the hammer upon the anvil of India.

Prince Bülow's words, and the theory of policy underlying them, really go
to the root of the whole trouble in European politics. They explain
the Balance of Power, the competition in armaments, the belief in the
inevitability and the moral value of war, and all those common European
shibboleths which seem so inexplicable to citizens of the more
modern-minded States and communities of the world. Why should Germany and
Austria arm against France and Russia when Canada does not arm against
the United States? Why should a Balance of Power be necessary to the
maintenance of European Peace when we do not consider the preponderance
of a single Power, such as the United States in North, Central and South
America, or Great Britain in the Pacific or Southern Asia dangerous to the
peace of the whole world? Why, finally, to press Prince Bülow's logic home,
if members of different nationalities cannot live side by side without
playing the game of Hammer and Anvil together, are not the English spending
the whole of their energy fighting the Welsh, the Scotch, and the Irish in
the United Kingdom, the Dutch in South Africa, and the French in Canada,
not to speak of the Jews in every part of the British Empire? The fact is
that the statesmen of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and of Russia also, have
missed the chief lesson of recent history and politics: that in the growing
complexity of world-relations power is falling more and more, of necessity,
into the hands of States which are not Nations but Commonwealths of
Nations, States composed, like the British Empire and the United States, of
a variety of nationalities and "cultures," living peacefully, each with its
own institutions, under a single law and a single central government.

But the time is not ripe yet for a Commonwealth of Europe. The peoples of
Europe have yet to win their liberties before they can be free to dream of
a United States of Europe. So long as the Emperors and statesmen of Central