If Europe is not to relapse into a race of armaments, world politics must be controlled by forces less selfish and insidious. A more serious element is required in public life, an element which will represent the innumerable men and women who work with their hands and brains. These are the people who desire peace, who find and seek no profit in a state of war. They are neither revolutionaries nor faddists, they are workers; they protest against the Treaties as a flagrant violation of all principles of right, as an attempt to crush the spirit of the conquered peoples, to visit the crimes of “irresponsible Governments” on the heads of innocents; they denounce a policy in Russia which makes the Russian people pariahs, and despise the men who, before peace had been ratified with Germany, invited collaboration in the blockade of Russia from the men they had called the Huns. A great fact in evolution has occurred, and now mankind is at the parting of the ways. Those who await a miracle or a hero to save them from themselves are unworthy citizens and use an idle form of speech when they talk of a new world. Old Europe’s suicide will culminate in world-wide chaos, unless Democracy asserts itself and counsels of wisdom and sanity prevail. Time presses. The reaction of foreign policy on the internal affairs of every State is becoming increasingly direct. Peace Treaties have been signed, but slaughter and terrorism continue. In Central Europe, great rivers, which are serene and splendid highways, are still defiled with human blood, still serve as barriers and are charged with sighs. The old discredited methods of “Secret Diplomacy” are being followed and the destinies of peoples are still at the mercy of officials who deal in bargains and transactions. In Great Britain and France, both in the Press and Parliament, reactionary forces have got the upper hand. As a consequence, trade is paralysed, and human misery exists on an unprecedented scale. While these conditions last, peace will be precarious. But the next war will not be made by nations; it will be civil war, the misgoverned will rise against their rulers and the foundations of our social fabric will rock. The workers in all lands have realised, at last, that their interests are the same, and that the greatest war in history was, from their point of view, an internecine struggle. Only the purblind or the reckless ignore this fact. But, portentous as it is, this fact is the one redeeming feature of the present situation, since it is the expression of a change of spirit, and the first step towards more rational relationships between the nations. Despair would be justified indeed if pride and prejudice and greed permeated the masses as they do the classes, if the doctrines preached by Jingo newspapers or the conversation in certain classes of society were correct indices of the thoughts and ideals of our generation.