corruption which pervades the various parties in all the modern States—­the commercial briberies, the lies of the Press, the poses and prevarications of Diplomats and Ministers—­one cannot but realize the great probability that the private advantage of individuals or classes has been (in the present case) a prevailing instigation.  The fact that in Britain two influential and honourable Cabinet Ministers resigned at once on the declaration of war (a fact upon which the Press has been curiously silent) cannot but “give one to think.”  One cannot but realize that the fighting men in all these nations are the pawns and counters of a game which is being played for the benefit—­or supposed benefit—­of certain classes; that public opinion is a huge millstream which has to be engineered; that the Press is a channel for its direction, and Money the secret power which commands the situation.

The fact is sad, but it must be faced.  And the facing of it leads inevitably to the question, “How, then, can Healing ever come?” If (it will be said) the origin of wars is in the diseased condition of the nations, what prospect is there of their ever ceasing?  And one sees at once that the prospect is not immediate.  One sees at once that Peace Societies and Nobel Prizes and Hague Tribunals and reforms of the Diplomatic Service and democratic control of Foreign Secretaries and Quaker and Tolstoyan preachments—­though all these things may be good in their way—­will never bring us swiftly to the realization of peace.  The roots of the Tree of Life lie deeper.

We have seen it a dozen times in the foregoing pages.  Only when the nations cease to be diseased in themselves will they cease fighting with each other.  And the disease of the modern nations is the disease of disunity—­not, as I have already said, the mere existence of variety of occupation and habit, for that is perfectly natural and healthy, but the disease by which one class preys upon another and upon the nation—­the disease of parasitism and selfish domination.  The health of a people consists in that people’s real unity, the organic life by which each section contributes freely and generously to the welfare of the whole, identifies itself with that welfare, and holds it a dishonour to snatch for itself the life which should belong to all.  A nation which realized that kind of life would be powerful and healthy beyond words; it would not only be splendidly glad and prosperous and unassailable in itself, but it would inevitably infect all other nations with whom it had dealings with the same principle.  Having the Tree of Life well rooted within its own garden, its leaves and fruit and all its acts and expressions would be for the healing of the peoples around.  But a nation divided against itself by parasitic and self-exalting cliques and sections could never stand.  It could never be healthy.  No armaments nor ingenuity of science and organization could save it, and even though the form of its institutions were democratic, if the reality of Democracy were not there, its peace crusades and prizes and sentimental Conferences and Christianities would be of little avail.