test of how they fight.  The German victory of forty years ago has produced not only an astonishing expansion, industrial as well as political of Germany, but has (most disastrously, as I think) infected Europe with German ideas, especially with the idea that you make a nation strong by making its people behave like cattle.  God send that I may live to see the day when victorious armies from Gaul shall shatter this illusion, burn up Prussianism with all its Police Regulations, Insurance Acts, Poll Taxes, and insults to the poor, and reassert the Republic.  It will never be done in any other way.

If arbitration is ever to take the place of war, it must be backed by a corresponding array of physical force.  Now the question immediately arises:  Are we prepared to arm any International Tribunal with any such powers?  Personally, I am not....  Turn back some fifty years to the great struggle for the emancipation of Italy.  Suppose that a Hague Tribunal had then been in existence, armed with coercive powers.  The dispute between Austria and Sardinia must have been referred to that tribunal.  That tribunal must have been guided by existing treaties.  The Treaty of Vienna was perhaps the most authoritative ever entered into by European Powers.  By that treaty, Venice and Lombardy were unquestionably assigned to Austria.  A just tribunal administering international law must have decided in favour of Austria, and have used the whole armed force of Europe to coerce Italy into submission.  Are those Pacifists, who try at the same time to be Democrats, prepared to acquiesce in such a conclusion?  Personally, I am not.

I replied as follows: 

     Mr. Cecil Chesterton says that the question which I have raised is
     this:  “Should usurers go to war?”

That, of course, is not true.  I have never, even by implication, put such a problem, and there is nothing in the article which he criticises, nor in any other statement of my own, that justifies it.  What I have asked is whether peoples should go to war.

I should have thought it was pretty obvious that, whatever happens, usurers do not go to war:  the peoples go to war, and the peoples pay, and the whole question is whether they should go on making war and paying for it.  Mr. Chesterton says that if they are wise they will; I say that if they are wise they will not.

I have attempted to show that the prosperity of peoples—­by which, of course, one means the diminution of poverty, better houses, soap and water, healthy children, lives prolonged, conditions sufficiently good to ensure leisure and family affection, fuller and completer lives generally—­is not secured by fighting one another, but by co-operation and labour, by a better organisation of society, by improved human relationship, which, of course, can only come of better understanding of the conditions of that relationship, which better understanding means