formed themselves into opposing groups; and each of the groups armed
feverishly against the other, fearful lest, by any change in the diplomatic
or political situation, they might be caught unawares and suffer loss.
Thus, it ought not to have surprised us that finally, through the accident
of a royal murder, the spark should be fired and the explosion ensue,
and that merchants and manufacturers, propagandists and philanthropists,
scholars and scientists, should find the ground shaken beneath their
feet and the projects patiently built up through years of international
co-operation shattered by the events of a few days.

Now that the war has come it is easy to see that they were mistaken. They
had built up the structure of a cosmopolitan society without looking to
the foundations. The economic activities of mankind have indeed brought a
World-Society and a World-Industry into being; but its political analogue,
a World-State, can only be formed, not through the co-operation of
individuals or groups of individuals, but through the union of nations and
the federation of national governments. The first task of our time for
Europe, as we shall try to show in the next chapter, is to lay firm the
foundations of those nations by carrying to victory the twin principles of
Nationality and Democracy--to secure that the peoples of Europe shall be
enabled to have governments corresponding to their national needs and
responsible to their own control, and to build up, under the care
and protection of those governments, the social institutions and the
civilisation of their choice. So long as there are peoples in Europe under
alien governments, curtailed in the use of their own language,[1] in the
propagation of their literature and ideas, in their social intercourse, in
their corporate life, in all that we in Great Britain understand by civil
liberty, so long will there be men who will mock at the very idea of
international peace, and look forward to war, not as an outworn instrument
of a barbarous age, but as a means to national freedom and self-expression.