If the fear of God was in them it might be possible to come
to some general understanding as to what God disapproves of; and Europe
might pull together on that basis. But the present panic, in which Prime
Ministers drift from election to election, either fighting or running
away from everybody who shakes a fist at them, makes a European
civilization impossible. Such peace and prosperity as we enjoyed before
the war depended on the loyalty of the Western States to their own
civilization. That loyalty could find practical expression only in an
alliance of the highly civilized Western Powers against the primitive
tyrannies of the East. Britain, Germany, France, and the United States
of America could have imposed peace on the world, and nursed modern
civilization in Russia, Turkey, and the Balkans. Every meaner
consideration should have given way to this need for the solidarity of
the higher civilization. What actually happened was that France and
England, through their clerks the diplomatists, made an alliance with
Russia to defend themselves against Germany; Germany made an alliance
with Turkey to defend herself against the three; and the two unnatural
and suicidal combinations fell on one another in a war that came nearer
to being a war of extermination than any wars since those of Timur the
Tartar; whilst the United States held aloof as long as they could, and
the other States either did the same or joined in the fray through
compulsion, bribery, or their judgment as to which side their bread was
buttered.
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