In discussing proposals for a European Council, then, we must be quite sure to face all that it means.  But let us not reject Professor Murray’s suggestion off-hand because of its inherent difficulties:  for that men should be discussing such schemes at all marks a significant advance in our political thought.  Only let us be quite clear as to what they presuppose.  They presuppose the supremacy, in the collective mind of civilised mankind, of Law over Force, a definite supremacy of what may be called the civilian as against the military ideal, not in a majority of States, but in every State powerful enough to defy coercion.  They presuppose a world map definitely settled on lines satisfactory to the national aspirations of the peoples.  They presuppose a status quo which is not simply maintained, like that after 1815, because it is a legal fact and its disturbance would be inconvenient to the existing rulers, but because it is inherently equitable.[1] They presuppose a similar democratic basis of citizenship and representation among the component States.  They presuppose, lastly, an educated public opinion incomparably less selfish, less ignorant, less unsteady, less materialistic, and less narrowly national than has been prevalent hitherto.  Let us work and hope for these things:  let us use our best efforts to remove misunderstandings and promote a sense of common responsibilities and common trusteeship for civilisation between the peoples of all the various sovereign States; but meanwhile let us work also, with better hopes of immediate if less ambitious successes, along the other parallel road of advance.

[Footnote 1:  The same applies to proposals for ensuring permanent peace in the industrial sphere.  Neither capital nor labour will abide by “scraps of paper” if they do not feel the status quo (i.e. the conditions under which wage-contracts are made) to be equitable and inherently just.]

The other road may seem, in this hour of dreams and disaster, of extremes of hope and disillusionment, a long and tedious track:  it is the old slow high road of civilisation, not the short cut across the fields.  It looks forward to abiding results, not through the mechanical co-operation of governments, but through the growth of an organic citizenship, through the education of the nations themselves to a sense of common duty and a common life.  It looks forward, not to the definite establishment, in our day, of the World-State, but only to the definite refutation of the wicked theory of the mutual incompatibility of nations.  It looks forward to the expression in the outward order of the world’s government of what we may call “the Principle of the Commonwealth,” of Lord Acton’s great principle of the State composed of free nations, of the State as a living body which lives through the organic union and free activity of its several national members.  And it finds its immediate field of action in the deepening and extension of the obligations of citizenship among the peoples of the great, free, just, peace-loving, supra-national Commonwealths whose patriotism has been built up, not by precept and doctrine, but on a firm foundation of older loyalties.