To return to the educational point from which we started, we can see now another line of approach to unity in training our own minds and those of others.  In some respects it is a surer way, though less direct.  When studying the political life and history of other nations, even if we do so deliberately in order to find out what we owe to them, we are bound to be arrested here and there by things that we do not like, even among our best friends.  The French may seem frivolous or less self-restrained than ourselves; they have had their sanguinary outbursts of revolution.  Where they have impeded our own movements, as in colonization, we are the more conscious of their faults.  Or we may feel that Americans have their materialistic vein.  And so on.  This with our best friends, who, no doubt, feel the same about us.  But on the other line of approach, the study of the things on which men now agree without question, which they have built up steadily with co-operating hands, the mental effect is quite different.  The opening vista leads us on, with growing admiration and confidence in the unbreakable solidarity of mankind.  We know that Newton who completes Galileo, Maxwell who follows Laplace, Helmholtz who uses the results of Joule, can have no conflicting jealousies.  Here quite obviously and indisputably all are fellow-workers, and before the greatness of their work the passions of rival domination in material things, the differences of national taste and habit, the quarrels of the past or the future, appear contemptible and insignificant.

They are not insignificant, as we know to our cost.  But by dwelling on the things of greater moment and solidity, we train ourselves and others to reduce the elements of discord to their true proportion and allay the storm.  The progress of a united mankind is thus an ideal, slowly realizing itself in time.  But its realization is quickened and rendered wider and more beneficent, the more we think of it and believe in it.  A blow comes, such as the present war, and seems to shatter the whole picture which so many hands have limned and so many eyes admired.  Those who have followed its growth through the ages, know well that no such blow can finally destroy a living growth or even go very deep in injuring its features.

It is surely a commonplace that in proportion as western populations, from statesmen downwards, are animated by sentiments of comradeship which arise from considerations such as these, the danger of war must diminish and the possibilities of fruitful common action increase.  Yet there is probably no country in Europe where any deliberate attempt is made to instruct the people in ideas which would most surely broaden their sympathies and lay the foundations of peace.