“If you like to put it that way. It’s not much use arguing with me, George, because I’m one of the old impenitents who believe that there will always be wars and what not. _Admitting_ that it’s the duty of all governments to keep the peace, _admitting_ that every government has failed in its duty, what are you going to do then?” “Try a different kind of government,” I answered. “A soviet?,” he asked. “If the aristocracy and _bourgeoisie_ have failed, that’s all you have left.” “I’d sooner have a soviet that thought it could keep peace than an aristocracy that admits it can’t.” “You should go and live in Russia,” Hornbeck recommended. The battle-piece which I was composing for Violet seemed naturally to take the form of a triptych; and the first two panels shewed that the governing classes in all countries had failed to keep the peace and had bungled the business of making war. When the third panel came to be painted, I wondered whether they would be more successful in making peace. “Is this going to be a _lasting_ settlement?,” I asked Lucien de Grammont, when he came to refresh himself after his work on the agenda. “We’re doing our best,” he answered. “As I told you at the time, the war stopped too soon. If we’re to secure that France is never again to be menaced, we must to some extent carry the war on into the peace.” “Do you still think there will be another war in fifty years’ time?” “I won’t pin myself to a date, but you’ll never abolish war.” “Then,” I said, “it’s time you made way for somebody who will. The old systems, the old diplomacy, the old men who ran the old system, are a self-confessed failure.” Lucien twirled his neat moustache and addressed to his neatly-shod feet a muttered confidence about doctrinaire idealists. Gerald Deganway, for the honour of the old diplomacy as practised in the British Foreign Office, screwed his eye-glass into place and exclaimed: “I say, you know, George, you’re an absolute bolshevist!” And Hornbeck administered the most damaging criticism by accepting my premises and proceeding to a diametrically opposite conclusion. “You’re proving too much, old son,” he argued. “I agree that governments should prevent wars, I agree that every government in the world failed to prevent this last one. That only shews you’re asking governments to do an impossibility. Take every nation in turn, from Belgium to the States, and tell me how the government of any one could have kept out of the war. When once the racket begins . . .” “We must go back a stage, then,” I said, “to the time before it begins. We must have a ‘will to peace’.” “Didn’t we have that in England?,” asked Violet. “Honour apart, we couldn’t afford to stay out in 1914.” “You must go beyond England,” I told her. “We want an international ‘will to peace’; a solemn league and covenant, not between foreign secretaries, but between the units of the world’s cannon-fodder. War will end of its own accord when you can’t fill your armies.”