and industry, and not by arms.  To us, too, it is clear, and will be one day to the Germanic Powers, that the British Empire, the largest political aggregate on the globe, is essentially a league of free peoples, under no compulsion from the centre, but responsive to attack upon their power or liberty by any third party, strong from their general contentment with the conditions and institutions of their life, and not through any systematic regulations imposed from above.  Even India and other protected states and dominions, though not yet self-governing, are moving steadily in the direction of responsibility and of willing association with the British Empire or Commonwealth as a whole.

Such is the much vaster community of nations which has succeeded to the Western Europe of the sixteenth century; and no mention has been made of the place of Russia or the countries still further east.  The picture does not suggest a welter of conflicting passions and ambition throughout the world.  On the whole a mass of men and women labouring with fair contentment at their daily task, not concerned that their state or nation should extend its boundaries, least of all that it should provoke attack; little conscious of the historic debt of nations to one another, but wishing well to others except when they cross the path of a personal desire; gaining rapidly more sense of actual community among living men, but hardly realizing yet how man’s power has been built up in the past and how infinitely it might be advanced and the world improved by harmony and steadily directed efforts in the future.  That the sense of brotherhood has gained ground in the world, especially since the middle of the eighteenth century, is certain.  Voices of protest reach us even from Germany through the storm of hatred.  But the vague sympathy, the desire for peace and shrinking from the horrors of war need to be enlightened, to have a reasoned basis in the belief that all nations, and especially those of the vanguard, are partners in a common work and essential one to another, above all, perhaps, to have institutions which tend to co-operation and make a sudden and disastrous breach as difficult as possible.  Many of these instruments of peace were being forged when the war broke out.  Many of the most profound ties between nations are not understood or are kept in the background by nationalist teachers or a nationalist press.

Of all the modern steps towards international unity, the most indisputable, the most firmly based and furthest-reaching, is science, and the various applications of science, both in promoting intercourse between different parts of the world and in alleviating suffering and strengthening and illuminating human life.  The more prominence, therefore, that we can secure for the growth of science in the teaching of history, the larger place humanity, or the united mind of mankind, will take in the moving picture which every one of us has, more or less full