Germany, human good will and every fine mind are
subordinated to political forms that have for a mouthpiece a Chancellor
with his brains manifestly addled by the theories of _Welt-Politik_ and
the Bismarckian tradition, and for a figurehead a mad Kaiser.
Nevertheless there comes even from Germany muffled cries for a new age.
A grinning figure like a bloodstained Punch is all that speaks for the
best brains in Bulgaria. Yes. We Western allies know all that by heart;
but, after all, the immediate question for each one of us is, "_What
speaks for me?_" So far as official political forms go I myself am as
ineffective as any right-thinking German or Bulgarian could possibly be.
I am more ineffective than a Galician Pole or a Bohemian who votes for
his nationalist representative. Politically I am a negligible item in
the constituency of this Mr. Burdett Coutts into whose brain we have
been peeping. Politically I am less than a waistcoat button on that
quaint figure. And that is all I am--except that I revolt. I have
written of it so far as if it were just a joke. But indeed bad and
foolish political institutions cannot be a joke. Sooner or later they
prove themselves to be tragedy. This war is that. It is yesterday's
lazy, tolerant, "sense of humour" wading out now into the lakes of blood
it refused to foresee.

It is absurd to suppose that anywhere to-day the nationalisms, the
suspicions and hatreds, the cants and policies, and dead phrases that
sway men represent the current intelligence of mankind. They are merely
the evidences of its disorganization. Even now we _know_ we could do far
better. Give mankind but a generation or so of peace and right education
and this world could mock at the poor imaginations that conceived a
millennium. But we have to get intelligences together, we have to
canalize thought before it can work and produce its due effects. To that
end, I suppose, there has been a vast amount of mental activity among
us political "negligibles." For my own part I have thought of the idea
of God as the banner of human unity and justice, and I have made some
tentatives in that direction, but men, I perceive, have argued
themselves mean and petty about religion. At the word "God" passions
bristle. The word "God" does not unite men, it angers them. But I doubt
if God cares greatly whether we call Him God or no. His service is the
service of man. This double idea of the League of Free Nations, linked
with the idea o