Diplomats, the choicest scapegoats to-day, are accused, not without justice, of playing callously with the lives of millions; using them like pawns on a chess-board is, I believe, the accepted figure. But what else, given the power, should we ourselves do, who live equally among abstractions, and are capable of reading the account of an earthquake in Colombia and then turning without emotion to the history of the latest movie scandal in Los Angeles? I do not say that we ought to feel emotion in learning that thousands have been killed in an earthquake. The lack of imagination displayed in our failure to do so is doubtless a necessary protective trait. Without it, to read any newspaper would be anguish; and we should, like those imaginative persons called cowards, die many times before our death. The intensest suffering of Jesus, the Man, must have been not His crucifixion, but His lifelong sympathy for the suffering of others. It is only this lack of imagination, plus the tradition in which they are bred, that makes diplomats what they notoriously are. There has been a good deal of amateur diplomacy of late years; yet one is not aware of any great improvement on the old, either in results or in methods. Here, suddenly, however roundabout the way may have seemed, we find ourselves back at the subject of self and knowledge of self. We (and by ‘we’ I no longer mean only ‘we Americans,’ whose world, after all, is but a little more crudely black-and-white than that of other peoples)--we lack the imagination to project ourselves into others’ lives chiefly because we know so little about ourselves. We may feel pity, even shed tears, at the sight of a man crushed by a motor car, because we have all felt physical pain; but we remain cold toward the feelings of a man caught in embezzlement, because we are unaware of the latent possibility of embezzlement in ourselves, given sufficiently impelling circumstances. Yet even were we gifted with imagination, we could learn directly almost nothing of other people. There is a wall that shuts us off. We can know so infinitely little about any of them that it is a wonder we trouble to divide such strangers into friends and enemies; and, indeed, as one grows older he finds his enmities dwindling to indifference, and his friendships fading or congealing into mere habit. In that very imperfect book, _L’Enfer_, Barbusse’s observer, watching (with a desperate, almost sick desire to get inside other people’s lives), through the hole in his chamber wall, what takes place in the room beyond, perceives only the impenetrable loneliness of the individual--in birth, in death, even in love.