ch will unite England and America, when
Englishmen can get to America in a day? The shortening of the distance
seems quite as likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate that
endless guerilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas in the
Middle Ages; when French invaders carried away the bells of Rye, and the
men of those flats of East Sussex gloriously pursued and recovered them.
I do not know whether American privateers, landing at Liverpool, would
carry away a few of the more elegant factory chimneys as a substitute
for the superstitious symbols of the past. I know not if the English, on
ripe reflection, would essay with any enthusiasm to get them back. But
anyhow it is anything but self-evident that people cannot fight each
other because they are near to each other; and if it were true, there
would never have been any such thing as border warfare in the world. As
a fact, border warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which it
was most difficult to bring under control. And our own traditional
position in face of this new logic is somewhat disconcerting. We have
always supposed ourselves safer because we were insular and therefore
isolated. We have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on having
enjoyed peace because we were cut off from our neighbours. And now they
are telling us that we shall only enjoy peace when we are joined up with
our neighbours. We have pitied the poor nations with frontiers, because
a frontier only produces fighting; and now we are trusting to a frontier
as the only thing that will produce friendship. But, as a matter of
fact, and for a far deeper and more spiritual reason, a frontier will
not produce friendship. Only friendliness produces friendship. And we
must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces
friendliness.

But apart from this fallacy about the facts, I feel, as I say, a strong
abstract anger against the idea, or what some would call the ideal. If
it were true that men could be taught and tamed by machines, even if
they were taught wisdom or tamed to amiability, I should think it the
most tragic truth in the world. A man so improved would be, in an
exceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to save it. But in truth he
cannot be so completely coerced into good; and in so far as he is
incompletely coerced, he is quite as likely to be coerced into evil. Of
the financial characters who figure as philanthropists and philosophers
in such case