The late Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, in a phrase which has retained its hold on the public mind, invited his countrymen some few years ago to "think Imperially." His advice has been followed. Many of the deepest political thinkers and the most experienced practical politicians are now devoting their attention to the question of how the foundations of the vast Imperial fabric which constitutes the British Empire can best be strengthened. Simultaneously with this movement another but not necessarily antagonistic phase of thought has sprung into prominence. Awed by the appalling results which have ensued from international discord, and convinced of the necessity of applying some anodyne to national animosities, we are now being constantly exhorted by politicians of very diverse proclivities to "think internationally." Although

some of those who proffer this advice are tainted with a suspicion that they are the friends of every country but their own, it would be a grievous error to confound the present international vein of thought with that vapid and flabby cosmopolitanism which, when carried to excess, is often destructive of all true patriotism. It is quite possible to be a reasonable internationalist and at the same time a sturdy patriot. The idea that the whole human race can achieve a solidarity such as that which is evinced by a single family or a single tribe may, indeed, be dismissed as Utopian, more especially at a time when passions have been excited, the embers of which, it may confidently be predicted, will continue to glow for more than one generation. But without indulging in ultra-idealist dreams it is perhaps not too much to hope that, as a result of the present War, the egotism of extreme nationalism will be

assuaged, that nations will grasp more clearly than heretofore the idea that the peace of the world cannot be secured without some degree of common action and mutual help, that international law, whose ordinances, always somewhat nebulous, have now been shattered to fragments by the mailed fist of the Kaiser, should be reinstated in its place, and that, in Mr. Asquith's words, some "partnership based upon the recognition of equal rights" should be created in order to obviate a recurrence of the cataclysm of which the whole world is now a horrified spectator.

There is nothing very novel in the apparent paradox that, as the result of a successful war, a hope should be engendered that all wars may be made to cease. The same idea was current when, after the battle of Waterloo, Europe shook off the incubus of Napcleon. His fall appeared to herald the inauguration of a reign of universal peace. As a matter of fact, a long period of comparative peace was secured. For more than half a century it was only seriously broken by the Italian Wars of Liberation and by the Crimean War, the latter being, as a French historian has wittily and truthfully remarked, a war of the eighteenth century which accidentally strayed into the nineteenth. Peace might have endured for longer had not the deadly shadow of Prussianism been cast over Europe, with the result that the growing tendencies towards pacificism and towards the assimilation of public and private morality were withered by its blighting touch. But even this temporary success was not due to the existence of any definite arrangements amongst the Powers to obviate wars. The abortive attempt made to secure a permanent peace by the half-crazy Czar, under the influence of his mystic