The Western world has had its lesson now—the lesson indelibly writ in death: There is no longer room in civilization for despotic Governments. In Germany, in Austria, in the country where despotism most reigns supreme—our ally, Russia—they are doomed in theory, if not as yet in fact.

The Slav is no more by nature the enemy of the Teuton than is the Briton of the Frank. That enmity is a fostered thing of imperial and bureaucratic dreams.

What stands out from all this welter? The ambitious diplomacy of the despotic Powers, in pursuit of so-called “national ideals,” a diplomacy begotten of vicious traditions and the misconceptions of egomania, removed by a ring fence from the people of the nations for whom it professes to speak. An ambitious and cynical diplomacy, battening on the knowledge that it can at almost any time raise for its ends a whirlwind of feeling out of the love men ever have for the land wherein they are born.

It is the divorce of executive power from popular sanction that has made possible this greatest of all the disasters in history. In democratic countries the aggressive faculty is imperceptibly yet continually weakened by the obscure but real link between ministers elect and the people. Only in those countries where, under a cloak perhaps of democratic forms, the administrative force is responsible to none save an imperial director, is a ruthless and unchecked pursuit of so-called national dreams, an aggressive parade of so-called national honour, possible.

If only autocracies—masquerading or naked—go down in the wreckage of this war!