But I am very certain that the defiance to Prussia did not come from a majority of Belgians.  It came from Belgium one and indivisible—­atheists, priests, princes of the blood, Frenchified shopkeepers, Flemish boors, men, women, and children, and the sooner we understand that this sort of thing can happen the better for us.  For it is this spontaneous spiritual fellowship of communities under certain conditions to which the four or five most independent minds of Europe willingly bear witness to-day.

But is there no exception:  is there no one faithful among the unfaithful found?  Is no great Socialist politician still untouched by the patriotism of the vulgar?  Why, yes; the rugged Ramsay MacDonald, scarred with a hundred savage fights against the capitalist parties, still lifts up his horny hand for peace.  What further need have we of witnesses?  I, for my part, am quite satisfied, and do not doubt that Mr. MacDonald will be as industrious in damping down democracy in this form as in every other.

A REAL DANGER

Heaven forbid that I should once more wade in those swamps of logomachy and tautology in which the old guard of the Determinists still seem to be floundering.  The question of Fate and Free Will can never attain to a conclusion, though it may attain to a conviction.  The shortest philosophic summary is that both cause and choice are ultimate ideas within us, and that if one man denies choice because it seems contrary to cause, the other man has quite as much right to deny cause because it seems contrary to choice.  The shortest ethical summary is that Determinism either affects conduct or it does not.  If it does not, it is morally not worth preaching; if it does, it must affect conduct in the direction of impotence and submission.  A writer in the “Clarion” says that the reformer cannot help trying to reform, nor the Conservative help his Conservatism.  But suppose the reformer tries to reform the Conservative and turn him into another reformer?  Either he can, in which case Determinism has made no difference at all, or he can’t, in which case it can only have made reformers more hopeless and Conservatives more obstinate.  And the shortest practical and political summary is that working men, most probably, will soon be much too busy using their Free Will to stop to prove that they have got it.  Nevertheless, I like to watch the Determinist in the “Clarion” Cockpit every week, as busy as a squirrel—­in a cage.  But being myself a squirrel (leaping lightly from bough to bough) and preferring the form of activity which occasionally ends in nuts, I should not intervene in the matter even indirectly, except upon a practical point.  And the point I have in mind is practical to the extent of deadly peril.  It is another of the numerous new ways in which the restless rich, now walking the world with an awful insomnia, may manage to catch us napping.