Yet the men who made the Treaty, and accelerated the famine and break-up of half a world, including those, like M. Tardieu, who still demand a ruined Germany and an indemnity-paying one, were the ablest statesmen of Europe, experienced, realist, and certainly not morally monsters. They were probably no worse morally, and certainly more practical, than the passionate democracies, American and European, who encouraged all the destructive elements of policy and were hostile to all that was recuperative and healing. It is perfectly true--and this truth is essential to the thesis here discussed--that the statesmen at Versailles were neither fools or villains. Neither were the Cardinals and the Princes of the Church, who for five hundred years, more or less, attempted to use physical coercion for the purpose of suppressing religious error. There is, of course an immeasurably stronger case for the Inquisition as an instrument of social order than there is for the use of competing national military power as the basis of modern European society. And the stronger case for the Inquisition as an instrument of social by a modern statesman when he goes to war. It was less. The inquisitor, in burning and torturing the heretic, passionately believed that he obeyed the voice of God, as the modern statesman believes that he is justified by the highest dictates of patriotism. We are now able to see that the Inquisitor was wrong, his judgment twisted by some overpowering prepossession: Is some similar prepossession distorting vision and political wisdom in modern statecraft? And if so, what is the nature of this prepossession? As an essay towards the understanding of its nature, the following suggestions are put forward:-- The assertion of national power, domination, is always in line with popular feeling. And in crises--like that of the settlement with Germany--popular feeling dictates policy. The feelings associated with coercive domination evidently lie near the surface of our natures and are easily excited. To attain our end by mere coercion instead of bargain or agreement, is the method in conduct which, in the order of experiments, our race generally tries first, not only in economics (as by slavery) but in sex, in securing acquiescence to our religious beliefs, and in most other relationships. Coercion is not only the response to an instinct; it relieves us of the trouble and uncertainties of intellectual decision as to what is equitable in a bargain. To restrain the combative instinct sufficiently to realise the need of co-operation, demands a social discipline which the prevailing political traditions and moralities of Nationalism and Patriotism not only do not furnish, but directly discourage.