In such a time, then, all of us who believe in the spirit must hold high the torch of humanistic culture.  Education is for life and not merely for efficiency.  Of what worth is life, if one is only a cog-wheel in the economic machine?  It is to save the spiritual heritage of humanity that we are fighting, and it is that heritage that education must bring to every child and youth, if it fulfills its supreme trust.  Education for the purposes of autocratic imperialism seeks to make a people a perfect economically productive and militarily aggressive machine.  Education for democracy means the development of each individual to the most intelligent, self-directed and governed, unselfish and devoted, sane, balanced and effective humanity.

XII

SOCIALISM AND THE WAR

One of the surprises of the War was the complete breakdown of international socialism.  Not only socialists, but those of us who had been thoughtfully watching the movement from without, had come to believe that the measure of consciousness of international brotherhood it had developed in the artisan groups of many lands, would be a powerful lever against war.  We were wrong:  the superficial international sympathy evaporated like mist under the rays of a revived nationalism.  The socialists fell in line, almost as completely as any other group, with the purely nationalist aims in each land.

This must have gratified certain despots; for one cause of the War, not the cause, was undoubtedly the preference on the part of various autocrats, to face an external war rather than the rising tide of democracy within the nation.  Temporarily, they have been successful, but surely only for a brief time.  The victory of democracy will vastly accelerate the growth of the spirit of brotherhood throughout the world.

The terrible waste of the War must of itself produce a reaction of the people on kings and castes in all lands.  The suffering that will follow the War, in the period of economic readjustment, will accentuate this.  Surely the people, in England, France, America, Italy, Russia, and among the neutral nations, will strive that no such war may come again.  Even in Germany, when the people find out what they have paid and why, inevitably they must struggle so to reform their institutions that no ruler or class may again plunge them into such disaster for the selfish benefit or ambitions of that ruler or class.  How our hearts have warmed to Liebknecht!

The realignment of nations must work to the same end.  War, like politics, makes strange bed-fellows.  Germany and Austria, for centuries rivals, and, at times, enemies, we behold united so completely that it is difficult to imagine them disentangled after the War.

France and England, long regarding each other as natural enemies, are fused heart and soul.  Strangest of all, we have seen England struggling to win for Russia that prize of Constantinople, which for generations it has been a main object of British diplomacy to keep from Russian grasp.  Most impressive of all, has been the new consciousness of unity and common cause among the nations of the earth, and the groups within all nations, standing for democracy.