VI

THE WAR AIMS OF THE WESTERN ALLIES


Here, quite compactly, is the plain statement of the essential cause and
process of the war to which I would like to see the Allied Foreign
Offices subscribe, and which I would like to have placed plainly before
the German mind. It embodies much that has been learnt and thought out
since this war began, and I think it is much truer and more fundamental
than that mere raging against German "militarism," upon which our
politicians and press still so largely subsist.

The enormous development of war methods and war material within the last
fifty years has made war so horrible and destructive that it is
impossible to contemplate a future for mankind from which it has not
been eliminated; the increased facilities of railway, steamship,
automobile travel and air navigation have brought mankind so close
together that ordinary human life is no longer safe anywhere in the
boundaries of the little states in which it was once secure. In some
fashion it is now necessary to achieve sufficient human unity to
establish a world peace and save the future of mankind.

In one or other of two ways only is that unification possible. Either
men may set up a common league to keep the peace of the earth, or one
state must ultimately become so great and powerful as to repeat for all
the world what Rome did for Europe two thousand years ago. Either we
must have human unity by a league of existing states or by an Imperial
Conquest. The former is now the declared Aim of our country and its