Possibly in the conviction that she is fighting for a worthy object (the ending of militarism), and in the determination (if sincerely carried out) of once more playing her part in the world as the protector of small nations, Britain may find her salvation, and a cause which will save her soul.  It is certainly encouraging to find that there is a growing feeling in favour of the recognition and rehabilitation of the small peoples of the world.  If it is true that Britain by her grasping Imperial Commercialism in the past (and let us hope that period is past) has roused jealousy and hatred among the other nations, equally is it true that Germany to-day, by her dreams of world-conquest, has been rousing hatred and fear.  But the day has gone by of world-empires founded on the lust of conquest, whether that conquest be military or commercial.  The modern peoples surely are growing out of dreams so childish as that.  The world-empire of Goethe and Beethoven is even now far more extensive, far more powerful, than that which Wilhelm II and his Junkers are seeking to encompass.  There is something common, unworthy, in the effort of domination; and while the Great Powers have thus vulgarized themselves, it is the little countries who have gone forward in the path of progress.  “In modern Europe what do we not owe to little Switzerland, lighting the torch of freedom six hundred years ago, and keeping it alight through all the centuries when despotic monarchies held the rest of the European Continent?  And what to free Holland, with her great men of learning and her painters surpassing those of all other countries save Italy?  So the small Scandinavian nations have given to the world famous men of science, from Linnaeus downwards, poets like Tegner and Bjoernson, scholars like Madvig, dauntless explorers like Fridthiof Nansen.  England had, in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton, a population little larger than that of Bulgaria to-day.  The United States, in the days of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Marshall, counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or Greece."[19]

In all their internal politics and social advancement, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Finland (until the paw of the Bear was on her) and Belgium (till the claw of the Spread-Eagle) have been well to the fore.  It is they who have carried on the banner of idealism which Germany herself uplifted when she was a small people or a group of small peoples.  It is they who have really had prosperous, healthy, independent, and alert populations.  How much more interesting, we may say, would Europe be under the variety of such a regime than under the monotonous bureaucracy and officialism of any Great Power!  And to some such scheme we must adhere.  It would mean, of course, the alliance of all the States of Western Europe, large and small (and including both a remodelled Germany and a largely remodelled Austria) in one great Federation—­whose purpose would