cause of the war.  The cause of the war must be sought in the slow development of forces which can be traced back for years, and even for centuries.  It was comparatively futile for Parliament to discuss whether this or that despatch or telegram was wise or unwise; the real questions to be asked were—­What produced the crowds in Vienna surging round the Serbian Legation at the end of June, and round the Russian Embassy at the end of July; what produced the slow, patient sympathy for the Balkan peoples and hatred for Austria in the heart of millions of Russian peasants; what produced the Servian nationalist movement; above all, what produced that strange sentiment throughout Germany which could honestly regard the invasion of Belgium as justifiable?  To answer those questions we have to estimate the force of the most heterogeneous factors in history:—­for instance, on the one hand, the slow break-up of the Turkish Empire, extending over more than two centuries, which has allowed the cauldron of the Slavonic Balkan peoples to boil up through the thin crust of foreign domination; and on the other hand, the gradual development of the whole system of German State education, and the character of the German newspapers, which have turned the eyes of German public opinion in upon itself and have excluded from public teaching and from the formation of thought every breath of fresh air from the outside world, until at last German public sentiment, through extreme and incessant self-contemplation, has lost the calmness and simplicity which were once the strength of the German character.  No man can allot the responsibility for these things, spreading as they do over generations; but assuredly the responsibility does not rest with the half-dozen Ministers for Foreign Affairs who were in power in July 1914.

If we are right in what we have said above, then the phrase “the democratization of foreign policy” takes on a new meaning.  It does not mean merely the introduction into foreign policy of any set of democratic institutions; it means the realisation by both statesmen and people that foreign policy is already in its essence a fundamentally democratic thing, and that the success or failure of any line of action depends not upon the desires of politicians but upon the mighty forces which move and determine the life of peoples.

At present the statesmen do not realise this sufficiently, and hence comes much futile and aimless talking and writing among politicians who fancy that what they say or write to each other in their studies can determine the course of the world.  In order to enable diplomatists to discharge all the duties we have already enumerated under the heading of “the estimation of national forces,” they need to have a better training and a fuller knowledge of the life and social movements both of their own country and of foreign countries.  The Royal Commission on the Civil Service was still considering, when war broke out, how this could be