veryone who has looked into the Albanian
question desires is that the Albanians shall pasture their flocks and
market their sheepskins in peace, free of Serbian control. In every
country at present at war, the desire of the majority of people is for
a non-contentious solution that will neither crystallise a triumph nor
propitiate an enemy, but which will embody the economic and ethnological
and geographical common sense of the matter. But while the formulae
of national belligerence are easy, familiar, blatant, and instantly
present, the gentler, greater formulae of that wider and newer world
pacifism has still to be generally understood. It is so much easier to
hate and suspect than negotiate generously and patiently; it is so
much harder to think than to let go in a shrill storm of hostility. The
rational pacifist is hampered not only by belligerency, but by a sort
of malignant extreme pacifism as impatient and silly as the extremest
patriotism.

5

I sketch out these ideas of a world pacification from a third-party
standpoint, because I find them crystallising out in men's minds. I note
how men discuss the suggestion that America may play a large part in
such a permanent world pacification. There I end my account rendered.
These things are as much a part of my impression of the war as a
shell-burst on the Carso or the yellow trenches at Martinpuich. But I
do not know how opinion is going in America, and I am quite unable to
estimate the power of these new ideas I set down, relative to the blind
forces of instinct and tradition that move the mass of mankind. On the
whole I believe more in the reason-guided will-power of men than I did
in the early half of 1914. If I am doubtful whether after all this war
will "end war," I think on the other hand it has had such an effect of
demonstration that it may start a process of thought and conviction,
it may sow the world with organisations and educational movements
considerable enough to grapple with an either arrest or prevent the next
great war catastrophe. I am by no means sure even now that this is not
the last great war in the experience of men. I still believe it may be.

The most dangerous thing in the business so far is concerned is the wide
disregard of the fact that national economic fighting is bound to cause
war, and the almost universal ignorance of the necessity of subjecting
shipping and overseas and international trade to some kind of
international control.