Now, what America will do about these things will not depend upon highly rationalised decisions, reached by a hundred million independent thinkers investigating the facts concerning the Panama Treaty, the respective merits of alternative alliance combinations, or the real nature of negro grievances. American policy will be determined by the same character of force as has determined British policy in Ireland or India, in Morocco or Egypt, French policy in Germany or in Poland, or Italian policy in the Adriatic. The "way of thinking" which is applied to the decisions of the American democracy has behind it the same kind of moral and intellectual force that we find in the society of Western Europe as a whole. Behind the American public mind lie practically the same economic system based on private property, the same kind of political democracy, the same character of scholastic training, the same conceptions of nationalism, roughly the same social and moral values. If we find certain sovereign ideas determining the course of British or French or Italian policy, giving us certain results, we may be sure that the same ideas will, in the case of America, give us very much the same results. When Britain spoke of "splendid isolation," she meant what America means by the term to-day, namely, a position by virtue of which, when it came to a conflict of policy between herself and others, she should possess preponderant power, so that she could impose her own view of her own rights, be judge and executioner in her own case. To have suggested to an Englishman twenty years ago that the real danger to the security of his country lay in the attitude of mind dominant among Englishmen themselves, that the fundamental defect of English policy was that it asked of others something which Englishmen would never accord if asked by others of them, and that such a policy was particularly inimical in the long run to Great Britain, in that her population lived by processes which dominant power could not, in the last resort, exact--such a line of argument would have been, and indeed was, regarded as too remote from practical affairs to be worth the attention of practical politicians. A discussion of the Japanese Alliance, the relations with Russia, the size of foreign fleets, the Bagdad railway, would have been regarded as entirely practical and relevant. These things were the "facts" of politics. It was not regarded as relevant to the practical issues to examine the role of certain general ideas and traditions which had grown up in England in determining the form of British policy. The growth of a crude philosophy of militarism, based on a social pseudo-Darwinism, the popularity of Kipling and Roberts, the jingoism of the Northcliffe Press--these things might be regarded as items in the study of social psychology; they were not regarded as matters for the practical statesman. "What would you have us do about them, anyway?"