TWO American citizens (pioneer members of the Legion) had made the trip from Geneva to Valais, and, after the journey, sat titillating their throats with strong liquor. About them, as they sat, a group formed —which seemed like an accidentally assembled minor council of the League of Nations. The conversation was coloured by the then recent happenings in Geneva where the embryo of the second naval conference had been buried without ceremony.

"Does your Calvin Coolidge," said an Englishman, "really take his blunder in the cruiser question so seriously that he should decide to renounce his 1928 candidacy when re-election was an absolute certainty? Yet so wary a man as Coolidge must realize that we British Islanders, with our small centre and our world-wide periphery, with all our dominions, colonies, and foreign interests, have requirements which are different from those of America's powerful, self-sufficient continent; that England needs swift little cruisers with 15-cm. guns to protect her trade routes and her imperial policies; and that England could not, even for friendship, renounce her right to stronger armament and to shells of wider range."

"CAUTIOUS Cal realizes that the failures of the disarmament program will be forgotten in a day, as soon as the search for new presidential timber has actively begun. But not wishing to have his name linked with a fiasco in the meantime, he promptly raised a new, and much more important issue to supplant disarmament. If the nation demands him, he can always as a patriot heed the call; and if an able Republican candidate cannot be unearthed he will be called. By that time the Geneva miscalculation will have been almost completely forgotten."

"New York political talk," answered one of the Americans. "Pay no attention to Wall Street gossip. Conscientious Cal takes everything to heart, even the feeling against a third term. And surely he is in bitter earnest at the thought that disarmament, which was to be his great international contribution, is not doing so well. Thus it is not as an electioneering ruse, nor as the result of any friction with the Senate, that he bids his fellow-citizens to be on the lookout for a new man in 1928. Our Calvin does not show signs of faltering. In many ways he is a Roman: quiet, courageous, level-headed, deliberate before an act and inflexible after. Nothing against old England. But isn't it absurd that we can come to an understanding with Japan on the matter of the Pacific and immigration, yet cannot reach a satisfactory agreement with Great Britain— our friend and cousin? Must Europe, which we rescued from destruction at the cost of so many lives and so much money, still continue to disillusion us?

"Every contact with Europe has been the same. They want to ship us all their waste products and cheap trash, their communism and Fascism."

A FLASH of blue eyes. And a girl's voice rings out excitedly: "Please leave the great Mussolini out of this—I call him the hundred-percent Roman. America's best friend, the Messiah of the Occident, the Benito of heaven!"

"But, Mabel," continued the American, "I don't intend to wash black linen here, in the drying air of Switzerland, or to rank the Duce among the dwarves. Another raspberry soda? Daughter!" (Thus one summons a Swiss waitress.) "Europeans are not like Americans in any respect. As propagandists and heralds of glory you Europeans are unsurpassable. But the reality is never up to the claims of the advertisement, either in trifles or in matters of the greatest importance. 'No more war!' shouted Harden, whose two articles on international reconciliation were inserted in the Congressional Record by unanimous vote of the Senate in September 1916—and on Sundays and holidays the cry of 'No More War' still echoes through the continent. But anyone travelling between London and Sofia, Palermo and Warsaw, will find such quantities of highly inflammable material for breeding international strife that he cannot help wondering just how long it will be before the outbreak of the next conflagration. On the hearth fire of Asia the yellow flesh is stewing slowly, and the porridge will take some time to prepare. For my part, I venture to say that the next war will also begin in Europe, as an outgrowth of territorial greed and commercial rivalry. Peace is in no danger from America."

"What about Nicaragua," growled the Englishman, puffing his pipe "—and Mexico?"

"It smells of oil there," interrupted a Frenchman (a parlor socialist, a Mirabeau in the vest-pocket edition of 1927). "None but the slaves of capitalism now fails to realize that the next world conflict will be an oil war. Motors and turbines, vessels and aeroplanes, machines of every description, are consuming more and more petroleum daily, swallowing up larger and larger amounts of its products and by-products: benzine, benzol, gasoline, and whatever else the infernal stuff may be called. Heat oil, light oil, lubricating oil—that will be the cause.

"England, whom the victims of her shrewdness have branded 'perfidious Albion' because she began to act in accord with capitalist logic sooner than the other states and to pray on the altar of Trade, has been forced to fall behind. Despite India and the alliance with Holland's Royal Dutch (Shell), she cannot cover her oil shortage. Mexico, Venezuela, and in a certain sense even Mosul were disillusions.

"IN Persia the exploited populace is rebelling against the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which is also highly irksome to the new dynasty. The Bolsheviks have simply expropriated the Shell group and organized their own Naphtha Syndicate; and their oil properties, which are already thought to contain as much as fifteen percent of the petroleum reserves of the entire world, can still be greatly increased if all the fields in the Caucasus and the Ural region are included. The United States still controls almost seventy percent of world production, and in combination with Mexico and Russia, or at least with one of the large producers, would be in a position of impregnable supremacy in this most important industrial branch of the future.

"Business is business. Has the odour of oil never struck your nostrils? Of course, the placards display the proud word Politics. But the conferences at Geneva and Lausanne have left behind them, in the archives of our so-called cultured humanity, nothing but big oil spots. If it gives you any satisfaction, you may despise old Europe as she appears in the light of America's starry flag. Yet do not forget that Europe received her name from a beautiful damzel who discerned in the bulky form of a bull the presence of Olympian godhead; and remember that on that same soil were born Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin, Huss, and Zwingli; Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, Pascal, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; Shakespeare, Cervantes, Calderon, Moliére, Racine, and Goethe; Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, and Verdi; the great corps of scientists and historians; Hegel, Proudhon, Fourier, Marx, and Lassalle; and the popular leaders, Cromwell, Sully, Richelieu, Lafayette, Bonaparte, Bismarck, Mazzini, and Masaryk —and also the Romagnolo Mussolini, à votre service. We Europeans have waged our principal wars for the emancipation of the human race, for the purity of the Faith and the unity of the State. Now that capitalism has been toppled from the throne, and subjected to moderating influences, and every far-reaching governmental decision has been made to depend upon the assent of the masses, you can be assured that henceforth weapons will be lifted only in self-defense, only for important objectives, and never again to gratify the vile greed of privileged classes and groups."

"HM.... That sounds very beautiful, very noble, and wonderfully encouraging," rejoined a German member of the group. "But I am afraid that it leaves out of account the inferiority complex which Professor Freud and his ominously increasing army of psychoanalysts have revealed in the glaring rays by which they penetrate to the very viscera (if such a bold metaphor is allowable). In the year 1870 every German soldier, officer, and even every statesman was firmly convinced that the purpose of the war was purely to block the ambitions of Louis Napoleon and the Ollivier-Gramont government, to recover the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which had been wrested from the old German Empire, and to ensure the long desired unity of German culture. Had anyone said, after the fashion of to-day, that all the fighting was over iron and ore, he would have been pilloried for slander. And yet the important tangible gain of the war turned out to be the iron mines of Lorraine, without which Germany could not (for some decades at least) have attained her leading industrial position. But even Bismarck, the chancellor of the North German Alliance, had not thought of this—and the militarists, the 'half-gods of the general staff' as he ironically called them, who pressed him to annex the greater part of old Lotharingia (named after Lothar, the reigning son of Louis, the Pious) did not want the country despite its mineral deposits, and had not imagined it the central pillar of a vast industry supplied with coal from the Rhineland, Westphalia, and Upper Silesia, but saw it purely as a defence against retaliation on the part of France. Exemplum docet. And the same complex of history demonstrates with unusual clarity how wars arise and upon what personal accidents their genesis depends. Freshen your memories with another drink, ladies and gentlemen. But I will continue: The Spanish throne had been offered to a son of the Prince von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. France was opposed to a Hohenzollern Prussian branch behind the Pyrenees. On the advice of William the First, who had too much peasant shrewdness and mature good sense to endorse such a venture, his nephew declined the candidacy to the throne. Had France's foreign minister, the Duc de Gramont, played up this renunciation as a tribute to French vigilance, he would have been acclaimed in parliament, peace would not have been disturbed, and for the time being the Troisième Empire would not have been overthrown.

"Instead of acting in this way, Gramont gave the impression that an obtrusive move on the part of the Ambassador Benedetti had been resisted by King William at Ems, interpreted this as justifying France in a declaration of war against Prussia, and so started the landslide which buried the empire and all hopes of Bourbon, Orleans, and Bonaparte. Forty-three years later Germany repeated the same performance. With the extremely conciliatory dispatches of Czar Nikolai Alexandrovitch and Sir Edward Grey in hand, two big trumps which could have rewarded his policies with an unhoped-for growth in the prestige of the German Empire, and could have guaranteed world peace for a considerable time to come, Chancellor Bethmann was intimidated by the uninformed advocates of a 'preventive war' and made the fatal blunders of an ultimatum and a declaration of war against Russia. Such incidents show us the absurdity of trying to explain the imminent causes, the genesis, and the purposes of modern war in the pat terms of current phraseology when so many of the real motives lie beneath the threshold of consciousness."

THE Frenchman countered: "Yet for that very reason shouldn't our statesmen be twice as cautious? Unless a person is so cowardly as to close his eyes deliberately to the danger of war, he is sure to see signs of it everywhere. Our planet is one great mass of combustibles—a tug at one or another of the ingenious fuses, a spark from the priming, and the flames will blaze up. Remember the colonial congress in Brussels. Never before had the world seen such a spectacle. Hindoos, Chinese, Manchus, Koreans, Syrians, Druses, Kurds, Berbers, Negroes, Indians: billions of people from the three largest continents were represented, crying for freedom from the yoke of overpowering empires, for the end of oppression, for the right of self-determination proclaimed for the entire globe by Woodrow Wilson eleven years ago—and receiving from Europe's socialists and pacifists solemn promises of help (the market value of which one must not, of course, overestimate). British India and the Dutch East Indies are in ferment, as China has been to an intense degree for decades. It was not so much the systematically organized agitation of Moscow as the deeply wounded pride in an ancient culture and a line of sages from Lao-Tse to Sun-Yat-Sen which created this spirit of unrest. Why did you allow Russia to be defeated by Japan —a white nation to be defeated by a yellow nation, Christians by Shintoists? Since then the belief in the resourcefulness and invincibility of the white race has been steadily declining —and it vanished entirely when you brought coloured soldiers of all hues as 'comrades' to the European theatres of battle and let them perish there in shrapnel fire, benzol flames, and gas.

"Why were your movies permitted to show them pictures of another world, letting them see all the comforts of civilization and teaching them about the uprisings by which the lot of the masses has been bettered? Now even the coolie looks upon himself as a human being. He will no longer acquiesce in a life of toil and destitution serving as a soldier for some ambitious chieftain and roaming about between Korea and Mongolia while his family back home lies somewhere near the edge of starvation. His wife is no longer willing to be a slave, an object of sporadic desire, and to hobble about on maimed feet in her ill-ventilated hut; but she feels her equality, and wants to collaborate with her husband for the happiness and prosperity of the family, the province, and the realm. Her children are eager for knowledge and understanding, and she wants to learn with them until she can teach them herself. The white race has never seriously tried to understand the Chinese and to sympathize with their spiritual and material needs.

"THE one aim was to exploit this vast central empire of the world economically, to hinder it by absurdly low import duties from developing industries of its own, and thus to force it into a large-scale importation of foreign commodities. And it soon became the aim of the Japanese as well, since they were quick to adopt all of the white race's arts and evils and, for example, stopped the Chinese export of silk into Korea with lightning speed by the erection of a high tariff wall. Even had there been no Karachan or Borodin, such things were bound to be avenged; and we must have the courage to gaze calmly and steadily at the majestic sun which is rising on this new day. The era of the imperialistic-capitalistic subjugation of China is irretrievably past. And that is not all. The lava from the volcano of the people's rage will turn to ashes the entire overpraised system of British colonial policy; for the English did not learn from the French psychology of government how to suggest the illusion of equality to the natives by conceding to the local rulers—the queens, sultans, and beys—who are powerless in matters of importance, at least the tribute of a constant semblance of homage on the part of the real masters."

"Before we come to the relations between the facade-kingdom of Mussolinia and the Moslems," interpolated the Englishman, "we have another trying journey. Observe that, despite their vast differences in temperament and aim, the gospels of Sun-Yat-Sen, Mahatma Gandhi, Said Zaghlul, and Lenin & Company have one underlying theme in common. Everywhere we see the striving after spiritual release, after the expression of national feelings which have been over-ridden by foreign powers. Further, in Teheran Mr. Millspaugh has laid down the office of Financial Administrator and lowered the oil banner of the stars and stripes to half-mast. But under cover the Anglo-Russian antagonism continues to exert influence unchecked. Where is it not perceptible? It can be felt in Afghanistan and Latvia, in Tokio, Paris, and Warsaw. Only three years ago it encouraged the Egyptian jurist Said Zaghlul, the head of the Nationalist Party, to refuse the agreement offered by the Labour Cabinet of Ramsay MacDonald. To-day this issue is the yeast in the dough of all international politics. And what a mass of blotches, abscesses, and boils spot the cheeks and neck of our withered world!

"And our American friends here could deliver us a very instructive academic-political lecture on the subject of similar suppuration under some parts of the skin of America. In Asia Minor, France is in more or less open conflict with the Syrians and the Druses; in Northern Africa she must defend Tangiers against Spain and Tunis against Italy; in Italy proper, assert herself against the Anglo-Italian coalition; in Europe safeguard the rights of the continental victor and fulfil the grand premier role of patron of the weak; and above all superintend the carrying out of the peace treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain, Trianon, and Neuilly.

"Peace: a noble word, sacred to all the poets—from Homer, Sophocles, and Virgil to Petrarch, Schiller, Victor Hugo, and Lamartine. Is it only by accident that, since 1918, no poet has been able to compose a poem to peace prophesying that peace would last forever or even long survive the present delicate international situation?

"Greece rages angrily against Turkey since she can neither house nor feed the million Hellenes driven from Turkey back to their homeland. Russia wants Roumania to return Bessarabia, and Hungary hopes to recover Transylvania from Roumania. Meanwhile the Magyars (supported by Lord Rothermere, the brother of Northcliffe, of the Northcliffe newspapers) are demanding that the Czecho-Slovak republic restore large areas of land to their crypto-kingdom, and that Yugoslavia agree to a derangement of the border on the Croatian flank. Yugoslavia is also being hard pressed on the Adriatic by Italy and its vassal state Albania, and will fight with Bulgaria over the division of the territory (containing the mixed Macedonian population) until joint rule or (still better) union among themselves, puts an end to the dispute. The Ukraine and Georgia are showing signs of a wary hostility to the lame but stringent economic policies and the renewed inflation of the Muscovites, while they in turn would like to incorporate the border states of the Czarist era, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and possibly Finland, into the Soviet system, and thus amputate the extremities from the hypertrophied body of Poland. And Lithuania insists that Poland return its old city of Vilna, the birthplace of the Polish Marshal Pilsudski who, a military organizer and the foe of Russia, is willing to defend this section as though it were his very life.

"And the free city of Danzig, ethnologically pure German, complains that Poland's militaristic policies, which reach out covetously as far as Königsberg, are cramping it and interfering with freedom of trade. A militant minority in Austria is crying for annexation to Germany, while France, Italy, and Czecho-Slovakia are especially insistent in their opposition to an Anschluss. Italy, whose sons compose whole armies of labourers in France and North and South America, and who, since Mussolini himself saw in Tripolitania how slow and dear the reclaiming of the Libyan deserts would be, no longer casts such loving eyes on Islam—Italy needs and is seeking room and a means of livelihood for her rapidly increasing population. Germany is in a similar position. She resents the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, West Prussia, and Posen, and the separation of East Prussia by the 'Polish corridor,' and she is agitating now to free the Rhineland and the Sarre basin of foreign occupation and administration. The German Tyrolese complain that the strictures of Fascist prefects are robbing their children of the right to religious instruction and to schooling in the mother tongue. From all countries where linguistic unity is lacking, we hear the appeals of the narrowly circumscribed minorities. And ..."

"Your picture is enough to frighten anyone," said the American. "And you could still add Britain's own Irish problems (De Valera is the explosive in the Dublin parliament), Portugal's dozen and a half revolutions, the squabbles over the colonies taken from imperial Germany! Even then the list is not complete. And that is how our world looks to-day. This is what has become of the earth which the Creator once beheld with divine satisfaction. Just let one of these many abscesses come to a head. Whereupon all your peace conferences and pacifist meetings will come to nought; and in the steel-grey armour of scientific barbarism, with the newest, the brand-newest infernal tricks of physics and chemistry, the war fury will dance its wild and desolate dance. When? No one dare venture a prophecy. Even a clever active statesman, who helped pull the strings of politics or at least was completely informed as to how they were tied, might honestly swear one day that peace was secure and be awakened the next by the violence of the conflagration. The flag of a touchy nation is insulted, infuriated jingoes break the boundary posts of a neighbouring country, the diplomatic representative of a powerful state is murdered—and Carnegie's peace palace at the Hague and Wilson's air castle at Geneva burn merrily. Appearances are deceiving. In June 1914, we heard the shepherd's pipes. Who, even after the assassination at Sarajevo, thought that war was near?"

"More persons than one," was the German's response. "Austria-Hungary's successor to the throne was murdered on Bosnia's troubled soil by young men of Serbian blood: at the very start I, who by no means pose as a Solomon, saw the blue-gold sky enshrouded in the pitch-black pall of war. There was a potential crisis in every one of the four empires of Europe. Czarism had been humbled, first by Japan, and then on account of Bosnia by Hohenzollern and Hapsburg. There was intense Anglo-Saxon rivalry on three major issues: the fleet, commerce, and influence with Islam. In Constantinople the German military commission of Liman von Sanders was in possession of the key to the Dardenelles. As young Turkey was previously menaced by the Balkan states, so now the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was threatened by Italians, Serbs, Croats, Czechs, Slovenes, Roumanians, and Galicians. Then there were the two children of sorrow— Poland and Alsace-Lorraine. Enormous armies had done nothing for the last fifty years but parade and manoeuvre and, like actors wearied of rehearsal, were eager for a public performance with its promise of applause. On every side dynastic agreements and partially or wholly secret special-treaties. Triple Entente against Triple Alliance. No generally recognized international Court of Appeal. Could this chaos continue? To-day things look quite different. Two dozen dynasties, with all their glittering trappings, have been retired. Four imperial thrones overthrown. Where monarchs still sign their name for the state firm, they are only too willing to imitate the wise reserve of King George or of the even quieter Re Vittorio Emanuele of Italy.

"Taking it all in all, decisions as to the territories and the sovereignty of the European peoples have been, in the judgment of man, definitely settled. The still unhealed afflictions of large or small nations, the neuroses of the suppressed minorities, can be eased without recourse to surgery. There are two international Courts of Justice ready to decide matters presented for arbitration—and about sixty states are subject to their rulings. All nations have come to realize just what modern warfare is. They see that it cannot be waged by slaves, vassals, allies, and mercenaries, but drains all the powers and resources of every man, woman, and child; that it is heaven's most terrible scourge; and that, to cap the climax, even the victor must find it bad business in the final reckoning. The Geneva protocol proposed to outlaw war as a crime, and Ambassador Houghton recommended that wars should be decided upon only by plebiscite, which would too often involve the judgment of a public who are duped, whipped to a frenzy, or disturbed by an illusion of danger. Love's Labour Lost. Mankind cannot be cured by such a formula. The remedy must come from within. It will result from the realization that life, creativeness, talent, individual genius are the world's richest possessions, and that the 'civilized' (which is to say those who are striving to attain the sociological ideal of the unarmed citizen) must look for a type of weapon and heroism more fitting than those of the knight in armour, the lawless feudal baron, and the lansquenet."

"Your plea sounds well enough. But when will this understanding dawn?" a someone spoke up.

"The sun is already climbing towards high noon. Cain slew Abel. With hatchets, slings, and scythes, villages went forth to do battle. Cities, allied races, neighbouring peoples waged wars against one another. Think of the civil wars in America, England, Germany, and Italy, from the last of which we are separated by only half a century. Every dispute over a matter of honour or property was settled by blood and might. But now instead we have the judge and the arbiter. And nations are undergoing this same evolution in their relationship to one another. It does not occur to the business man, who is the most thorough-going instance of the civilized principle, to take the life of his competitor. He proposes a partnership, a pool, or a combine—or, if necessary, engages him in a lawsuit. The same will apply soon to the wider sphere ('wider' in a purely spatial sense) of politics. A few years ago any one who would not swear that war between Japan and the United States was inevitable was laughed at pityingly as an unmitigable fool. The United States, at a vast distance from its base, demonstrated the force of its will. Nippon recognized on quaking soil that a war would after all be poor business—and the whole attitude is now as extinct as a belief in ghosts. If we are continually counting our pulse, taking our temperature, and trembling at the thought of swellings and bacilli, we can never get the feeling of being sound and healthy.

"Admit to yourself that the 'next war' is far away from us, by the distance which separates a palaver of cannibals from a meeting of the Federal Reserve Board, and that war cannot come if you, men and women, mothers and fathers, do not wish it. Work, first by economic means and then politically, for the Union of the Continents. Free them from tariff barriers, trade restrictions, oil corruption, and transform the 'Utopia of a unified currency' into a reality which will make all nations fear devaluation through war as a common danger to their existence. Democracy is hard pressed on the left by Bolshevism and on the right by Fascism, two systems of government which are determined by particular conditions of time and place —but you can raise it to a place of light and purity where there is adequate assurance that those persons most fit to serve the state will be selected.

"Do not let the tooth of doubt gnaw at the first frail and timid attempts to establish a new world order, a union of nations, and an international court of arbitration. But support these efforts by simple faith, which is the foundation of every religion; and in order to facilitate the work, constitute yourselves a shadow-cabinet for the constant surveillance of peace, and be prepared to issue a loud warning at every gust of wind which might endanger it. How would it be if we random delegates from five nations were ourselves to make the start? Everyone pledges himself to watch his country and its neighbours, and our English friend undertakes ..."

A silence, then: "What about Nicaragua, and Mexico?"