Page:The League of Nations and the democratic idea.djvu/16

 Kölnische Zeitung and the Daily Mail they would simply depute unofficial friends to meet privately on their behalf. The idea is impracticable.

But the fundamental error lies deeper. The whole notion that because war and war-making, as things now stand, not only cause practical injury to the common people, but constitute an intolerable outrage on human freedom, therefore a mere democratizing of international machinery would ensure peace, is, in my judgement, a false inference.

If wars sprang entirely from class interests, from deliberate avarice or ambition, there would be some plausibility in the theory, though even then we should have to admit that there are large classes among the rich who suffer cruelly from war and large classes among the poor who make high wages by it. But notoriously other causes are at work too. Wars spring just as much from national passion and ignorance as from selfish scheming^ And in most wars of recent times you could find as much war frenzy in the Jingo mob as in the most plutocratic club or drawing-room. The idolization of the working class is not much less foolish than other idolizations. Man's virtue does not vary according to his class or his income; it varies neither directly nor yet inversely; and it merely obscures counsel to talk as if it did.

True, if you take the real leaders of the working class throughout Europe they have a remarkably