the
fact that the business was committed to wrong hands. The organs for
working the change were for the most part autocratic monarchs and
old-world diplomatists--the last people in the world likely to bring about
a workable millennium. A great crisis demands very careful manipulation.
Cynicism must not be allowed to play any part in it. Traditional
watchwords are not of much use. Theoretical idealism itself may turn out
to be a most formidable stumbling-block. Yet no one can doubt that a
solution of the problem, whenever it is arrived at, must come along the
path of idealism. Long ago a man of the world was defined as a man who in
every serious crisis is invariably wrong. He is wrong because he applies
old-fashioned experience to a novel situation--old wine in new
bottles--and because he has no faith in generous aspirations, having noted
their continuous failure in the past. Yet, after all, it is only faith
which can move mountains, and the Holy Alliance itself was not so much
wrong in the principles to which it appealed as it was in the personages
who signed it. We have noticed already that, like all other great ideas,
it did not wholly die. The propaganda of peace, however futile may be some
of the discussions of pacifists, is the heritage which even so
wrong-headed a man as Alexander I has left to the world. The idea of
arbitration between nations, the solution of difficulties by arguments
rather than by swords, the power which democracies hold in their hands for
guiding the future destinies of the world--all these in their various
forms remain with us as legacies of that splendid, though ineffective,
idealism which lay at the root of the Holy Alliance.

SMALL NATIONALITIES

And now after this digression, which has been necessary to clear the
ground, and also to suggest apt parallels, let us return to what Mr.
Asquith said in Dublin on the ultimate objects of the present war. He
borrowed from Mr. Gladstone the phrase "the enthronement of the idea of
public right as the governing idea of European politics," and in
developing it as applicable to the present situation he pointed out that
for us three definite objects are involved. The first, assented to by
every publicist of the day, apart from those educated in Germany, is the
wholesale obliteration of the notion that states exist simply for the sake
of going to war. This kind of militarism, in all its different aspects,
will have to be abolished. The next point br