interrogate themselves, to express their vocation, and to assure its
accomplishment by an alliance capable of substituting itself for the
absolute league which now reigns supreme.

"If England persist in maintaining a neutral, passive, selfish part, she
will have to expiate it. A European transformation is inevitable. When it
shall take place, when the struggle shall burst forth at twenty places at
once, when the old combat between fact and right is decided, the peoples
will remember that England stood by, an inert, immovable, sceptical witness
of their sufferings and efforts. The nation must rouse herself and shake
off the torpor of her government. She must learn that we have arrived at
one of those supreme moments in which one world is destroyed and another
is to be created; in which, for the sake of others and for her own, it is
necessary to adopt a new policy."

England to-day has adopted this "new policy"; she has responded to
Mazzini's appeal by stepping into the arena and declaring herself ready to
take part in "the organisation of the European task"; her sons are dying on
the Continent in defence of the principle of nationality, in support of
the rights of other nations to that liberty which her insular position has
secured for herself for many centuries, the liberty "to associate freely,
without obstacles, without foreign domination, in order to elaborate and
express their idea." She is fighting, moreover, not only on behalf of the
threatened freedom of Belgium, France, and Serbia, on behalf of the
unborn freedom of Poland, Alsace-Lorraine, and the subject races of the
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, but also on her own behalf. It is not
merely that she recognises that her Empire is in danger; she recognises
also that she is unable to work out her own salvation, unable to carry on
her industrial development and her schemes for the betterment of her people
in security, while the Continent at her doors remains in constant peril