Or again, the millions and millions of Great and Little Russian peasants.  Big-framed, big-hearted, patient, friendly, with a great natural gift for association and co-operation, peacefully minded and profoundly religious; yet superstitious, and capable of rising at any moment en masse to the call of a great crusade or “holy war”; it might seem that they hold all Western Europe in the hollow of their hands.  Indeed they constitute not only a hope and promise of deliverance to our modern world, but also a considerable danger.  All depends on how we dispose ourselves towards them.  Should the nations of Western Europe rouse their hatred by chicanery and mean treatment the result might be fatal.  If their flood once began to move, no battle array of armaments would be of any use—­any more than a revolver against a rising tide—­the flood would flow round and over us.  But if on the other hand we could really reach the heart of this great people, if we could treat them really generously and with understanding, we should create a response there, and a recognition, which would remove all risk to ourselves, and possibly help to free Russia from the great burden of political servitude and ignorance which has so long oppressed her peasantry.

Or think of the Servians—­that hospitable people, good lovers and good haters, with their ancient, almost prehistoric, system of family communities surviving down to modern days, and blossoming out in a perfect genius for co-operative agriculture and Raffeisen banks!

Or the Finns, the Swedes, the Norwegians, and the Danes (if I may class these together); what a clear, clean-minded, healthy people are these, so direct in their touch on Nature and the human instincts, so democratic, bold, and progressive in their social organizations—­what a privilege to have them as our near neighbours and relatives!  Or the Germans, in many ways resembling the last mentioned group, only richer and more varied in their culture and racial characteristics!  Or the Dutch, so well-based and broad-seated both in body and mind, with their ample bowels of compassion and their well-equipped brains, so full of tenderness and of sturdy commonsense, what a gift has been theirs to Europe, what a legacy of artistic treasure and of heroic record!  Or the Spanish with their beautiful and dignified women, or the French with their fine logical and artistic sense, or the Hungarians, Greeks, and Italians!

Have we nothing to do but to prepare engines of death and of slaughter against all these peoples?  Is our main idea of relation to them one of domination and profit?  Have we no use for them but to gain their riches, and in exchange to lose our own souls?  Or shall we, like the Prussians, seek to “impose” our own standards of so-called culture on them, and trim their infinite variety and grace to one sorry pattern?  These are all in their diverse glory and beauty as leaves of the one great Tree whose branches