hour, day after day—­that will really burn out and wreck towns, that will drive people mad by the thousand.  We shall get a very complete cessation of sea transit.  Even land transit may be enormously hampered by aerial attack.  I doubt if any sort of social order will really be able to stand the strain of a fully worked out modern war.  We have still, of course, to feel the full shock effects even of this war.  Most of the combatants are going on, as sometimes men who have incurred grave wounds will still go on for a time—­without feeling them.  The educational, biological, social, economic punishment that has already been taken by each of the European countries is, I feel, very much greater than we yet realize.  Russia, the heaviest and worst-trained combatant, has indeed shown the effects and is down and sick, but in three years’ time all Europe will know far better than it does now the full price of this war.  And the shock effects of the next war will have much the same relation to the shock effects of this, as the shock of breaking a finger-nail has to the shock of crushing in a body.  In Russia to-day we have seen, not indeed social revolution, not the replacement of one social order by another, but disintegration.  Let not national conceit blind us.  Germany, France, Italy, Britain are all slipping about on that same slope down which Russia has slid.  Which goes first, it is hard to guess, or whether we shall all hold out to some kind of Peace.  At present the social discipline of France and Britain seems to be at least as good as that of Germany, and the morale of the Rhineland and Bavaria has probably to undergo very severe testing by systematized and steadily increasing air punishment as this year goes on.  The next war—­if a next war comes—­will see all Germany, from end to end, vulnerable to aircraft....

Such are the two sets of considerations that will, I think, ultimately prevail over every prejudice and every difficulty in the way of the League of Free Nations.  Existing states have become impossible as absolutely independent sovereignties.  The new conditions bring them so close together and give them such extravagant powers of mutual injury that they must either sink national pride and dynastic ambitions in subordination to the common welfare of mankind or else utterly shatter one another.  It becomes more and more plainly a choice between the League of Free Nations and a famished race of men looting in search of non-existent food amidst the smouldering ruins of civilization.  In the end I believe that the common sense of mankind will prefer a revision of its ideas of nationality and imperialism, to the latter alternative.  It may take obstinate men a few more years yet of blood and horror to learn this lesson, but for my own part I cherish an obstinate belief in the potential reasonableness of mankind.

IX

DEMOCRACY