Sec.6. The Principle of the Commonwealth.—­Such seems to many the meaning of the present European situation—­a stern conflict between nations and cultures, to be decided by force of arms.  The bridges between the nations seem broken down, and no one can tell when they will be repaired.  The hopes that had gathered round international movements, the cosmopolitan dreams of common action between the peoples across the barriers of States and Governments, seem to have vanished into limbo; and the enthusiastic dreamers of yesterday are the disillusioned soldiers and spectators of to-day.  Nationality, that strange, inarticulate, unanalysable force that can call all men to her tents in the hour of crisis and danger, seems to have overthrown the international forces of to-day, the Socialists, the Pacifists, and, strongest of all, the Capitalists, as it overthrew Napoleon and his dreams of Empire a hundred years ago.  What Law is there but force that can decide the issue between nation and nation?  And, in the absence of a Law, what becomes of all our hopes for international action, for the future of civilisation and the higher life of the human race?

But in truth the disillusionment is as premature as the hopes that preceded it.  We are still far off from the World-State and the World-Law which formed the misty ideal of cosmopolitan thinkers.  But only those who are blind to the true course of human progress can fail to see that the day of the Nation-State is even now drawing to a close in the West.  There is in fact at present working in the world a higher Law and a better patriotism than that of single nations and cultures, a Law and a patriotism that override and transcend the claims of Nationality in a greater, a more compelling, and a more universal appeal.  The great States or Powers of to-day, Great Britain, the United States, France, and (if they had eyes to sec it) Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, are not Nation-States but composite States—­States compacted of many nationalities united together by a common citizenship and a common law.  Great Britain, the United States, the German Empire, and Austria-Hungary bear in their very names the reminder of the diverse elements of which they are composed; but France with her great African Empire, and Russia with her multitudinous populations, from Poland to the Pacific, from Finland to the Caucasus, are equally composite.  In each of these great States nations have been united under a common law; and where the wisdom of the central government has not “broken the bruised reed or quenched the smoking flax” of national life, the nations have been not only willing but anxious to join in the work of their State.  Nations, like men, were made not to compete but to work together; and it is so easy, so simple, to win their good-hearted devotion.  It takes all sorts of men, says the old proverb, to make a world.  It takes all sorts of nations to make a modern State.  “The combination of