they were very "advanced" ideas in 1914, very Utopian. Against them was
an unbroken mass of mental habit and public tradition. While we talked
of this "war to end war," the diplomatists of the Powers allied against
Germany were busily spinning a disastrous web of greedy secret treaties,
were answering aggression by schemes of aggression, were seeing in the
treacherous violence of Germany only the justification for
countervailing evil acts. To them it was only another war for
"ascendancy." That was three years and a half ago, and since then this
"war of ideas" has gone on to a phase few of us had dared hope for in
those opening days. The Russian revolution put a match to that pile of
secret treaties and indeed to all the imperialist plans of the Allies;
in the end it will burn them all. The greatest of the Western Allies is
now the United States of America, and the Americans have come into this
war simply for an idea. Three years and a half ago a few of us were
saying this was a war against the idea of imperialism, not German
imperialism merely, but British and French and Russian imperialism, and
we were saying this not because it was so, but because we hoped to see
it become so. To-day we can say so, because now it is so.

In those days, moreover, we said this is the "war to end war," and we
still did not know clearly how. We thought in terms of treaties and
alliances. It is largely the detachment and practical genius of the
great English-speaking nation across the Atlantic that has carried the
world on beyond and replaced that phrase by the phrase, "The League of
Nations," a phrase suggesting plainly the organization of a sufficient
instrument by which war may be ended for ever. In 1913 talk of a World
League of Nations would have seemed, to the extremest pitch, "Utopian."
To-day the project has an air not only of being so practicable, but of
being so urgent and necessary and so manifestly the sane thing before
mankind that not to be busied upon it, not to be making it more widely