still a rarity; the Press non-existent, communication between men still
rudimentary, worse even than it had been two thousand years previously.
And yet, despite these immense handicaps upon the growth of opinion and
intellectual ferment as against physical force, it was impossible for a
new idea to find life in Geneva or Rome or Edinburgh or London without
quickly crossing and affecting all the other centres, and not merely
making headway against entrenched authority, but so quickly breaking up
the religious homogeneity of states, that not only were governments
obliged to abandon the use of force in religious matters as against
their subjects, but religious wars between nations became impossible for
the double reason that a nation no longer expressed a single religious
belief (you had the anomaly of a Protestant Sweden fighting in alliance
with a Catholic France), and that the power of opinion had become
stronger than the power of physical force--because, in other words, the
limits of military force were more and more receding.

But if the use of force was so ineffective against the spiritual
possessions of man when the arms to be used in their defence were so
poor and rudimentary, how could a government hope to crush out by force
to-day such things as a nation's language, law, literature, morals,
ideals, when it possesses such means of defence as are provided in
security of tenure of material possessions, a cheap literature, a
popular Press, a cheap and secret postal system, and all the other means
of rapid and perfected inter-communication?

You will notice that I have spoken throughout not of the _defence_ of a
national ideal by arms, but of its attack; if you have to defend your
ideal it is because someone attacks it, and without attack your defence
would not be called for.