It was not merely robbery that the Italian Government intended, but they meant from the first that it should be war—­to “dish the Socialists,” to play some sordid intrigue of internal politics.

The ultimatum was launched from the center of Christendom—­the city which lodges the titular head of the Universal Church—­to teach to the Mohammedan world what may be expected from a modern Christian Government with its back to eighteen centuries of Christian teaching.

We, Christendom, spend scores of millions—­hundreds of millions, it may be—­in the propagation of the Christian faith:  numberless men and women gave their lives for it, our fathers spent two centuries in unavailing warfare for the capture of some of its symbols.  Presumably, therefore, we attach some value to its principles, deeming them of some worth in the defense of human society.

Or do we believe nothing of the sort?  Is our real opinion that these things at bottom don’t matter—­or matter so little that for the sake of robbing the squalid belongings of a few Arab tribes, or playing some mean game of party politics, they can be set aside in a whoop of “patriotism”?

Our press waxes indignant in this particular case, and that is the end of it.  But we do not see that we are to blame, that it is all the outcome of a conception of politics which we are forever ready to do our part to defend, to do daily our part to uphold.

And those of us who try in our feeble way to protest against this conception of politics and patriotism, where everything stands on its head; where the large is made to appear the great, and the great is made to appear the small, are derided as sentimentalists, Utopians.  As though anything could be more sentimental, more divorced from the sense of reality, than the principles which lead us to a condition of things like these; as though anything could be more wildly, burlesquely Utopian than the idea that efforts of the kind that the Italian people are now making, the energy they are now spending, could ever achieve anything of worth.

Is it not time that the man in the street, verily, I believe, less deluded by diplomatic jargon than his betters, less the slave of an obsolete phraseology, insisted that the experts in the high places acquired some sense of the reality of things, of proportion, some sense of figures, a little knowledge of industrial history, of the real processes of human cooperation?

At present Europe is quite indifferent to Italy’s behavior.  The Chancelleries, which will go to enormous trouble and take enormous risks and concoct alliances and counter-alliances when there is territory to be seized, remain cold when crimes of this sort are committed.  And they remain cold because they believe that Turkey alone is concerned.  They do not see that Italy has attacked not Turkey, but Europe; that we, more than Turkey, will pay the broken pots.