Any plan for peace is apt to be not only futile but dangerous. Like most planning, unless of a mainly material kind, it breaks down through disregard of human nature.

We learn from history that democracy has commonly put a premium on conventionality. By its nature, it prefers those who keep step with the slowest march of thought and frowns on those who may disturb the "conspiracy for mutual inefficiency." Thereby, this system of government tends to result in the triumph of mediocrity, and entails the exclusion

History is the best help, being a record of how things usually go wrong. A long historical view not only helps us to keep calm in a "time of trouble" but reminds us that there is an end to the longest tunnel. Even if we can see no good hope ahead, an historical interest as to what will happen is a help in carrying on. For a thinking man, it can be

It is a recurrent illusion in history that the enemy of the time is essentially different, in the sense of being more evil, than any in the past.

Bismarck's often quoted aphorism throws a different and more encouraging light on the problem. It helps us to realize that there are two forms of practical experience, direct and indirect and that, of the two, indirect practical experience may be the more valuable because infinitely wider.

He has to learn how to detach his thinking from every desire and interest, from every sympathy and antipathy; like ridding oneself of superfluous tissue, the "tissue" of untruth which all human beings tend to accumulate for their own comfort and protection.

The history of ancient Greece showed that, in a democracy, emotion dominates reason to a greater extent than in any other political system, thus giving freer rein to the passions which sweep a state into war and prevent it getting out at any point short of the exhaustion and destruction of one or other of the opposing sides. Democracy is a system

in the eleventh-century teaching of Chang-Tsai: "If you can doubt at points where other people feel no impulse to doubt, then you are making progress."

But "anti-Fascism" or "anti-Communism" is not enough. Nor is even the defence of freedom. What has been gained may not be maintained, against invasion without and erosion within, if we are content to stand still. The peoples who are partially free as a result of what their forebears achieved in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries