Disraeli used to complain of what he called ‘Dutch finance,’ which consists in ’mortgaging the industry of the future to protect property in the present.’  Pitt paid for the great war of a hundred years ago in this manner; after a century we are still groaning under the burden of his loans.  We may hear more of the iniquity of ‘Dutch finance’ when the democracies of the next generation have a chance of repudiating obligations which, as they will say, they did not contract.  However that may be, international rivalry is plainly very bad business; and there are great possibilities in the Hague Tribunal, if, and only if, the signatories to the conference bind themselves to use force against a recalcitrant member.  The conduct of Germany in this war has shown that public opinion is powerless to restrain a nation which feels strong enough to defy it.

Another cause which may give patriots leisure to turn their thoughts away from war’s alarms is that the ‘swarming’ period of the European races is coming to an end.  The unparalleled increase of population in the first three quarters of the 19th century has been followed by a progressive decrease in the birth-rate, which will begin to tell upon social conditions when the reduction in the death-rate, which has hitherto kept pace with it, shall have reached its natural limit.  Europe with a stationary population will be in a much happier condition; and problems of social reform can then be tackled with some hope of success.  Honourable emulation in the arts of life may then take the place of desperate competition and antagonism.  Human lives will begin to have a positive value, and we may even think it fair to honour our saviours more than our destroyers.  The effects of past follies will then soon be effaced; for nations recover much more quickly from wars than from internal disorders.  External injuries are rapidly cured; but ’those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves.’  The greatest obstacle to progress is not man’s inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism.  The true patriot will keep his eye fixed on this, and will dread as the state’s worst enemies those citizens who at the top and bottom of the social scale have no other ambition than to hang on and suck the life-blood of the nation.  Great things may be hoped from the new science of eugenics, when it has passed out of its tentative and experimental stage.

In the distant future we may reasonably hope that patriotism will be a sentiment like the loyalty which binds a man to his public school and university, an affection purged of all rancour and jealousy, a stimulus to all honourable conduct and noble effort, a part of the poetry of life.  It is so already to many of us, and has been so to the noblest Englishmen since we have had a literature.  If Henry V’s speech at Agincourt is the splendid gasconade of a royal freebooter, there is no false ring in the scene where John of Gaunt takes leave of his banished son; nor