And yet even these ideals, firmly set as they are in our language and
tradition, are rapidly yielding to the necessary force of events. A
generation ago it would have been inconceivable that a people or a
monarch should calmly see part of its country secede and establish
itself as a separate political entity without attempting to prevent it
by force of arms. Yet this is what happened but a year or two since in
the Scandinavian peninsula. For forty years Germany has added to her own
difficulties and those of the European situation for the purpose of
including Alsace and Lorraine in its Federation, but even there, obeying
the tendency which is world-wide, an attempt has been made at the
creation of a constitutional and autonomous government. The history of
the British Empire for fifty years has been a process of undoing the
work of conquest. Colonies are now neither colonies nor possessions.
They are independent States. Great Britain, which for centuries has made
such sacrifices to retain Ireland, is now making great sacrifices in
order to make her secession workable. To all political arrangements, to
all political ideals, the final test will be applied: Does it or does it
not make for the widest interests of the mass of the people involved?...
And I would ask those who think that war must be a permanent element in
the settlement of the moral differences of men to think for one moment
of the factors which stood in the way of the abandonment of the use of
force by governments, and by one religious group against another in the
matter of religious belief. On the one hand you had authority with all
the prestige of historical right and the possession of physical power in
its most imposing form, the means of education still in their hands;
government authority extending to all sorts of details of life to which
it no longer extends; immense vested interests outside government; and
finally the case for the imposition of dogma by authority a strong one,
and still supported by popular passion: and on the other hand, you had
as yet poor and feeble instruments of mere opinion; the printed book