or people or interest in the shipping of the world.  The plain right thing is a world shipping control, as impartial as the Postal Union.  What right and reason and the welfare of coming generations demand in Poland is a unified and autonomous Poland, with Cracow, Danzig, and Posen brought into the same Polish-speaking ring-fence with Warsaw.  What everyone who has looked into the Albanian question desires is that the Albanians shall pasture their flocks and market their sheepskins in peace, free of Serbian control.  In every country at present at war, the desire of the majority of people is for a non-contentious solution that will neither crystallise a triumph nor propitiate an enemy, but which will embody the economic and ethnological and geographical common sense of the matter.  But while the formulae of national belligerence are easy, familiar, blatant, and instantly present, the gentler, greater formulae of that wider and newer world pacifism has still to be generally understood.  It is so much easier to hate and suspect than negotiate generously and patiently; it is so much harder to think than to let go in a shrill storm of hostility.  The rational pacifist is hampered not only by belligerency, but by a sort of malignant extreme pacifism as impatient and silly as the extremest patriotism.

5

I sketch out these ideas of a world pacification from a third-party standpoint, because I find them crystallising out in men’s minds.  I note how men discuss the suggestion that America may play a large part in such a permanent world pacification.  There I end my account rendered.  These things are as much a part of my impression of the war as a shell-burst on the Carso or the yellow trenches at Martinpuich.  But I do not know how opinion is going in America, and I am quite unable to estimate the power of these new ideas I set down, relative to the blind forces of instinct and tradition that move the mass of mankind.  On the whole I believe more in the reason-guided will-power of men than I did in the early half of 1914.  If I am doubtful whether after all this war will “end war,” I think on the other hand it has had such an effect of demonstration that it may start a process of thought and conviction, it may sow the world with organisations and educational movements considerable enough to grapple with an either arrest or prevent the next great war catastrophe.  I am by no means sure even now that this is not the last great war in the experience of men.  I still believe it may be.

The most dangerous thing in the business so far is concerned is the wide disregard of the fact that national economic fighting is bound to cause war, and the almost universal ignorance of the necessity of subjecting shipping and overseas and international trade to some kind of international control.  These two things, restraint of trade and advantage of shipping, are the chief material causes of anger between modern states.  But they would not be in themselves dangerous