Now upon this issue people do not seem to me to be yet thinking very clearly.  It is the exception to find anyone among the peace talkers who really grasps how inseparably the necessity for free access for everyone to natural products, to coal and tropical products, e.g. free shipping at non-discriminating tariffs, and the recognition by a Tribunal of the principle of common welfare in trade matters, is bound up with the ideal of a permanent world peace.  But any peace that does not provide for these things will be merely laying down of the sword in order to take up the cudgel.  And a “peace” that did not rehabilitate industrial Belgium, Poland, and the north of France would call imperatively for the imposition upon the Allies of a system of tariffs in the interests of these countries, and for a bitter economic “war after the war” against Germany.  That restoration is, of course, an implicit condition to any attempt to set up an economic peace in the world.

These things being arranged for the future, it would be further necessary to set up an International Boundary Commission, subject to certain defining conditions agreed upon by the belligerents, to re-draw the map of Europe, Asia, and Africa.  This war does afford an occasion such as the world may never have again of tracing out the “natural map” of mankind, the map that will secure the maximum of homogeneity and the minimum of racial and economic freedom.  All idealistic people hope for a restored Poland.  But it is a childish thing to dream of a contented Poland with Posen still under the Prussian heel, with Cracow cut off, and without a Baltic port.  These claims of Poland to completeness have a higher sanction than the mere give and take of belligerents in congress.

Moreover this International Tribunal, if it was indeed to prevent war, would need also to have power to intervene in the affairs of any country or region in a state of open and manifest disorder, for the protection of foreign travellers and of persons and interests localised in that country but foreign to it.

Such an agreement as I have here sketched out would at once lift international politics out of the bloody and hopeless squalor of the present conflict.  It is, I venture to assert, the peace of the reasonable man in any country whatever.  But it needs the attention of such a disengaged people as the American people to work it out and supply it with—­weight.  It needs putting before the world with some sort of authority greater than its mere entire reasonableness.  Otherwise it will not come before the minds of ordinary men with the effect of a practicable proposition.  I do not see any such plant springing from the European battlefields.  It is America’s supreme opportunity.  And yet it is the common sense of the situation, and the solution that must satisfy a rational German as completely as a rational Frenchman or Englishman.  It has nothing against it but the prejudice against new and entirely novel things.