long as there are peoples in Europe under
alien governments, curtailed in the use of their own language,[1] in the
propagation of their literature and ideas, in their social intercourse, in
their corporate life, in all that we in Great Britain understand by civil
liberty, so long will there be men who will mock at the very idea of
international peace, and look forward to war, not as an outworn instrument
of a barbarous age, but as a means to national freedom and self-expression.
Englishmen sometimes forget that there are worse evils than open war, both
in political and industrial relations, and that the political causes for
which their fathers fought and died have still to be carried to victory on
the Continent. Nationality and their national institutions are the very
life-blood of English people. They are as natural to them as the air
they breathe. That is what makes it sometimes so difficult for them to
understand, as the history of Ireland and even of Ulster shows, what
nationality means to other peoples. And that is why they have not realised,
not only that there are peoples in Europe living under alien governments,
but that there are governments in Europe so foolish as to think that men
and women deprived of their national institutions, humiliated in their
deepest feelings, and forced into an alien mould, can make good citizens,
trustworthy soldiers, or even obedient subjects.

[Footnote 1: The German official _communique_ on August 26, 1914, reports
as follows: "All the newspapers in Belgium, with the exception of those in
Antwerp, are printed in the German language." This, of course, is on the
model of the Prussian administration of Poland. The Magyars are more
repressive even than the Germans. See the bibliography given in _General
Books_ below.]

The political causes of the present war, then, and of the half century
of Armed Peace which preceded it are to be found, not in the particular
schemes and ambitions of any of the governments of Europe, nor in their
secret diplomacy, nor in the machinations of the great armament interests
allied to them, sinister though all these may have been, but in the nature
of some of those governments themselves, and in their relation to the
peoples over whom they rule.

"If it were possible," writes Prince Buellow, who directed German policy
as Imperial Chancellor from 1900 to 1909, "for members of different
nationalities, with different language and customs, and an intellectual