attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap disaster upon

disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether.

The remaining interest of this book now is the sustained validity

of this thesis and the discussion of the possible ending of war

on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity to

break out among the rulers ofstates and the leaders of mankind.

I have represented the native common sense of the Frenchmind and

of the English mind-for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be

'God's Englishman'-leading mankind towards a bold and resolute

effort of salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the

school book footnotes say, compare to-day's newspaper. Instead

of a frank and honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman

meeting German and Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences

and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in

Geneva at the other end of Switzerland a poor little League of

(Allied) Nations (excluding the United States, Russia, and most

of the 'subject peoples' of the world), meeting obscurely amidst

a world-wide disregard to make impotent gestures at the leading

problems of the debacle. Either the disaster has not been vast

enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict the

necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion.

Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity

andthought that increase would go on for ever, so now it would

seem the world isgrowing accustomed to a steady glide towards

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