and America does not, that only proves how very much current ideas in politics fail to take cognizance of the facts. The United States to-day has in the problem of the Philippines, their protection and their trade, and the bearing of those things upon Japanese policy; in Hayti and the West Indies, and their bearing upon America’s subject nationality problem of the negro; in Mexico, which is likely to provide America with its Irish problem; in the Panama Canal tolls question and its relation to the development of a mercantile marine and naval competition with Great Britain, in these things alone, to mention no others, subjects of conflict, involving defence of American interests, out of which will arise entanglements not differing greatly in kind from the foreign questions which dominated British domestic policy during the period of British isolation.

Now, what America will do about these things will not depend upon highly rationalised decisions, reached by a hundred million independent thinkers investigating the facts concerning the Panama Treaty, the respective merits of alternative alliance combinations, or the real nature of negro grievances. American policy will be determined by the same character of force as has determined British policy in Ireland or India, in Morocco or Egypt, French policy in Germany or in Poland, or Italian policy in the Adriatic. The “way of thinking” which is applied to the decisions of the American democracy has behind it the same kind of moral and intellectual force that we find in the society of Western Europe as a whole. Behind the American public mind lie practically the same economic system based on private property, the same kind of political democracy, the same character of scholastic training, the same conceptions of nationalism, roughly the same social and moral values. If we find certain sovereign ideas determining the course of British or French or Italian policy, giving us certain results, we may be sure that the same ideas will, in the case of America, give us very much the same results.

When Britain spoke of “splendid isolation,” she meant what America means by the term to-day, namely, a position by virtue of which, when it came to a conflict of policy between herself and others, she should possess preponderant power, so that she could impose her own view of her own rights, be judge and executioner in her own case. To have suggested to an Englishman twenty years ago that the real danger to the security of his country lay in the attitude of mind dominant among Englishmen themselves, that the fundamental defect of English policy was that it asked of others something which Englishmen would never accord if asked by others of them, and that such a policy was particularly inimical in the long run to Great Britain, in that her population lived by processes which dominant power could not, in the last resort, exact—such a line of argument would have been, and indeed was, regarded as too remote from practical affairs to be worth the attention of practical politicians. A discussion of the Japanese Alliance, the relations with Russia, the size of foreign fleets, the Bagdad railway, would have been regarded as entirely practical and relevant. These things were the “facts” of politics. It was not regarded as relevant to the practical issues to examine the role of certain general ideas and traditions which had grown up in England in determining the form of British policy. The growth of a crude philosophy of militarism, based on a social pseudo-Darwinism, the popularity of Kipling and Roberts, the jingoism of the Northcliffe Press—these things might be regarded as items in the study of social psychology; they were not regarded as matters for the practical statesman. “What would you have us do about them, anyway?”

It has happened to the present writer, in addressing American students, to lay stress upon the rôle of certain dominant ideas in determining policy (upon the idea, say, of the State as a person, upon the conception of States as necessarily rival entities), and afterwards to get questions in this wise: “Your lecture seems to imply an internationalist policy. What is your plan? What ought we to do? Should we make a naval alliance, with Great Britain, or form a new League of Nations, or denounce Article X, or ...?” I have replied: “The first thing to do is to change your ideas and moral values; or to get to know them better. That is the most practical and immediate platform, because all others depend on it. We all profess great love of peace and justice. What will you pay for it, in terms of national sovereignty? What degree of sovereignty will you surrender as your contribution to a new order? If your real feeling is for domination, then the only effect of writing constitutions of the League of Nations will be to render international organisation more remote than ever, by showing how utterly incompatible it is with prevailing moral values.”

But such a reply is usually regarded as hopelessly “unpractical.” There is no indication of something to be “done”—a platform to be defended or a law to be passed. To change fundamental opinions and redirect desires is not apparently to “do” anything at all. Yet until that invisible thing is done our Covenants and Leagues will be as futile as have been the numberless similar plans of the past, “concerning which,” as one seventeenth century critic wrote, “I know no single imperfection save this: That by no possibility would any Prince or people be brought to abide by them.” It was, I believe, regarded as a triumph of practical organisation to have obtained nation-wide support for the ‘League to Enforce Peace’ proposal, “without raising controversial matters at all”—leaving untouched, that is, the underlying ideas of patriotism, of national right and international obligation, the prevailing moral and political values, in fact. The subsequent history of America’s relation to the world’s effort to create a League of Nations is sufficient commentary as to whether it is “practical” to devise plans and constitutions without reference to a prevailing attitude of mind.

America has before her certain definite problems of foreign policy—Japanese immigration into the United States and the Philippines; concessions granted to foreigners in Mexico; the question of disorder in that country; the relations with Hayti (which will bear on the question of America’s subject nationality, the negro); the exemption of American ships from tolls in the Panama Canal; the exclusion of foreign shipping from “coastwise” trade with the Philippines. It would be possible to draw up plans of settlement with regard to each item which would be equitable. But the development of foreign policy (which, more than any other department of politics, will fix the quality of American society in the future) will not depend upon the more or less equitable settlement of those specific questions. The specific differences between England and Germany before the War were less serious than those between England and America—and were nearly all settled when war broke out. Whether an issue like Japanese immigration or the Panama tolls leads to war will not depend upon its intrinsic importance, or whether Britain or Japan or America make acceptable proposals on the subject. Mr ex-Secretary Daniels has just told us that the assertion of the right to establish a cable station on the Island of Yap is good ground for risking war. The specific issues about which nations fight are so little the real cause of the fight that they are generally completely forgotten when it comes to making the peace. The future of submarine warfare was not mentioned at Versailles. Given a certain state of mind, a difference about cables on the Island of Yap is quite sufficient to make war