I come home impressed with the fact that Britain has learned more from this war than any other nation, and will probably gain more by that knowledge.  We are all wanting, of course, to know what we shall get out of it, since it was forced upon us; and of course the only gain worth considering—­as many of those to whom its coming has brought home the first glimmerings of social science are beginning to see—­is precisely a newly acquired vision of the art of self-government.  It has been unfortunately necessary—­or perhaps fortunately necessary—­for the great democracies to turn their energies and resources and the inventive ingenuity of their citizens to the organization of armies and indeed of entire populations to the purpose of killing enough Germans to remove democracy’s exterior menace.  The price we pay in human life is appallingly unfortunate.  But the necessity for national organization socializes the nation capable of it; or, to put the matter more truly, if the socializing process had anticipated the war—­as it had in Great Britain—­the ability to complete it under stress is the test of a democratic nation; and hence the test of democracy, since the socializing process becomes international.  Britain has stood the test, even from the old-fashioned militarist point of view, since it is apparent that no democracy can wage a sustained great war unless it is socialized.  After the war she will probably lead all other countries in a sane and scientific liberalization.  The encouraging fact is that not in spite of her liberalism, but because of it, she has met military Germany on her own ground and, to use a vigorous expression, gone her one better.  In 1914, as armies go today, the British Army was a mere handful of men whose officers belonged to a military caste.  Brave men and brave officers, indeed!  But at present it is a war organization of an excellence which the Germans never surpassed.  I have no space to enter into a description of the amazing system, of the network of arteries converging at the channel ports and spreading out until it feeds and clothes every man of those millions, furnishes him with newspapers and tobacco, and gives him the greatest contentment compatible with the conditions under which he has to live.  The number of shells flung at the enemy is only limited by the lives of the guns that fire them.  I should like to tell with what swiftness, under the stress of battle, the wounded are hurried back to the coast and even to England itself.  I may not state the thousands carried on leave every day across the channel and back again—­in spite of submarines.  But I went one day through Saint Omer, with its beautiful church and little blue chateau, past the rest-camps of the big regiments of guards to a seaport on the downs, formerly a quiet little French town, transformed now into an ordered Babel.  The term is paradoxical, but I let it stand.  English, Irish, and Scotch from the British Isles and the ends of the earth mingle there with Indians, Egyptians, and the chattering Mongolians in queer fur caps who work in the bakeries.