Looking the world in the face, we see what may be called a precious mess. Under a thin veneer――sometimes no veneer――of regard for civilisation, each country, great and small, is pursuing its own ends, struggling to rebuild its own house in the burnt village. The dread of confusion-worse-confounded, of death recrowned, and pestilence revivified, alone keeps the nations to the compromise of peace. What chance has a better spirit? “The exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation of the world,” are the words of Thomas Hardy, and so true that it may be well to cast an eye over such mediums as we have for the exchange of international thought. “The Permanent Court of International Justice”; “The League of Nations”; “The Pan-American Congress”; certain sectional associations of this nation with that nation, tarred somewhat with the brush of self-interest; sporadic international conferences concerned with sectional interests; and the recently founded P.E.N. Club, an international association of writers with friendly aims, but no political intentions. These are about all, and they are taken none too seriously by the peoples of the earth. The salvation of a world in which we all live, however, would seem to have a certain importance. Why, then, is not more attention paid to the only existing means of salvation? The argument for neglect is much as follows: Force has always ruled human life――and always will. Competition is basic. Co-operation and justice succeed, indeed, in definite communities so far as to minimise the grosser forms of crime, but only because general opinion within the ring fence of a definite community gives them an underlying force which the individual offender cannot withstand. There is no such ring-fence round nations, therefore no general opinion, and no underlying force to ensure the abstention of individual nations from crime――if, indeed, transgression of laws which are not fixed can be called crime.