their lives have been caught. But they would take up such a lead with
the utmost vigor and enthusiasm.

No one who has followed the diplomatic history of the negotiations that
led to this war can doubt that if there had been no secret treaties, but
instead open proclamations of intentions and an open discussion of
international ambitions, the world might have been saved this
catastrophe. It is no condemnation of any person or country to say this.
The reserves and hesitations and misconceptions that led Germany to
suppose that England would wait patiently while France and Belgium were
destroyed before she herself received attention were unavoidable under
the existing diplomatic conditions. What reasonable people have to do
now is not to recriminate over the details in the working of a system
that we can now all of us perceive to be hopelessly bad, but to do our
utmost in this season of opportunity to destroy the obscurities in which
fresh mischief may fester for our children.

Let me restate this section in slightly different words. At the end of
this war there must be a congress of adjustment. The suggestion in this
section is to make this congress permanent, to use it as a clearing
house of international relationships and to abolish embassies.

Instead of there being a British Ambassador, for example, at every
sufficiently important capital, and an ambassador from every important
State in London, and a complex tangle of relationships, misstatements,
and misconceptions arising from the ill-co-ordinated activities of this
double system of agents, it is proposed to send one or several
ambassadors to some central point, such as The Hague, to meet there all
the ambassadors of all the significant States in the world and to deal
with international questions with a novel frankness in a collective