Scapegoats are essential in a black-and-white world--to explain the black part; and we have had precisely as long a line of them as of short-cuts to Utopia. At one time, in the golden early days of muck-raking, they were trusts and their founders; and then we read, with a shudder of revulsion, of how Mr. Rockefeller’s face resembled that of an evil bird of prey. For Mr. Henry Ford the Jews are apparently the scapegoats, while to these the very numerous members of the Ku Klux Klan generously add the Negroes and the Catholics. But among our intellectual élite the scapegoats of the moment are undoubtedly Governments and Diplomats. Gazing with horror upon the wreck to which the recent war reduced the world, these more thoughtful members of our public nevertheless share with the unthinking masses the need of a scapegoat, of something evil completely outside themselves, on which the blame can be laid. It approximates the need of a personal Devil. And so they say: ‘France is a menace to the peace of the world; she wishes to destroy Germany (or to obtain an hegemony over the coal-and-iron industry of Europe); she is cold-blooded and selfish. England’s pretence to greater generosity is a lie; she has annexed two million square miles of German colonies, and would be lenient toward Germany now in the matter of reparations solely because she needs a market for her industrial products.’ (Not to mention what they say of our ex-enemies). By ‘France’ and ‘England’ Americans of this sort do not mean the French and English peoples; they are not, like the Ku Klux Klansmen, childish enough to indict whole races. They mean the governments of England and France; but these they conceive of as flawless entities with a soul--an evil soul. Now it is undoubtedly true that any group, whether it be a mob, a literary circle or a government, does evoke a kind of group-spirit, a sort of soul, which is worse than the soul of any one of the individuals who constitute the group. But this is a pallid thing at best, or worst. The group-entity is but a thought in the minds of the individuals, who alone are real, and very like ourselves. Once one admits this, the whole black-and-white world collapses, and one faces a troubled, obscure, but also infinitely richer and more human world, full of pathetically mixed motives.