accomplished.  It is too long a question to enter on here, but it may safely be said that the more the problem is examined the more does it appear to be, like the wider problem of the whole body of 200,000 civil servants in the United Kingdom, a question of national education, and not a mere matter of Government regulations and democratic institutions.  What is required, in the Foreign Office, as in the whole British civil service, has been well expressed by Mr. Graham Wallas in his book Human Nature in Politics: 

“However able our officials are and however varied their origin, the danger of the narrowness and rigidity which has hitherto so generally resulted from official life would still remain and must be guarded against by every kind of encouragement to free intellectual development.”

Sec.3. Foreign Policy and Education.—­But if statesmen do not sufficiently realise the strength of existing popular forces in foreign policy, it is equally true that the people themselves do not realise it.  The people of every country are inclined to think that they can alter the destiny of nations by ousting one foreign minister from power and setting up another; they think that speeches and the resolutions passed by congresses can change fundamental economic facts.  They think that mere expressions of mutual goodwill can take the place of knowledge, and they forget that no nation can shake itself free in a moment from the historical development which has formed it, just as no man can wholly shake himself free from the character which he has inherited from his ancestors.  Indeed all our phrases—­our whole attitude of mind—­shows how little we, as a people, realise popular forces.  We commonly speak, for instance, of Russia as if nothing in that vast country had any influence on foreign affairs except the opinions of a few bureaucrats in Petrograd.  Our sympathy for or hostility to Russia is determined by our opinion of the Russian bureaucracy, and we never spare a thought for the hopes and fears and the dumb but ardent beliefs of millions of Russian peasants.  We are apt to dismiss them from our minds as ignorant and superstitious villagers tyrannised over by the Tsar, without troubling to enquire narrowly into the real facts of Russian life.  We thus make precisely the same mistake that diplomatists too often make.  We forget that the masses of peasants who flow every year on pilgrimage to the shrines of their religion constitute a more vital fact in the history of the world than the deliberations of the Duma or the decisions of police magistrates.