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