It is for that reason that we have to make the discussion of these national arrangements as open and public as we possibly can. This is not a matter for the quiet little deals of the diplomatists. This is no chance for kings. All the civilised peoples of the earth have to form an idea of the general lines upon which a pacific Europe can be established, an idea clear and powerful enough to prevent and override the manœuvres of the chancelleries. The nations themselves have to become the custodians of the common peace. In Italy, indeed, this is already the case. The Italian monarchy is a strong and Liberal monarchy, secure in the confidence of its people; but were it not so, it is a fairly evident fact that no betrayal by its rulers would induce the Italian people to make war upon France in the interests of Austria and Prussia. I doubt, too, if the present King of Bulgaria can afford to blunder again. The world moves steadily away from the phase of Court-centred nationalism to the phase of a collective national purpose. It is for the whole strength of western liberalism to throw itself upon the side of that movement, and in no direction can it make its strength so effective at the present time as in the open and energetic promotion of a new and greater Balkan League. XI THE WAR OF THE MIND All the realities of this war are things of the mind. This is a conflict of cultures, and nothing else in the world. All the world-wide pain and weariness, fear and anxieties, the bloodshed and destruction, the innumerable torn bodies of men and horses, the stench of putrefaction, the misery of hundreds of millions of human beings, the waste of mankind, are but the material consequences of a false philosophy and foolish thinking. We fight not to destroy a nation, but a nest of evil ideas. We fight because a whole nation has become obsessed by pride, by the cant of cynicism and the vanity of violence, by the evil suggestion of such third-rate writers as Gobineau and Stewart Chamberlain that they were a people of peculiar excellence destined to dominate the earth, by the base offer of advantage in cunning and treachery held out by such men as Delbruck and Bernhardi, by the theatricalism of the Kaiser, and by two stirring songs about Deutschland and the Rhine. These things, interweaving with the tradesmen’s activities of the armaments trust and the common vanity and weaknesses of unthinking men, have been sufficient to release disaster—we do not begin to measure the magnitude of the disaster. On the back of it all, spurring it on, are the idea-mongers, the base-spirited writing men, pretentious little professors in frock coats, scribbling colonels. They are the idea. They pointed the way and whispered “Go!” They ride the world now to catastrophe. It is as if God in a moment of wild humour had lent his whirlwinds for an outing to half-a-dozen fleas.