To understand the nature of forces which must determine America's main domestic and foreign policies--as they have determined those of Western Society in Europe during the last generation--is surely an "American interest"; though indeed, in neglecting the significance of those "hidden currents flowing continually beneath the surface of political history," American students of politics would be following much European precedent. Although public opinion and feeling are the raw material with which statesmen deal, it is still considered irrelevant and academic to study the constituent elements of that raw material. Americans are sufficiently detached from Europe to see that in the way of a better unification of that Continent for the purposes of its own economic and moral restoration stand disruptive forces of "Balkanisation," a development of the spirit of Nationalism which the statesmen for years have encouraged and exploited. The American of to-day speaks of the Balkanisation of Europe just as the Englishman of two or three years ago spoke of the Balkanisation of the Continent, of the wrangles of Poles, Czecho-Slovaks, Hungarians, Rumanians, Italians, Jugo-Slavs. And the attitude of both Englishman and American are alike in this: to the Englishman, watching the squabbles of all the little new States and the breaking out of all the little new wars, there seemed at work in that spectacle forces so suicidal that they could never in any degree touch his own political problems; the American to-day, watching British policy in Ireland or French policy towards Germany, feels that in such conflict are moral forces that could never produce similar paralysis in American policy. "Why," asks the confident American, "does England bring such unnecessary trouble upon herself by her military conduct in Ireland? Why does France keep three-fourths of a Continent still in ferment, making reparations more and more remote"? Americans have a very strong feeling that they could not be guilty of the Irish mess, or of prolonging the confusion which threatens to bring Europe's civilisation to utter collapse. How comes it that the English people, so genuinely and so sincerely horrified at the thought of what a Bissing could do in Belgium, unable to understand how the German people could tolerate a government guilty of such things, somehow find that their own British Government is doing very similar things in Cork and Balbriggan; and finding it, simply acquiesce? To the American the indefensibility of British conduct is plain. "America could never be guilty of it." To the Englishman just now, the indefensibility of French conduct is plain. The policy which France is following is seen to be suicidal from the point of view of French interests. The Englishman is sure that "English political sense" would never tolerate it in an English government.