The only way for these truths to affect policy, to become operative in the conduct of nations, is to make them operative in the minds of men; therefore discussion of them is futile.
Our troubles arise from the wrong ideas of nations; therefore ideas do not count—they are "theories."
General conception and insight in this matter is vague and ill-defined, so that action is always in danger of being decided by sheer passion and irrationalism; therefore we shall do nothing to render insight clear and well-defined.
The empire of sheer impulse, of the non-rational, is strongest when associated with ignorance (e.g., Mohammedan fanaticism, Chinese Boxerism), and only yields to the general progress of ideas (e.g., sounder religious notions sweeping away the hate and horrors of religious persecution); therefore the best way to maintain peace is to pay no attention to the progress of political ideas.
The progress of ideas has completely transformed religious feeling in so far as it settles the policy of one religious group in relation to another; therefore the progress of ideas will never transform patriotic feeling, which settles the policy of one political group in relation to another.
What, in short, does the argument of my critics amount to? This: that so slow, so stupid is the world that, though the facts may be unassailable, they will never be learned within any period that need concern us.
Without in the least desiring to score off my critics, and still less to be discourteous, I sometimes wonder it has never struck them that in the eyes of the profane this attitude of theirs must appear really as a most colossal vanity. "We" who write in newspapers and reviews understand these things; "we" can be guided by reason and wisdom, but the common clay will not see these truths for "thousands of years." I talk to the converted (so I am told) when my book is read by the editors and reviewers. They, of course, can understand; but the notion that mere diplomats and statesmen, the men who make up Governments and nations, should ever do so is, of course, quite too preposterous.
Personally, however flattering this notion might be, I have never been able to feel its soundness. I have always strongly felt the precise opposite—namely, that what is plain to me will very soon be equally plain to my neighbor. Possessing, presumably, as much vanity as most, I am, nevertheless, absolutely convinced that simple facts which stare an ordinary busy man of affairs in the face are not going to be for ever hid from the multitude. Depend upon it, if "we" can see these things, so can the mere statesmen and diplomats and those who do the work of the world.
Moreover, if what "we" write in reviews and books does not touch men's reasons, does not affect their conduct, why do we write at all?
We do not believe it impossible to change or form men's ideas; such a plea would doom us all to silence, and would kill religious and political literature. "Public Opinion" is not external to men; it is made by men; by what they hear and read and have suggested to them by their daily tasks, and talk and contact.
If it were true, therefore, that the difficulties in the way of modifying political opinion were as vast as my critics would have us believe, that would not affect our conduct; the more they emphasize those difficulties, the more they emphasize the need for effort on our part.
But it is not true that a change such as that involved here necessarily "takes thousands of years." I have already dealt with the plea, but would recall only one incident that I have cited: a scene painted by a Spanish artist of the Court and nobles and populace in a great European city, gathered on a public holiday as for a festival to see a beautiful child burned to death for a faith that, as it plaintively said, it had sucked in with its mother's milk.
How long separates us from that scene? Why, not the lives of three ordinarily elderly people. And how long after that scene—which was not an isolated incident of uncommon kind, but a very everyday matter, typical of the ideas and feelings of the time at which it was enacted—was it before the renewal of such became a practical impossibility? It was not a hundred years. It was enacted in 1680, and within the space of a short lifetime the world knew that never again would a child be burned alive as the result of a legal condemnation by a duly constituted Court, and as a public festival, witnessed by the King and the nobles and the populace, in one of the great cities of Europe.