They have called forth the genii and cannot bottle him again. In their blind efforts to have and to hold power, the dictators and the premiers of Europe and all whose interests they represent, have found a weapon ready-forged for their purposes, and one which they have wielded well. That weapon is the spirit of nationalism. With conviction born of psychological necessity these men have hallowed that sentiment with the bathos of a thousand speeches, a thousand parades. Pushed on by the pressure of those who would upset them, they have identified the welfare of the country with the success of their own class; and they have further attempted to lay a smokescreen of patriotism before the issues where they stand in political danger. In England in 1931, in France today, in Germany last March, in Italy in 1920, they have converted their own weak position into a "National Crisis"; and by drugging the people into believing it, they have retained control. These facts are elementary, though they are usually forgotten and often deliberately disregarded. The tactics are the tactics of any class fighting for its existence; but in an age when nationalism is looked upon as an inexplicable but perverse disease which attacks whole peoples and leads them to force their reluctant leaders to make war upon any nation which they, the people, designate, it is no matter of wonder that any such simple, if harshly true, explanation is rejected universally.

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If, after the gaseous smoke has cleared away from the wreckage of the next Continental war to which this nationalism fostered by the dominant class today is rushing us, there remains enough life to carry through a social revolution, it will doubtless be effected in every nation of Europe, and a federation of communist states established. (That limited prediction is by no means a wild, baseless forecast. Almost any observer of the European scene would second it.) Whether that system could keep the peace among its component parts can never, of course, be adequately settled until it has been tried. But this much one can say: nationalism is only an idea and can be met by an idea. It springs from the instability of a state continually threatened with that fact infrequently mentioned in polite circles--the class struggle; and a great deal of the virulence of nationalism can be drawn if economic differences are more or less completely resolved. When property, which Madison believed was the chief source of faction, is eliminated as an issue, there will remain the possibility of a stable, peaceful society which can govern its foreign relations on a basis of welfare, not power; on an absolute good, not a relative one. The difficulties such an organization will face should not be underestimated; but in it there is hope, and in our present setup there is only inherent chaos. CASTOR.