And when reference is made to the force of ideas--Nationalist or Socialist or Revolutionary--a power which we all admit by our panic fears of defeatist or Red Propaganda, it is necessary to keep in mind the kind of force that is meant. One speaks of Communist or Socialist, Pacifist or Patriotic ideas gaining influence, or creating a ferment. The idea of Communism, for instance, has obviously played some part in the vast upheavals that have followed the War.[86] But in a world where the great majority are still condemned to intense physical labour in order to live at all, where peoples as a whole are overworked, harassed, pre-occupied, it is impossible that ideas like those of Karl Marx should be subjected to elaborate intellectual analysis. Rather is it _an_ idea--of the common ownership of wealth or its equal distribution, of poverty being the fault of a definite class of the corporate body--an idea which fits into a mood produced largely by the prevailing conditions of life, which thus becomes the predominating factor of the new public opinion. Now foreign policy is certainly influenced, and in some great crises determined, by public opinion. But that opinion is not the resultant of a series of intellectual analyses of problems of Balkan nationalities or of Eastern frontiers; that is an obvious impossibility for a busy headline-reading public, hard at work all day and thirsty for relaxation and entertainment at night. The public opinion which makes itself felt in Foreign Policy--which, when war is in the balance after a longish period of peace, gives the preponderance of power to the most Chauvinistic elements; which, at the end of a war and on the eve of Treaty-making, as in the December 1918 election, insists upon a rigorously punitive peace--this opinion is the result of a few predominant 'sovereign ideas' or conceptions giving a direction to certain feelings.