it had not the sense to see that England, whether morally bound to or
not, was certain, at all costs, to fight in defence of Belgium's
neutrality. So true it is that without the understanding which comes
from the heart, all the paraphernalia of science and learning and the
material results of organization and discipline are of little good.

But however we choose to apportion the blame or at least the
responsibility for the situation among the various Governments
concerned, the main point and the main lesson of it all is to see that
any such apportionment does not much matter! As long as our Governments
are constructed as they are--that is, on the principle of representing,
not the real masses of their respective peoples, but the interests of
certain classes, especially the commercial, financial, and military
classes--so long will such wars be inevitable. The real blame rests,
not with the particular Foreign policy of this or that country but with
the fact that Europe, already rising through her mass-peoples into a far
finer and more human and spiritual life than of old, still lies bound in
the chains of an almost Feudal social order.

When the great German mass-peoples find this out, when they discover the
little rift in the lute which now separates their real quality from the
false standards of their own dominant military and commercial folk, then
their true rôle in the world will begin, and a glorious rôle it will be.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] "A German," he said, "could not live long in the atmosphere of
England--an atmosphere of sham, prudery, conventionality, and
hollowness"! See article on "Treitschke," by W.H. Dawson, in the
_Nineteenth Century_ for January 1915.