The cinema will show them the beauties of war; we shall thus prepare them for the career of arms; and as long as there are soldiers there will be wars.

My friends, we must abandon these dangerous practices. The teacher of the future must exclude from his teaching every appeal directed towards hatred of the foreigner, yes, even towards hatred of our enemy of yesterday; not because one should be indulgent of crime and absolve all criminals, but because any people at any given moment contains more victims than it contains evil-doers; because one has no right to impose the punishment due to wrong. doers upon innocent generations; and, finally, because all the peoples of the world have much to forgive each other. February 6, 1920.

XXII

*

THE CO-EXISTENCE OF INCOMPATIBLES To the many horrors of the Peace, the last few days has witnessed a new addition, in the form of a whirlwind advertisement campaign having as its object the bringing of pressure to bear upon members of Parliament to expel the Turk from Constantinople in order that the League of Nations may rule there. We are informed that neither the League of Nations itself nor the League of Nations Union has financed this campaign; a single individual has laid it as a sort of foundling upon their doorsteps, and its adoption is still a matter for determination.

A strong case would never have needed such methods, and we mention the incident but to pass on to the disease of which it is the symptom. It is an attempt to drive the twentieth century back into the arms of the twelfth. As one member of the House remarked during the great Constantinople debate last week, there is "the shadow of the Crusades over it all." If those Labour members

* A frenzied and obviously very costly advertisement campaign against Turkey had appeared in a leading British paper in the preceding week.

who so gaily advocated the "bag and baggage policy would give some consideration to the effects of the Cruades upon the consolidation of power in monarchical hands and to such delights as the Saladin Tithes which adorned them, they might think twice before embarking upon a policy of embattling Europe against Asia, Christendom against Islam. The war evidently has changed something; for if (let us suppose) Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Father Bernard Vaughan taking these gentlemen as typical of what crusading spirit might then have been extant had appeared upon a Trade Union Congress platform ten years ago to advocate the dispossession of Constantinople from the Turk, the vote would hardly have gone in their favour. It is evident that the anti-Turk group, whatever its class or party derivation, draws its spiritual sustenance either from ignorance of the past or an all-too-trustful credulity in such visions of the future as the League of Nations and that with regard to the present it has ignored one trivial world-factor, namely, the existence of the British Empire. The Neo-Crusaders have turned a Nelsonian telescope towards the vital truth that more than a quarter of their fellow-citizens within the British Commonwealth are Moslems. The

Crusades must have been inspiring and exciting to those who took part in them, but the revival to-day is just about four hundred years too late. The last date for a Crusade in which the people of these islands could logically have fought would have been before the grant of a charter to the East India Company. The existence of an Empire is incompatible with Crusades against the religions of portions of itself.

It may also be pointed out that the Constantinople situation reveals the attempted co-existence of two more incompatibles. The House of Commons would like to control foreign policy, and in days gone by there were even prophecies as to a time when diplomacy should no longer be secret. Yet the announcement is made by a mere Admiral in Constantinople that that city is to be left to the Turks; it is repeated in India by the Viceroy; and with this accomplished fact the House is confronted. The plain truth again is that true democracy and large imperialist States cannot co-exist. Some similitude of it may flourish for a time; but every domination over others is ultimately made at the cost of some loss of liberty at home. There was only one brief period in English history when England was herself, when she had lost everything on the Continent

and had not founded an Empire, and that was in the spacious days of the Virgin Queen. Elizabeth was great, and England was merry England, but it was not by means of alien holdings. Under Elizabeth's Scotto-Teutonic successors a different course has been mapped out for this unfortunate country, and every step she takes must be taken with conditions as they now are, and for considerations, very different from those which would have weighed with an Edward I or even a Henry VII. The ancestors of the seventy million Moslems of India who now look to George V as their Emperor did not ask to be made British subjects. The situation is of our own creation, and we must face it.

Hence in our peace negotiations with Turkey we must bear in mind that, although there is no question of dictation" from our Moslem fellow-subjects, yet they are vitally involved. Speaking with all due respect of Lord Robert Cecil, it is not his views as to what they ought or ought not to think of the Khilafat which matter, but what they actually do think. An important Indian Moslem deputation is now in London, able and willing to explain to British publicists what Mahomedans realy do hold upon the matter: nor are their views upon the