of understanding foreign policy.  The masses understand it now.  They understand that in spite of very earnest efforts in various Cabinets, the ruling classes have failed to avert the most terrible disaster in history.  The masses will say to themselves, ’At any rate we couldn’t have done worse than that.’  The masses know that if the war decision had been openly submitted to a representative German chamber, instead of being taken in concealment and amid disgusting chicane, no war would have occurred.  It is absolutely certain that the triumph of democracy, and nothing else, will end war as an institution.  War will be ended when the Foreign Offices are subjected to popular control.  That popular control is coming.”—­Arnold Bennett in the “Daily News,” October 15, 1914.

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THE FUTURE SETTLEMENT.

Let us turn, then, from the past to the future and ask, first, what the governmental mind, left to itself, is likely to make of Europe when the war is finished; secondly, what we, on our part, want and mean to make of it.  What the diplomatists will make of it is written large on every page of history.  Again and again they have “settled” Europe, and always in such a way as to leave roots for the growth of new wars.  For always they have settled it from the point of view of States, instead of from the point of view of human life.  How one “Power” may be aggrandized and another curtailed, how the spoils may be divided among the victors, how the “balance” may be arranged—­these kinds of considerations and these alone have influenced their minds.  The desires of peoples, the interests of peoples, that sense of nationality which is as real a thing as the State is fictitious—­to all that they have been indifferent....

What can be foreseen with certainty is, that if the peace is to be made by the same men who made the war it will be so made that in another quarter of a century there will be another war on as gigantic a scale....

When this war is over Europe might be settled, then and there, if the peoples so willed it and made their will effective, in such a way that there would never again be a European War....

First, the whole idea of aggrandizing one nation and humiliating another must be set aside....  Secondly, in rearranging the boundaries of States, one point, and one only, must be kept in mind:  to give to all peoples suffering and protesting under alien rule the right to decide whether they will become an autonomous unit, or will join the political system of some other nation....  Let no community be coerced under British rule that wants to be self-governing.  We have had the courage, though late, to apply this principle to South Africa and Ireland.  There remains our greatest act of courage and wisdom—­to apply it to India.—­G.  Lowes Dickinson, “The War and the Way Out,” pp. 34 et seq.

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