outcome of a conception of politics which we are forever ready to do
our part to defend, to do daily our part to uphold.

And those of us who try in our feeble way to protest against this
conception of politics and patriotism, where everything stands on its
head; where the large is made to appear the great, and the great is
made to appear the small, are derided as sentimentalists, Utopians. As
though anything could be more sentimental, more divorced from the sense
of reality, than the principles which lead us to a condition of things
like these; as though anything could be more wildly, burlesquely
Utopian than the idea that efforts of the kind that the Italian people
are now making, the energy they are now spending, could ever achieve
anything of worth.

Is it not time that the man in the street, verily, I believe, less
deluded by diplomatic jargon than his betters, less the slave of an
obsolete phraseology, insisted that the experts in the high places
acquired some sense of the reality of things, of proportion, some sense
of figures, a little knowledge of industrial history, of the real
processes of human cooperation?

At present Europe is quite indifferent to Italy's behavior. The
Chancelleries, which will go to enormous trouble and take enormous
risks and concoct alliances and counter-alliances when there is
territory to be seized, remain cold when crimes of this sort are
committed. And they remain cold because they believe that Turkey alone
is concerned. They do not see that Italy has attacked not Turkey, but
Europe; that we, more than Turkey, will pay the broken pots.

And there is a further reason: We still believe in these piracies; we
believe they pay and that we may get our turn at some "swag" to-morrow.
France is envied for her possession of Morocco; Germany for her
increased authority over some pestilential African swamps. But when we
realize that in these international burglaries there is no "swag," that
the whole thing is an illusion, that there are huge costs but no
reward, we shall be on the road to a better tradition, which, while it
may not give us international policing, may do better still--render the
policing unnecessary. For when we have realized that the game is not
worth the candle, when no one desires to commit aggression, the
competition in armaments will have become a bad nightmare of the past.

SIR MAX WAECHTER

It is generally admitted that the present condition of Europe is highly