there are a few who will give wholehearted assistance to their younger brethren. In our view, we shall in this way serve, not merely the cause of mankind, but the cause of our own land, far better than that cause will be served by the evil counsellors who preach armed isolation. Every country which shuts itself apart pronounces its own death-sentence. Gone for ever are the days when the young and tumultuous energies of the European nations needed, for their clarification, to be surrounded by partition walls.--Let me quote a few words uttered by Jean Christophe in his riper age: "I neither admire nor dread the nationalism of the present time. It will pass away with the present time; it is passing, it has already passed. It is but a rung in the ladder. Climb to the top.... Every nation felt [before the war] the imperious necessity of gathering its forces and making up its balance-sheet. For the last hundred years all the nations have been transformed by their mutual intercourse and the immense contributions of all the brains of the universe, building up new morality, new knowledge, new faith. Every man must examine his conscience, and know exactly what he is and what he has, before he can enter with the rest into the new age. A new age is coming. Humanity is on the point of signing a new lease of life. Society is on the point of springing into vigour with new laws. It is Sunday to-morrow. We are all balancing our accounts for the week, setting our houses in order, making them clean and tidy, so that, joining together, we may go into the presence of our common God and enter into a new covenant with Him." The war will prove (even against our will) to have been the anvil upon which will have been forged the unity of the European soul. It is my hope that this intellectual communion will not be restricted to the European peninsula, but will extend to Asia, to the two Americas, and to the great islets of civilisation spread over the rest of the globe. It is absurd that the nations of western Europe should pride themselves upon the discovery of profound differences, at the very time when they have never resembled one another more closely in merits and defects; at a time when their thought and their literature are least notable for distinctive characteristics; when everywhere there becomes sensible a monotonous levelling of intelligence; when on all hands we discern individualities that are dishevelled, threadbare, limp. I will venture to say that all of them, with their united efforts, are incompetent to give us the hope of that mental renovation to which the world is entitled after this formidable convulsion. We must go to Russia, which has doors thrown wide open towards the eastern world, for there only will our faces be freshened by the new currents which are blowing in every department of thought.