the neutrality of Belgium (which Britain was bound by treaty to defend), on the understanding that Belgium should be reinstated after she had served her purpose, if she had offered no resistance; Belgium, be it noted, being bound in honour to offer resistance by the very treaty which Germany proposed to violate; and (b) that after France had been humiliated and beaten to the earth for the crime of possessing territories which Germany coveted, she should be restored to independence, and Germany should be content to annex her 5,000,000 square miles of colonies.  In return for this undertaking Britain was to be—­allowed to hold aloof from the war, and await her turn.

There is no getting over these facts.  The aim of Germany had come to be nothing less than world-supremacy.  The destiny of the whole globe was to be put to the test.  Surely this was the very insanity of megalomania.

X

What of the Night?

The gigantic conflict into which the ambitions of Germany have plunged the world is the most tremendous event in human history, not merely because of the vast forces engaged, and the appalling volume of suffering which has resulted from it, but still more because of the magnitude of the principles for which it is being fought.  It is a war to secure the right of communities which are linked together by the national spirit to determine their own destinies; it is a war to maintain the principles of humanity, the sanctity of formal undertakings between states, and the possibility of the co-operation of free peoples in the creation of a new and better world-order; it is a war between two principles of government, the principle of military autocracy and the principle of self-government.  With all these aspects of the mighty struggle we are not here immediately concerned, though they have an intimate bearing upon our main theme:  some of them have been analysed elsewhere. [Footnote:  In Nationalism and Internationalism and in National Self-Government.] But what does concern us most directly, and what makes this war the culmination of the long story which we have endeavoured to survey, is that this is a war in which, as in no earlier war, the whole fate and future of the now unified world is at stake.  For just because the world is now, as never before, an indissoluble economic and political unity, the challenge of Germany, whatever view we may take of the immediate aims of the German state, inevitably raises the whole question of the principles upon which this unified world, unified by the victory of European civilisation, is to be in future directed.  And the whole world knows, if vaguely, that these vast issues are at stake, and that this is no merely European conflict.  That is why we see arrayed upon the fields of battle not only French, British, Russian, Italian, Serbian, Belgian, Rumanian, Greek and Portuguese soldiers, but Canadians, Australians,