The situation suggests this question: would Americans deny that England in the past has shown very great political genius, or that the French people are alert, open-minded, "realist," intelligent? Recalling what England has done in the way of the establishment of great free communities, the flexibility and "practicalness" of her imperial policy, what France has contributed to democracy and European organisation, can we explain the present difficulties of Europe by the absence, on the part of Englishmen or Frenchmen, or other Europeans, of a political intelligence granted only so far in the world's history to Americans? In other words, do Americans seriously argue that the moral forces which have wrought such havoc in the foreign policy of European States could never threaten the foreign policy of America? Does the American plead that the circumstances which warp an Englishman's or Frenchman's judgment could never warp an American's? Or that he could never find himself in similar circumstances? As a matter of fact, of course, that is precisely what the American--like the Englishman or Frenchman or Italian in an analogous case--does plead. To have suggested five years ago to an Englishman that his own generals in India or Ireland would copy Bissing, would have been deemed too preposterous even for anger: but then equally, to Americans, supporting in their millions in 1916 the League to Enforce Peace, would the idea have seemed preposterous that a few years later America, having the power to take the lead in a Peace League, would refuse to do so, and would herself be demanding, as the result of participation in a war to end war, greater armament than ever--as protection against Great Britain. I suggest that if an English government can be led to sanction and defend in Ireland the identical things which shocked the world when committed in Belgium by Germans, if France to-day threatens Europe with a military hegemony not less mischievous than that which America determined to destroy, the causes of those things must be sought, not in the special wickedness of this or that nation, but in forces which may operate among any people.