It is this rather hopeless, inert, pseudo-sage mass of unbelievers who render possible the continuation of war dangers.  They give scope for the activities of the evil minority which hates, which lives by pride and grim satisfactions, and which is therefore anxious to have more war and more.  And it is these inert half-willed people who will obstruct the disentanglement of the settlement from diplomatic hands.  “What do we know about the nuance of such things?” they will ask, with that laziness that apes modesty.  It is they who will complain when we seek to buy out the armaments people.  Probably all the private armament firms in the world could be bought up for seventy million pounds, but the unbelievers will shake their heads and say:  “Then there will only be something else instead.”

Yet there are many ungauged forces on the side of the greater settlement.  Cynicism is never more than a half-truth, and because man is imperfect it does not follow that he must be futile.  Russia is a land of strange silences, but it is manifest that whatever the innermost quality of the Czar may be, he is no clap-trap vulgar conqueror of the Wilhelm-Napoleon pattern.  He began his reign, and he may yet crown his reign, with an attempt to establish peace on a newer, broader foundation.  His religion, it would seem, is his master and not his servant.  There has been no Russian Bernhardi.

And there has been much in America, much said and much done, since the war broke out that has surprised the world.  I may confess for myself, and I believe that I shall speak for many other Europeans in this matter, that what we feared most in the United States was levity.  We expected mere excitement, violent fluctuations of opinion, a confused irresponsibility, and possibly mischievous and disastrous interventions.  It is no good hiding an open secret.  We judged America by the peace headline.  It is time we began to offer our apologies to America and democracy.  The result of reading endless various American newspapers and articles, of following the actions of the American Government, of talking to representative Americans, is to realize the existence of a very clear, strong national mentality, a firm, self-controlled, collective will, far more considerable in its totality than the world has ever seen before.

We thought the United States would be sentimentally patriotic and irresponsible, that they would behave as though the New World was, indeed, a separate planet, and as though they had neither duties nor brotherhood in Europe.  It is quite clear, on the contrary, that the people of the United States consider this war as their affair also, and that they have the keenest sense of their responsibility for the general welfare of mankind.