hat it wanted to do and did it! So with almost everything else.

Now if there be such a thing as the collective wisdom of the State I
suppose that the moment when we are most likely to find it in action is
the moment when one State has dealings with another State. That surely
is a fair test. If States possess collective wisdom they ought to show
its existence and measure when they confront one another _as
States_--when State calls to State across the great deeps of
international policy. What should we say of any State which claimed
collective wisdom only when dealing with its own individual
members--with you and me--but dropped the claim when the question was
one of reasonable intercourse with another State similarly endowed? This
we should say is a very dubious claim.

Well, how stands the matter when this test is applied? The present war
provides the answer. The war arose out of a type of quarrel which, had
it occurred between half a dozen individuals of average intelligence,
would have been amicably settled, by reasonable human intercourse, in
twenty minutes. Does not this afford a rough measure of the collective
wisdom of such States as at present exist in this world? Does it not
suggest that they have little faculty of reasonable intercourse with
one another? And when you say _that_ of any being, or any collection of
beings, do you not put it pretty low down in the scale of intelligence?
It is literally true that these States do not understand one another.
Thus we are driven back upon a plain alternative; either the States do
not represent collective wisdom, or else this collective wisdom is one
of the lowest forms of wisdom now extant on this planet. In either case
we must be very cautious in our use of the phrase. We must not infer
moral progress from the reign of collective wisdom until we are assured
that collective wisdom is really as wise as some of its devotees assume
it to be.

About the idea of moral progress, which is only another name for the
idea of progress in its widest form, I need say little, the question
having been adequately treated by other lecturers. But I will add this.
Belief in moral progress is a belief which no man can live without, and,
at the same time, a belief which cannot be proved by any appeal to human
experience. We cannot live without it, because life is just the process
of reaching forward to a better form of itself. Were a man to say that
since the world began no moral progres