Page:The League of Nations and the democratic idea.djvu/31

 in league. These obvious international needs will have their effect on public feeling and are bound to be reflected in the press. The great questions will, as a matter of fact, be chiefly questions of economics, of industry, of political principle and theory, and so far as they are mere struggles of interest they will be class conflicts rather than national conflicts.

This tendency must be helped and encouraged. Everything must be done to prevent the great issues which divide men's minds from taking the form of brute struggles of greed or pride between armed nations. Let us hope that the disputes which come before the Council of Conciliation will not. even at the worst, be merely tugs-of-war between nations, with no principle involved but competing desires. They will also raise an issue between Free Trade and Protection, between Industry and Agriculture, between Liberalism and Reaction, between Socialism and Capital, or between some other of the great principles or groups of thought which divide on more or less similar lines all the progressive nations of the world. Divisions of this sort may lead to hot party feeling. They may cause grave domestic inconvenience. But no matter how hot the feeling or how grave the inconvenience, we can put up with them, for they cannot in themselves lead to war. No split of opinion or even of interest, neither political nor social nor religious, is fatally dangerous as long as it is not a split between sovereign states, because it is only such states, and