It is easy to retort that it is the nationalism of Germany that has spread fire and blood across Europe. But it is easier yet to give the final answer. There are diseases of individuality--the "artistic temperament," egoism, freakishness, criminality--which require chastening. But because certain individuals have to be restrained, we do not crush individual liberty, self-expression and the free play of development. There are diseases of nationalism--the lust for power and territory, the desire to impose the will, the language and the customs, on smaller units. When a nation hands over its foreign policy and its personal morality to the state, which is only the machinery of a nation, and when the machine, operated by a little group of imperialists instead of by the collective will of the nation, turns to organized aggression, there is catastrophe. Prussian history from the vivisection of Poland, through the rape of Schleswig and the crushing of Paris, to the assassination of Belgium, offers us no guarantees of a common aim for human welfare. But it is because nationality has been betrayed, not because it has been expressed. The Uhlan officer, murdering women, is no reason for abolishing Habeas Corpus. The misbehavior of Germany is no excuse for rebuking the liberty of France. At the touch of the bayonet, on the first shock of reality, internationalism crumbles--the internationalism, I mean, that disbelieves in national quality, and disregards essential differences. Groups of "workers," the "universal" church of co-religionists, dissolve. The nation emerges. Wars have been the terrible method by which nations have created themselves, and by which they have defended their being. Pacifism is not a disease, it is the symptom of the disease of a false internationalism. Pacifism springs from the belief that nations do not matter, that "humanity is the great idea." "Why should nations go to war, since the principle of nationality is not vital?" But, actually, this principle is vital. "An effective internationalism can only be rendered possible by a triumphant nationalism." The present war is a fight by the little nations of Belgium and Serbia, and by the great nation, France, for the preservation of their nationality. We have failed to understand "the causes and objects" of this war, because we have weakened our own sense of nationality. Our tradition has been drowned out by new voices. Ninety years ago, we responded to Greece, and, later, to Garibaldi and Kossuth. To-day, only those understand the fight of the nations who have been reared in our American tradition. Richard Neville Hall went from Dartmouth College and died on an Alsatian Hill, serving France. A friend writes of him: "He was saying things about the France of Washington and Lafayette, how he had been brought up on the tradition of that historic friendship."