Consequently, the new idea continues to gain in strength, and finally it does not need any more support, and spreads everywhere by the mere effect of imitation, acting with contagion, a faculty with which humans are very heavily endowed. Just as soon as the mechanism of contagion intervenes, the idea enters on the phase which necessarily signifies ultimate success, and it then becomes public opinion, and takes on a penetrating and subtle force, which spreads it progressively among all intellects, creating simultaneously a sort of special receptive atmosphere or a general manner of thinking. Like the fine dust of the prairie, which penetrates everywhere, it finds its way into the interior of all the conceptions, and all the productions of an epoch, and the idea and its consequences, then form part of that compact stock of hereditary commonplaces loaded on us by education. Thus the idea has triumphed, and has entered the domain of public opinion, where it has nothing to fear. The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is a fine example of the reception accorded an idea by public opinion as I have illustrated above. For seventy years the apostles of the political doctrine that the direct election of United States Senators by the people is best for them, kept hammering away with their arguments, until it was finally adopted as an amendment to the Constitution. The object of most arguments are at first abhorred, finally endured, and eventually embraced. The idea of International Peace like the Seventeenth Amendment, has practically run its prescribed course for adoption. It has reached the point where progress is rapid. Of the various ideas which guide a civilization, some rest confined with the upper grades of the nation, while others go deep down among the population. As a rule they arrive there much deformed, but, when they do arrive there, the power they exert over primitive minds incapable of much reasoning is wonderfully large. Under such conditions the idea represents something that is practically invincible, and its efforts are hurled forward with violence analagous to a stream that has overflown its banks. There are always hundreds of thousands of men in a nation of the larger sort who are ready to risk their lives to defend an idea as soon as this idea has actually convinced or subjugated them. International Peace has been talked and discussed for so many years, that the time is now ripe for it to be inaugurated as part of the international law of the world. OUR NATIONAL STAGE-FRIGHT BY EDWARD F. MURPHY