All round the world there is this same obscuration of the real intelligence of men.  In Germany, human good will and every fine mind are subordinated to political forms that have for a mouthpiece a Chancellor with his brains manifestly addled by the theories of Welt-Politik and the Bismarckian tradition, and for a figurehead a mad Kaiser.  Nevertheless there comes even from Germany muffled cries for a new age.  A grinning figure like a bloodstained Punch is all that speaks for the best brains in Bulgaria.  Yes.  We Western allies know all that by heart; but, after all, the immediate question for each one of us is, “What speaks for me?” So far as official political forms go I myself am as ineffective as any right-thinking German or Bulgarian could possibly be.  I am more ineffective than a Galician Pole or a Bohemian who votes for his nationalist representative.  Politically I am a negligible item in the constituency of this Mr. Burdett Coutts into whose brain we have been peeping.  Politically I am less than a waistcoat button on that quaint figure.  And that is all I am—­except that I revolt.  I have written of it so far as if it were just a joke.  But indeed bad and foolish political institutions cannot be a joke.  Sooner or later they prove themselves to be tragedy.  This war is that.  It is yesterday’s lazy, tolerant, “sense of humour” wading out now into the lakes of blood it refused to foresee.

It is absurd to suppose that anywhere to-day the nationalisms, the suspicions and hatreds, the cants and policies, and dead phrases that sway men represent the current intelligence of mankind.  They are merely the evidences of its disorganization.  Even now we know we could do far better.  Give mankind but a generation or so of peace and right education and this world could mock at the poor imaginations that conceived a millennium.  But we have to get intelligences together, we have to canalize thought before it can work and produce its due effects.  To that end, I suppose, there has been a vast amount of mental activity among us political “negligibles.”  For my own part I have thought of the idea of God as the banner of human unity and justice, and I have made some tentatives in that direction, but men, I perceive, have argued themselves mean and petty about religion.  At the word “God” passions bristle.  The word “God” does not unite men, it angers them.  But I doubt if God cares greatly whether we call Him God or no.  His service is the service of man.  This double idea of the League of Free Nations, linked with the idea of democracy as universal justice, is free from the jealousy of the theologians and great enough for men to unite upon everywhere.  I know how warily one must reckon with the spite of the priest, but surely these ideas may call upon the teachers of all the great world religions for their support.  The world is full now of confused propaganda, propaganda of national ideas, of traditions of hate, of sentimental and degrading