This war, and the cloud of war that has weighed upon us so many years before the bursting of the storm, has brought to bankruptcy the “National State.” Till 1870 it was the ultimate ideal of European politics, as it is still in the Balkans, where the Turk has broken Time’s wings. It was such a fruitful ideal that it has rapidly carried us beyond itself, and in the last generation the life of the world has been steadily finding new and wider channels. In the crisis of change from nationalism to internationalism we were still exposed to the plague of war. The crisis might have been passed without it, and war banished for ever between the nations of civilized Europe. Now that the catastrophe has happened (it is childish to waste energy in incriminations against its promoters) we must carry through the change completely and at once: we cannot possibly afford to be exposed to the danger again. [Sidenote: The bases of true nationality must be laid.] No tool, machine, or idea made by men has an immortal career. Sooner or later they all run amuck, and begin to do evil instead of good. At that stage savage or unskilful men destroy them by force and replace them by their opposite: civilized men get them under control, and build them into something new and greater. Nationality will sink from being the pinnacle of politics only to become their foundation, and till the foundations are laid true, further building is impossible. But the bases of nationality have never yet been laid true in Europe. When we say that “nationality was the political ideal of the nineteenth century,” and that 1870 left the populations of Europe organized in national groups, we are taking far too complacent a view of historical facts. The same century that produced a united Italy and Germany, saw out the whole tragedy of Poland, from the first partition in 1772 to the last revolt in 1863. Human ideas do not spring into the world full-grown and shining like Athena: they trail the infection of evil things from the past. In the Dark Ages Europe’s most pressing need and only practicable ideal was strong government. Strong government came with its blessings, but it brought the evil of territorial ambitions. The Duke of Burgundy spent the wealth of his Netherland subjects in trying to conquer the Swiss mountaineers. Burgundy succumbed to the king of France. But the very factor that made the French kings survive in the struggle for existence between governments, the force of compact nationality which the French kingdom happened to contain, delivered the inheritance of the kings to the Nation. [Sidenote: Nationalism has perpetuated violence.]