"Other wars and other great events have fostered sentiment, much of which has been hopeful and useful; they have accomplished far-reaching economic changes, many of them necessary. "But the reactions of this war will surely go beyond all previous experience. They already are and must be, in a far greater measure, profoundly intellectual, and one of the consequences of this fact inevitably will be the broadening and deepening of the democratic current. "When peace returns it will be seen that democracy has received a hitherto unimagined impetus. Then it will be understood that democracy, in one of its most important aspects, is popular thinking, that it is the widest possible extension of the sense of responsibility. "A democratic world will be, all in all, a peace-loving world. "We may confidently expect far-reaching changes in the internal political organization of the nations now involved. In every nation of Europe the people are asking: What, after all, is this conflict all about? "They will ask this many times, and however they may answer it they will, by consequence, follow the question with another: Shall we go on fighting wars about the necessity, expedience, and righteousness of which we have not been consulted? "And to this query they will find only one answer--an emphatic negative. "Sooner or later there will be a comprehensive political reorganization of Europe, and when its day comes the rearrangement will be along the lines of a republic rather than along the lines of any monarchy, however liberal. "Then international agreements will be unnecessary and there will be no treaties to be broken--no 'scraps of paper' to be disregarded. "Apparently Germany has been as successful in training her people to think accurately along economic lines as she has been in training them to work efficiently along such lines; and that accurate thought undoubtedly is bearing startling fruit among the men today crouched in the trenches on the firing lines." Era of Individual Thought. "England, on the other hand, and France have encouraged the free and spontaneous life of democratic peoples. France and England, like the United States, have been training their peoples to think efficiently of and to appreciate and use liberty and initiative. And the men of these two nations are, in turn, exercising that ability as they crouch in their trenches. "In other words, this war has precipitated an era of sober individual thought about the individual's rights and responsibilities. It will everywhere bring about a wider political organization of mankind, a greater freedom of trade and opportunity, a more serious and thorough education, a more earnest attention and devotion to the higher interests of life, giving such thought preference above that overemphasis of material comforts which has been so marked a feature of recent human history.