destruction of old political sophistries--Divine Rights of Kings and what not--and to enable one or two simple facts to emerge clearly and unmistakeably, as that the object of government is the good of the governed, and can find its justification in nothing else whatsoever. It was these simple truths which, spreading over the world--with many checks and set-backs--have so profoundly modified the structure of Christendom. Somewhere it is related of Montaigne that talking with academic colleagues, he expressed a contemptuous disbelief in the whole elaborate theory of witchcraft as it existed at that time. Scandalised, his colleagues took him into the University library, and showed him hundreds, thousands, of parchment volumes written in Latin by the learned men of the subject. Had he read these volumes, that he talked so disrespectfully of their contents? No, replied Montaigne, he had not read them, and he was not going to, because they were all wrong, and he was right. And Montaigne spoke with this dogmatism because he realised that he saw clearly that which they did not--the crookedness and unsoundness of just those simple fundamental assumptions on which the whole fantastic structure was based. And so with all the sophistries and illusions by which the war system is still defended. If the public as a whole had to follow all the intricacies of those marvellous diplomatic combinations, the maze of our foreign politics, to understand abstruse points of finance and economics, in order to have just and sound ideas as to the real character of international relationship, why then public opinion would go on being as ignorant and mistaken as it had been hitherto. But sound opinion and instincts in that field depend upon nothing of the sort, but upon the emergence of a few quite simple facts, which are indisputable and self-evident, which stare us in the face, and which absolutely disprove all the elaborate theories of the Bellicist statesmen.