_G. Lowes Dickinson, “The War and the Way Out,” Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1915._ LOWES DICKINSON’S PLAN [Sidenote: Mr. Dickinson’s plan lacks hard-headedness.] Writing in the _Atlantic Monthly_, Mr. Lowes Dickinson attempts to point the moral of the war and to offer a way out. His theory is that wars are made by governments without the consent and against the interest of their subjects; they are made because the governmental mind is obsessed with the illusion that States are “natural enemies,” that they have always been so and always will be, that force is the only arbiter between them. This fantasy of the governing caste, says Mr. Dickinson, is what rules the State, and through control of foreign policy and the press drags the population to slaughter. The remedy is to shatter the illusion, to assert against the criminal nonsense of the governing mind the humanity and commonsense of ordinary people.... Now peace will have to be built on a very hard-headed basis or it will be fragile and illusory. But it is just this hard-headedness which Mr. Dickinson’s argument seems to lack. In our opinion he himself is building on an illusion, and if his doctrine prevails among the workers for peace their passion will be misdirected, and their disappointment will be as deep as their hopes are high. [Sidenote: Is political power irrelevant to economic power?] To prove these assertions, we need not go beyond the example which Mr. Dickinson uses, the case of Russia and her desire to hold Constantinople. Mr. Dickinson dismisses this ambition with the statement that “for all purposes of trade, for all peace purposes, the Dardanelles are open. And it is the interest of all nations alike that they should remain so.” What he is assuming here is that it makes no economic difference whether Constantinople is under one political government or another. This is the center of Mr. Dickinson’s argument, and it rests on the doctrine of Norman Angell that “political power is a consideration irrelevant to economic power.”