for a year.  Now there is no military force on earth, nor likely to be, strong enough to prevent America from treating these agreements as Germany has just treated the 1839 Treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium.  Therefore the Militarists declare that the agreements are not worth the scraps of paper they are written on.  They always will footle in this way.  They might as well say that because there are crimes which men can commit with legal impunity in spite of our haphazard criminal codes, men always do commit them.  No doubt nations will do what it is to their interest to do.  But because there is in every nation a set of noisy moral imbeciles who cannot see that nations have an overwhelming interest in creating and maintaining a tradition of international good faith, and honouring their promissory notes as scrupulously as the moral imbeciles pay their silly gambling debts and fight their foolish duels, we are not, I presume, going to discard every international guarantee except the howitzer.  Why, the very Prussian Militarists themselves are reviling us for doing what their own Militarist preachers assumed as a matter of course that we should do:  that is, attack Prussia without regard to the interests of European civilization when we caught her at a disadvantage between France and Russia.  But we should have been ashamed to do that if she had not, by assuming that there was no such thing as shame (alias conscience), terrified herself into attacking France and Belgium, when, of course, we were immediately ashamed not to defend them.  This idiotic ignoring of the highest energies of the human soul, without the strenuous pressure of which the fabric of civilization—­German civilization perhaps most of all—­could not hold together for a single day, should really be treated in the asylums of Europe, not on battlefields.

I conclude that we might all very well make a beginning by pledging ourselves as America has done to The Hague tribunal not to take up arms in any cause that has been less than a year under arbitration, and to treat any western Power refusing this pledge as an unpopular and suspicious member of the European club.  To break such a pledge would be an act of brigandage; and the need for suppressing brigandage cannot be regarded as an open question.

The Security Will o’ the Wisp.

It will be observed that I propose no guarantee of absolute security.  Not being a sufferer from delirium tremens I can live without it.  Security is no doubt the Militarists’ most seductive bait to catch the coward’s vote.  But their method makes security impossible, They undertook to secure the English in Egypt from an imaginary Islam rising by the Denshawai Horror, as a result of which nobody has ventured to suggest that we should trust the Egyptian army in this conflict, though India, having learnt from Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald that there are really anti-Militarists in England