The peoples of all constitutionally-governed countries are justified in demanding that diplomatic relations with their neighbors shall be conducted with the main object of maintaining friendly international intercourse. The increasing social and economic interdependence, the ramifications of the credit system, the facility and rapidity of intercommunication, the developing community of intellectual interest, the growth of a collective social consciousness, are combining to minimize the significance of the purely political frontiers which divide civilized States. For these reasons the world is moving towards conferences when political difficulties arise as a substitute for war. The determination to preserve national ideals and traditions offers no real obstacle. But the common interest of civilized democracies cannot be advanced by a secret diplomacy out of touch with democratic sentiment. The anomaly of such practises in a democratic State has only to be understood to be condemned. All the domestic activities of a constitutional Government are tested in the crucible of public analysis and criticism. But the Government department charged with the supervision of the nation’s intercourse with its neighbors, which if wrongly handled may react with ruinous effect upon the whole field of its domestic activities and upon the future of its entire social economy, _not only escapes efficient public control, but considers itself empowered to commit the nation to specific courses and to involve it in obligations to third parties entailing the risk of war, without the nation’s knowledge of consent_. [Sidenote: British foreign policy has been autocratic.]