behind closed doors.  The machinery we are devising will be a state machinery, not a popular one.  All that we ask of you is implicit trust.  You complain of our action in the past.  You have good cause.  You say that the same men are about to determine your future.  Again you are right.  But when you affirm that we are sure to make the like mistakes, you are wrong, and we ask you to take our word for it.  You complain that we are politicians who feel the weight of certain commitments and the fetters of obsolete traditions from which we cannot free ourselves; that we are mainly concerned to protect and further the interests of our respective countries, and that it is inconceivable we should devise an organization which looks above and beyond those interests.  We ask you, are you willing, then, to abandon the heritage of our fathers to the foreigner?’

“That the downtrodden peoples in Austria and Germany have been emancipated is a moral triumph.  But why has the beneficent principle that is said to have inspired the deed been restricted in its application?  Why has the experiment been tried only in the enemies’ countries?  Or are things quite in order everywhere else?  Is there no injustice in other quarters of the globe?  Are there no complaints?  If there be, why are they ignored?  Is it because all acts of oppression are to be perpetuated which do not take place in the enemy’s land?  What about Ireland and about a dozen other countries and peoples?  Are they skeletons not to be touched?

“By debarring the masses from participation in a grandiose scheme, the success of which depends upon their assent, the governments are indirectly but surely encouraging secret combined opposition, and in some cases Bolshevism.  The masses resent being treated as children after having been appealed to as arbiters and rescuers.  For four and a half years it was they who bore the brunt of the war, they who sacrificed their sons and their substance.  In the future it is they to whom the states will look for the further sacrifices in blood and treasure which will be necessary in the struggles which they evidently anticipate.  Well, some of them refuse these sacrifices in advance.  They challenge the right of the governments to retain the power of making war and peace.  That power they are working to get into their own hands and to wield in their own way, or at any rate to have a say in its exercise.  And in order to secure it, some sections of the peoples are making common cause with the socialist revolutionaries, while others have gone the length of Bolshevism.  And that is a serious danger.  The agitation now going on among the people, therefore, starts with a grievance.  The masses have many other grievances besides the one just sketched—­the survivals of the feudal age, the privileges of class, the inequality of opportunity.  And the kernel formed by these is the element of truth and equity which imparts force to all those underground movements, and enables them to subsist and extend.  Error is never dangerous by itself; it is only when it has an admixture of truth that it becomes powerful for evil.  And it seems a thousand pities that the governments, whose own interests are at stake, as well as those of the communities they govern, should go out of their way to provide an explosive element for Bolshevism and its less sinister variants.”