The Chief Result.
"There is the probability of some dislocation of territory and some shiftings of sovereignty after the war ends, but these will be of comparatively minor importance. The important result of this great war will be the stimulation of international organization along some such lines as I have suggested.
"Dislocation of territory and the shifting of sovereigns as the result of international disagreements are mediaeval practices. After this war the world will want to solve its problems in terms of the future, not in those of the outgrown past.
"Conventional diplomacy and conventional statesmanship have very evidently broken down in Europe. They have made a disastrous failure of the work with which they were intrusted. They did not and could not prevent the war because they knew and used only the old formulas. They had no tools for a job like this.
"A new type of international statesman is certain to arise, who will have a grasp of new tendencies, a new outlook upon life. Bismarck used to say that it would pay any nation to wear the clean linen of a civilized State. The truth of this must be taught to those nations of the world which are weakest in morale, and it can only be done, I suppose, as similar work is accomplished with individuals. Courts, not killings, have accomplished it with individuals.
"One more point ought to be remembered. We sometimes hear it said that nationalism, the desire for national expression by each individual nation, makes the permanent peace and good order of the world impossible.
"To me it seems absurd to believe that this is any truer of nations than it is of individuals. It is not each nation's desire for national oppression which makes peace impossible; it is the fact that thus far in the world's history such desire has been bound up with militarism.
"The nation whose frontier bristles with bayonets and with forts is like the individual with a magazine pistol in his pocket. Both make for murder. Both in their hearts really mean murder.
"The world will be better when the nations invite the judgment of their neighbors and are influenced by it.
"When John Hay said that the Golden Rule and the open door should guide our new diplomacy he said something which should be applicable to the new diplomacy of the whole world. The Golden Rule and a free chance are all that any man ought to want or ought to have, and they are all that any nation ought to want or ought to have.