light. We shall see and know what
is happening much more clearly than anything of the kind has ever been
seen before.

It is not only that people will have behind them, as a light upon what
is happening, the experiences and discussions of a hundred years, but
that the international situation will be far plainer than it has ever
been. This war has made Germany the central fact in all national affairs
about the earth. It is not going to destroy Germany, and it seems
improbable that either defeat or victory, or any mixture of these, will
immediately alter the cardinal fact of Germany's organised
aggressiveness.

The war will not end the conflict of anti-Germany and Germany, That will
only end when the results of fifty years of aggressive education in
Germany have worn away. This will be so plain that the great bulk of
people everywhere will not only see their changing economic
relationships far more distinctly than such things have been seen
hitherto, but that they will see them as they have never been seen
before, definitely orientated to the threat of German world
predominance. The landlord who squeezes, the workman who strikes and
shirks, the lawyer who fogs and obstructs, will know, and will know that
most people know, that what he does is done, not under an empty,
regardless heaven, but in the face of an unsleeping enemy and in
disregard of a continuous urgent necessity for unity.

So far we have followed this speculation upon fairly firm ground, but
now our inquiry must plunge into a jungle of far more difficult and
uncertain possibilities. Our next stage brings us to the question of how
people and peoples and classes of people are going to react to the new
conditions of need and knowledge this war will have brought about, and
to the new demands that will be made upon them.

This is really a question of how far they will prove able to get out of
the habits and traditions of their former social state, how far they
will be able to take generous views and make sacrifices and unselfish
efforts, and how far they will go in self-seeking or class selfishness
regardless of the common welfare. This is a question we have to ask
separately of each great nation, and of the Central Powers as a whole,
and of the Allies as a whole, before we can begin to estimate the
posture of the peoples of the world in, say, 1946.

Now let me here make a sort of parenthesis on human nature. It will be
rather platitudinous, but it is a nece