sword which was only fully revealed on the outbreak of war. And it will only be by this might that we shall be able to safeguard our peace in the future. We misconstrue reality, if we imagine that it is possible to rid the world of war by means of mutual agreements. Such agreements will, in the future, as in the past, be concluded from time to time between States. The further development of international courts of arbitration, and the elimination of many causes of dispute by their agency, lies within the realm of possibility, but any such agreements will after all only be treaties which will not on every occasion be capable of holding in check the forces seething within the States. Therefore the idea of a universal league for the preservation of peace remains a Utopia, and would be felt as an intolerable tutelage by any great and proud-spirited nation. Here, too, let us heed Treitschke's warning when he says: "The idea of one universal empire is odious. The ideal of a State co-extensive with humanity is no ideal at all. In a single State the whole range of culture could never be fully spanned."[4] The fact that it was precisely the President of the United States of North America who advocated such a brotherhood of nations must in any case arouse our wonderment. America's behaviour in the War has shown that pacifism, as represented in America, is only business pacifism, and so at the bottom nothing else than crass materialism. This truth is not altered by the fact that it is wrapped in a hazy garment of idealism and so seeks to hide its real significance from unsuspecting minds. Nor is the truth altered by the appeal to democratic tendencies, for precisely this War is showing that those who at present hold power in the great democracies have risked in irresponsible fashion the future of the peoples entrusted to their guidance. In any event, as regards us Germans, the World War should disencumber us once and for all of any vague cosmopolitan sentimentality. If our enemies, both our secret and our avowed enemies, make professions of this nature, that is for us sufficient evidence of the hypocrisy which underlies them.