her territorial conquests.

Russia, for instance, has nearly five times the population and very many
times the area of France; but one may doubt whether even a Russian would
assert that Russian influence is five or ten times greater than that of
France; still less that the world yielded him in any sense a
proportionately greater deference than it yields the Frenchman. The
extent to which the greatest power can impose itself by bayonets is very
limited in area and depth. All the might of the Prussian Army cannot
compel the children of Poland or of Lorraine to say their prayers in
German; it cannot compel the housewives of Switzerland or Paraguay or of
any other little State that has not a battleship to its name to buy
German saucepans if so be they do not desire to. There are so many other
things necessary to render political or military force effective, and
there are so many that can offset it altogether.

We see these forces at work around us every day accomplishing miracles,
doing things which a thousand years of fighting was never able to
do--and then say serenely that they are mere "theories." Why do Catholic
powers no longer execute heretics? They have a perfect right--even in
international law--to do so. What is it that protects the heretic in
Catholic countries? The police? But the main business of the police and
the army used to be to hunt him down. What is controlling the police and
the army?

By some sort of process there has been an increasing intuitive
recognition of a certain code which we realize to be necessary for a
decent society. It has come to be a sanction much stronger than the
sanction of law, much more effective than the sanction of military
force. During the German advance on Paris in August last I happened to
be present at a French family conference. Stories of the incredible
cruelties and ferocity of the Germans were circulating in the Northern
Department, where I happened to be staying.

Every one was in a condition of panic, and two Frenchmen, fathers of
families, were seeing red at the story of all these barbarities. But
they had to decide--and the thing was discussed at a little family
conference--where they should send their wives and children. And one of
these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation
of the German barbarian, said quite naively and with no sense of irony
or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which
would not be defen