“What is this I hear, Jones, that you do not believe in the Monroe Doctrine?”

“It is a wicked lie.  I have said no such thing.  I do believe in the Monroe Doctrine.  I would lay down my life for it; I would die for it.  What I did say was that I didn’t know what it meant.”

And it was this vague theory which very nearly drove America into a war that would have been disastrous to the progress of Anglo-Saxon civilization.

This was at the time of the Venezuelan crisis:  the United States, which for nearly one hundred years had lived in perfect peace with a British power touching her frontier along three thousand miles, laid it down as a doctrine that her existence was imperilled if Great Britain should extend by so much as a mile a vague frontier running through a South American swamp thousands of miles away.  And for that cause these decent and honourable people were prepared to take all the risks that would be involved to Anglo-Saxon civilisation by a war between England and America.  The present writer happened at that time to be living in America, and concerned with certain political work.  Night after night he heard these fulminations against Great Britain; politicians, Congressmen, Senators, Governors, Ministers, Preachers, clamouring for war, for a theory as vague and as little practical as one could wish.

And we, of course, have had our like obsessions without number:  “the independence integrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe” is one.  Just think of it!  Take in the full sound of the phrase:  “the independence integrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe!”

What, of course, makes these fantastic political doctrines possible, what leads men to subscribe to them, are a few false general conceptions to which they hold tenaciously—­as all fundamental conceptions are held, and ought to be.  The general conceptions in question are precisely the ones I have indicated:  that nations are rival and struggling units, that military force is consequently the determining factor of their relative advantage; that enlargement of political frontiers is the supreme need, and so on.

And the revision of these fundamental conceptions will, of course, be the general work of Christendom, and given the conditions which now obtain, the development will go on pari passu in all nations or not all.  It will not be the work of “nations” at all; it will be the work of individual men.

States do not think.  It is the men who form the states who think, and the number of those men who will act as pioneers in a better policy must, of course, at first be small:  a group here and a group there, the best men of all countries—­England, France, Germany, America—­influencing by their ideas finally the great mass.  To say, as so many do in this matter:  “Let other nations do it first” is, of course, to condemn us all to impotence—­for the other nations use the same language.  To ask that one group of forty