ES" FALSE AND TRUE: THEIR ROLE IN EUROPEAN PROGRESS.

The improvement of ideas the foundation of all improvement--Shooting
straight and thinking straight; the one as important as the
other--Pacifism and the Millennium--How we got rid of wars of
religion--A few ideas have changed the face of the world--The simple
ideas the most important--The "theories" which have led to war--The work
of the reformer to destroy old and false theories--The intellectual
interdependence of nations--Europe at unity in this matter--New ideas
cannot be confined to one people--No fear of ourselves or any nation
being ahead of the rest.

But what, it will be said, is the practical outcome? Admitting that we
are, or that our fathers were, in part responsible for this war, that it
is their false theories which have made it necessary, that like false
theories on our part may make future wars inevitable--what shall we do
to prevent that catastrophe?

Now while as an "abstract proposition" everyone will admit that the one
thing which distinguishes the civilized man from the savage is a
difference of ideas, no one apparently believes that it is a dangerous
and evil thing for the political ideas of savages to dominate most of
our countrymen or that so intangible a thing as "ideas" have any
practical importance at all. While we believe this, of course--to the
extent to which we believe it--improvement is out of the question. We
have to realize that civic faith, like religious faith, is of
importance; that if English influence is to stand for the right and not
the wrong in human affairs, it is impossible for each one of us
individuals to be wrong; that if the great mass is animated by temper,
blindness, ignorance, passion, small and mean prejudices, it is not
possible for "England" to stand for something quite different and for
its influence to be ought but evil. To say that we are "for our country
right or wrong" does not get over the matter at all; rather is it
equivalent to saying that we would as readily have it stand for evil as
for good. And we do not in the least seem to realize that for an
Englishman to go on talking wicked nonsense across the dinner table and
making one of the little rivulets of bad temper and prejudice which
forms the mighty river drowning sane judgment is to do the England of
our dreams a service as ill (in reality far more mischievous) as though
the plans of fortresses were sold to Germany. We must all learn to shoot
str