The late Viscount Bryce, just before his regrettable death, delivered eight lectures in the United States on “the large subject covered by the term International Relations.” “It is History,” says Bryce, “which, recording the events and explaining the influences that have moulded the minds of men, shows us how the world of international politics has come to be what it is. History is the best—indeed the only—guide to a comprehension of the facts as they stand, and to a sound judgment of the various means that have been suggested for replacing suspicions and enmities by the co-operation of States in many things and by their good will in all.” But Bryce, than whom no publicist of our times has held higher place as a seer and prophet, speaks not in an optimistic vein in his last published utterances. The great lesson of the war, that the ambitions and hatreds which cause war must be removed, has not been learned, and if this war has failed to impress the lesson upon most of the peoples, what else can teach them? This is why thoughtful men are despondent, and why some comfort must now be sought for, some remedy devised at once against a recurrence of the calamities we have suffered. Bryce is in agreement with the leading minds of to-day striving for a solution of international problems. They see no way out of the difficulties and perils confronting the race unless some new and hitherto unknown method be found to prevent mankind from repeating the scarlet sins that have disgraced and incarnadined the past. Arbitration, conciliation, alliances, treaties, congresses, leagues, peace palaces and palaver—what have they accomplished that can be cited to confute the pessimism of Philip Kerr or to suggest the remedy the necessity for which James Bryce, with the clairvoyance of a dying man, acutely realized? What the race needs at this critical hour is both a message and a medium, a warning and a way, a revelation and a road, with a light from the past shining on the pathway just ahead. And Man has at his command this way, this medium, this road, upon which gleams a radiance that might easily save the race from destruction, if he had sufficient sense to learn from his past just a few elementary lessons in common-sense, just a few basic truths that, once grasped, would change history from a record of recurrent crimes to an epic tale of Man’s triumph over himself.