think of encouraging a fight between two sides of a street: why does he not recognise with equal directness the futility and immorality of a fight between two sides of a continent?[87] It is only because public opinion has not yet effectively realised that the moral sphere includes not only the citizens of one city and the cities of one nation, but the nations of a continent and the continents of the world. But it is a fact that the moral sphere does include the whole of humanity, who are colleagues in the task of civilisation, inspired by the twentieth-century corollary of gloomy nineteenth-century religious agnosticism, the cheerful corollary that it is Man's duty rather than God's to improve the habitable earth. The truth of this fact is already recognised by the better thought of all the nations concerned, and there is no reason why it should be withheld any longer from the people who suffer most by its suppression. As soon as public opinion is allowed to grasp this truth--and it is only too willing to clutch at any generalisation that is emotionally encouraged by its governors--there need be no difficulty at all in embodying that opinion in some form of international government: for, as Rousseau might have said, where there's a General Will, there's a way. As a matter of fact the way has already been admirably mapped by several parties of surveyors.[88] On the constitution of an International Authority, even on the general aspiration of Europe towards some form of supernational judicature, war will cease to have any more attraction or justification than the street brawl. For war is actually in the community of nations what the street fight is between individual citizens. War is futile, because it can settle no questions of principle; it is immoral, because it is an offence against the membership of a moral community. There is abundant evidence in Blue Books and in the overt acts of Germany that war releases and encourages the elementary brutality of the individual which is normally inhibited by the consciousness of social relations. I have tried to show in a former chapter that war serves the lowest interests of a parasitic commercial class at the expense of the better part of the community. War fosters at the same time the basest elements in the individual, and the basest individuals in the community. War is a crime against the peace of the people. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 86: _Supra_, I, Sec. 5.] [Footnote 87: Mr. Gilbert Cannan has noted somewhere that "a 'straight' fight between Great Britain and Germany will be like a fight between two drunken women in a slum."] [Footnote 88: See, for example, the quite definite and complete report on _International Government_, published by the Fabian Society (1916): and compare Mr. J. A. Hobson's book _Towards International Government_, and Mr. H. G. Wells' _The World Set Free_.] Sec. 8 Imperialism and Capitalism through War and Trade the Enemies: Socialism to the Rescue