good is done when Tom Fool shoots Hans Narr? The plain fact is
that if we leave our capital to be dealt with according to the
selfishness of the private man he will send it where wages are low and
workers enslaved and docile: that is, as many thousand miles as possible
from the Trade Unions and Trade Union rates and parliamentary Labour
Parties of civilization; and Germany, at his sordid behest, will plunge
the world into war for the sake of disgracing herself with a few rubber
plantations, poetically described by her orators and journalists as "a
place in the sun." When you do what the Socialists tell you by keeping
your capital jealously under national control and reserving your
shrapnel for the wasters who not only shirk their share of the
industrial service of their country, but intend that their children and
children's children shall be idle wasters like themselves, you will find
that not a farthing of our capital will go abroad as long as there is a
British slum to be cleared and rebuilt, or a hungry, ragged, and
ignorant British child to be fed, clothed, and educated.

*A League of Peace*.

But in the west I see no insuperable obstacle to a Treaty of Peace in
the largest sense. This war has smoothed the way to it, if I may use the
word smoothing to describe a process conduced with so little courtesy
and so much shrapnel. Germany has now learned--and the lesson was
apparently needed, obvious as it would have been to a sanely governed
nation--that when it comes to shoving and shooting, Germany instantly
loses all the advantages of her high civilization, because France and
England, cultured or uncultured, can shove and shoot as well or beter
than she, whilst as to slashing and stabbing, their half barbarous Turco
and Ghoorka slaves can cut the Prussian Guard to bits, in spite of the
unquestionable superiority of Wagner's music to theirs. Then take
France. She does not dream that she could fight Germany and England
single-handed. And England could not fight France and Germany without a
sacrifice as ruinous as it would be senseless. We therefore have the
necessary primary conditions for a League of Peace between the three
countries; for if one of them break it, the other two can make her
sorry, under which circumstances she will probably not break it. The
present war, if it end in the reconquest of Alsace and Lorraine by the
French, will make such a League much more stable; not that France can
acquire by mere conqu