learning of the expert often distorts. Exactly the service which extricated us from the intellectual and moral confusion that resulted in such catastrophes in the field of religion, is needed in the field of politics. From certain learned folk--writers, poets, professors (German and other), journalists, historians, and rulers--the public have taken a group of ideas concerning Patriotism, Nationalism, Imperialism, the nature of our obligation to the State, and so on, ideas which may be right or wrong, but which we are all agreed, will have to be very much changed if men are ever to live together in peace and freedom; just as certain notions concerning the institution of private property will have to be changed if the mass of men are to live in plenty. It is a commonplace of militarist argument that so long as men feel as they do about their Fatherland, about patriotism and nationalism, internationalism will be an impossibility. If that is true--and I think it is--peace and freedom and welfare will wait until those large issues have been raised in men's minds with sufficient vividness to bring about a change of idea and so a change of feeling with reference to them. It is unlikely, to say the least, that the mass of Englishmen or Frenchmen will ever be in possession of detailed knowledge sufficient to equip them to pass judgment on the various rival solutions of the complex problems that face us, say, in the Balkans. And yet it was immediately out of a problem of Balkan politics that the War arose, and future wars may well arise out of those same problems if they are settled as badly in the future as in the past. The situation would indeed be hopeless if the nature of human relationship depended upon the possession by the people as a whole of expert knowledge in complex questions of that kind. But happily the Sarajevo murders would never have developed into a war involving twenty nations but for the fact that there had been cultivated in Europe suspicions, hatreds, insane passions, and cupidities, due largely to false conceptions (though in part also themselves prompting the false conceptions) of a few simple facts in political relationship; conceptions concerning the necessary rivalry of nations, the idea that what one nation gains another loses, that States are doomed by a fate over which they have no control to struggle together for the space and opportunities of a limited world. But for the atmosphere that these ideas create (as false theological notions once created a similar atmosphere between rival religious groups) most of these at present difficult and insoluble problems of nationality and frontiers and government, would have solved themselves.