Mr. Ponsonby appealing in the name of the people to Sir Edward Grey to stand aloof from European war; Mazzini appealing in the name of the people to the respectable, peaceable, middle classes of England to forsake Cobden’s pacifist doctrines and throw England’s sword into the scale of European revolution—­it is a strange contrast which serves to remind us that the word “democracy,” so lightly bandied about by political parties, has many different meanings and has stood for many different policies.  It may be roughly said that it stood for internationalism in 1792, when France claimed as her mission the liberation of all nations under the tricolor; it stood for nationalism in 1848 in the mouth of Mazzini, Kossuth and the German constitutional party; to-day it again stands for internationalism in the more advanced countries of Europe, but are we justified as yet in calling this more than a phase in the development of democratic doctrine?  It is a very difficult question, which it would be presumptuous to try to answer offhand; all we have tried to show here is that, on the whole, the assumption as to the peaceful tendencies of a democratic foreign policy is a doubtful one, on which we must to some extent reserve our judgment.

Sec.2. Foreign Policy and Popular Forces.—­The above considerations will help us to appreciate at its true value the second main assumption which lies behind the demand for increased democratic control of foreign policy—­namely, the assumption that the stuff of international politics is at present spun from the designs of individual statesmen, and has no relation to the needs of the peoples they govern.  Stated thus, this idea will not bear examination for a moment.  The doctrine of the “economic interpretation of history,” which has received perhaps its most emphatic expression in the teaching of Marxian socialists, is now in one form or another accepted by all thinking men.  But “economics” is after all a rough name for the sum of the ordinary needs and efforts of every single human being, and the economic interpretation of history means that the history of the world is in the long run determined by the cumulative force of these humble needs and efforts.  This and this alone is the real stuff of international politics.  Statesmen may attempt to found systems, but the only real force in international as in domestic politics is the education of the individual man’s desires.  It is indeed open to any critic to say that our present capitalist economic system is responsible for war because it dams up and diverts from their true channels the needs and the efforts of the mass of mankind.  But to this an Englishman may fairly answer that the free trade system under which our capitalist organisation has reached its greatest development was built up by the Manchester School with the sincere and avowed object of introducing universal peace.  Cobden avowed this object clearly: 

“I see,” he said, “in free trade that which shall act on the moral world as the law of gravitation in the universe, drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race and creed and language and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace...  I believe that the desire and motive for large and mighty empires, for gigantic armies and mighty navies ... will die away.”