here only to carry home the fact that the ideas of sovereign isolation
and detachment that were perfectly valid in 1900, the self-sufficient
empire, Imperial Zollverein and all that stuff, and damn the foreigner!
are now, because of the enormous changes in range of action and facility
of locomotion that have been going on, almost as wild--or would be if we
were not so fatally accustomed to them--and quite as dangerous, as the
idea of setting up a free and sovereign state in the Isle of Dogs. All
the European empires are becoming vulnerable at every point. Surely the
moral is obvious. The only wise course before the allied European powers
now is to put their national conceit in their pockets and to combine to
lock up their foreign policy, their trade interests, and all their
imperial and international interests into a League so big as to be able
to withstand the most sudden and treacherous of blows. And surely the
only completely safe course for them and mankind--hard and nearly
impossible though it may seem at the present juncture--is for them to
lock up into one unity with a democratized Germany and with all the
other states of the earth into one peace-maintaining League.

If the reader will revert again to his atlas he will see very clearly
that a strongly consolidated League of Free Nations, even if it
consisted only of our present allies, would in itself form a
combination with so close a system of communication about the world, and
so great an economic advantage, that in the long run it could oblige
Germany and the rest of the world to come in to its council. Divided the
Oceanic Allies are, to speak plainly, geographical rags and nakedness;
united they are a world. To set about organizing that League now, with
its necessary repudiation on the part of Britain, France, and Italy, of
a selfish and, it must be remembered in the light of these things I have
but hinted at here, a _now hopelessly unpracticable imperialism_, would,
I am convinced, lead quite rapidly to a great change of heart in Germany