, though ineffective, idealism which lay at the root of the Holy Alliance. SMALL NATIONALITIES