“Therefore, again, natural selection has picked out what we call Morality for survival in the social world.  The whole further progress of mankind would seem to hang upon the possibility that we can find a way to limit and, if possible, to terminate wars between nations, for only in that contingency can we hope to develop a social system in which a supreme efficiency with a maximum of individual liberty can be combined upon a working basis.”

Application of the Facts.

“These are incontrovertible facts, and they find their application to the existing European situation in various ways, the most important of which will appear in the discovery that, valuable as conventions and covenants of nation with nation may be, and intolerable as any violation of them surely is, we cannot hope for general and unfailing observance of them until the feeling of mankind and the whole attitude of the world in respect to international as well as private conduct shall be that the covenants and conventions shall become, in a degree, unnecessary.

“Already it is apparent that the entire world, including the peoples of the nations at war as well as the peoples of the nations remaining happily at peace, have, begun to think these thoughts and reflect upon their momentous importance.

“Shocked and stunned as never before by a calamity for which we find no measure in past human experience, mankind is bound to take at this moment a more sober view, a broader and more rational view, of the problems of responsibility and collective conduct than it hitherto has been able even to attempt.

“The world is sure to ask what things make for sobriety of judgment and integrity of purpose.  It is sure in future more carefully to weigh relative values, and will be disposed to count as unimportant many things for which hitherto the armed men of nations have rushed into war.

“In a word, this war has made the whole world think as no one thing ever has made it think before, and, after all, it is upon the habit of thought that we must depend for all rational progress.

“Other wars and other great events have fostered sentiment, much of which has been hopeful and useful; they have accomplished far-reaching economic changes, many of them necessary.

“But the reactions of this war will surely go beyond all previous experience.  They already are and must be, in a far greater measure, profoundly intellectual, and one of the consequences of this fact inevitably will be the broadening and deepening of the democratic current.

“When peace returns it will be seen that democracy has received a hitherto unimagined impetus.  Then it will be understood that democracy, in one of its most important aspects, is popular thinking, that it is the widest possible extension of the sense of responsibility.

“A democratic world will be, all in all, a peace-loving world.

“We may confidently expect far-reaching changes in the internal political organization of the nations now involved.  In every nation of Europe the people are asking:  What, after all, is this conflict all about?