'The cause of this insanity,' says Sir Philip Gibbs, 'is the failure of idealism.' Others write in much the same strain that selfishness and materialism have reconquered the world. But this does not get us very far. By what moral alchemy was this vast outpouring of unselfishness, which sent millions to their death as to a feast (for men cannot die for selfish motives, unless more certain of their heavenly reward than we in the Western world are in the habit of being) turned into selfishness; their high ideals into low desires--if that is what has happened? Can it be a selfishness which ruins and starves us all? Is it selfishness on the part of the French which causes them to adopt towards Germany a policy of vengeance that prevents them receiving the Reparations that they so sorely need? Is it not indeed what one of their writers had called a 'holy hate,' instinctive, intuitive, purged of all calculation of advantage or disadvantage? Would not selfishness--enlightened selfishness--have given us not only a sounder Europe in the material sense, but a more humane Europe, with its hostilities softened by the very fact of contact and co-operation, and the very obviousness of our need for one another? The last thing desired here is to raise the old never-ending question of egoism versus altruism. All that is desired is to point out that a mere appeal to feeling, to a 'sense of righteousness' and idealism, is not enough. We have an illimitable capacity for sublimating our own motives, and of convincing ourselves completely, passionately, that our evil is good. And the greater our fear that intellectual inquiry, some sceptical rationalism, might shake the certitude of our righteousness, the greater the passion with which we shall stand by the guide of 'instinct and intuition.' Can there not be a destructive idealism as well as a social one? What of the Holy Wars? What of the Prussian who, after all, had his ideal, as the Bolshevist has his? What of all fanatics ready to die for their idealism? It is never the things that are obviously and patently evil that constitute the real menace to mankind. If Prussian nationalism had been nothing but gross lust and cruelty and oppression, as we managed to persuade ourselves during the War that it was, it would never have menaced the world. It did that because it could rally to its end great enthusiasms; because men were ready to die for it. Then it threatened us. Only those things which have some element of good are dangerous.