A PRACTICAL INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM
event that will not only profoundly affect the future fortunes of Europe, but will be of vital importance to the whole civilized world. Some international thinkers have even gone so far as to insist that since the neutral nations are so inextricably involved in the future of Europe, the neutral nations should have a direct and active part in the negotiations of the warring nations which frame the terms of peace. Only recently the International Peace Bureau at Berne, of which H. La Fontaine is president, issued a circular to the peace societies in all lands, in which appeared the following pronouncement:
"First and foremost, we must insist on neutral powers taking part in the peace negotiations, if only because their interests are at stake and because the agreements intended to insure a lasting peace must, if they are to be efficacious, take the whole world into account."
It is just possible that, however desirable it may be, this direct participation of the neutral nations in the peace negotiations will not prove feasible. Europe is under the war system and, unfortunately, will probably insist upon concluding its technical terms of peace without outside interference. The countries engaged have been fighting a long, hard, bloody war: a war which every warring nation regards as a war of desperate defense: a war in which each nation has spent not merely vast resources of an economic sort, but thousands upon thousands of the lives of its best young men. After a desperate war of such magnitude, it is but natural that the peace negotiations will be conducted in somewhat the same temper as the war itself was waged. Any advantage gained by any particular nation will have been dearly bought and will not be easily relinquished. Of course, this is the great danger of the situation: the
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