dream, they have themselves been brought to depend upon
foreigners. War itself has become internationalist.

There is something of sardonic humor in the fact that it is the greatest
war of history which is illustrating the fact that even the most
powerful of the European nations must co-operate with foreigners for its
security. For no one of the nine or ten combatants of the present war
could have maintained its position or defended itself alone. There is
not one nation involved that would not believe itself in danger of
destruction but for the help of foreigners; there is not one whose
national safety does not depend upon some compact or arrangement with
foreign nations. France would have been helpless but for the help of
Britain and of Russia. Russia herself could not have imposed her will
upon Germany if Germany could have thrown all her forces on the eastern
frontier. Austria could certainly not have withstood the Russian flood
single handed. Quite obviously the lesser nations, Serbia, Belgium, and
the rest, would be helpless victims but for the support of their
neighbors.

And it should be noted that this international co-operation is not by
any means always with similar and racially allied nations. Republican
France finds itself, and has been for a generation, the ally of
autocratic Russia. Australia, that much more than any other country has
been obsessed by the yellow peril and the danger from Japan, finds
herself today fighting side by side with the Japanese. And as to the
ineradicable hostility of races preventing international co-operation,
there are fighting together on the soil of France as I write, Flemish,
Walloons, and negroes from Senegal, Turcos from Northern Africa, Gurkhas
from India, co-operating with the advance on the other frontier of
Cossacks, and Russians of all descriptions. This military and political
co-operation has brought together Mohammedan and Christian; Catholic,
Protestant, and Orthodox; negro, white and yellow; African, Indian, and
European; monarchist, republican, Socialist, reactionary--there seems
hardly a racial, religious, or political difference that has stood in
the way of rapid and effective co-operation in the common need.

Thus the soldier himself, while defending the old nationalist and
exclusive conceptions, is helping to shrink the spaces of the world and
break down old isolations and show how interests at the uttermost ends
of the earth react one upon the other.

Bu