Russia, for instance, has nearly five times the population and very many times the area of France; but one may doubt whether even a Russian would assert that Russian influence is five or ten times greater than that of France; still less that the world yielded him in any sense a proportionately greater deference than it yields the Frenchman.  The extent to which the greatest power can impose itself by bayonets is very limited in area and depth.  All the might of the Prussian Army cannot compel the children of Poland or of Lorraine to say their prayers in German; it cannot compel the housewives of Switzerland or Paraguay or of any other little State that has not a battleship to its name to buy German saucepans if so be they do not desire to.  There are so many other things necessary to render political or military force effective, and there are so many that can offset it altogether.

We see these forces at work around us every day accomplishing miracles, doing things which a thousand years of fighting was never able to do—­and then say serenely that they are mere “theories.”  Why do Catholic powers no longer execute heretics?  They have a perfect right—­even in international law—­to do so.  What is it that protects the heretic in Catholic countries?  The police?  But the main business of the police and the army used to be to hunt him down.  What is controlling the police and the army?

By some sort of process there has been an increasing intuitive recognition of a certain code which we realize to be necessary for a decent society.  It has come to be a sanction much stronger than the sanction of law, much more effective than the sanction of military force.  During the German advance on Paris in August last I happened to be present at a French family conference.  Stories of the incredible cruelties and ferocity of the Germans were circulating in the Northern Department, where I happened to be staying.

Every one was in a condition of panic, and two Frenchmen, fathers of families, were seeing red at the story of all these barbarities.  But they had to decide—­and the thing was discussed at a little family conference—­where they should send their wives and children.  And one of these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the German barbarian, said quite naively and with no sense of irony or paradox:  “Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all right.”  His instinct, of course, was perfectly just.  The German “savage” had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute power in Brussels, and so far as we know, not a child or a woman has been injured.