believe that the nation called "John" would not steal your mortgages is suicidal trustfulness. You are besotted to think that Brown, who is half insolvent, wants a law-suit with you, who have the bank of England in your breeches-pocket, but to suppose that Czar Alexander wants a war with England is only far-seeing and wise. If your coachman tells you that your groom tells him that your enemy's stable-boy was heard to say he should like to duck the said groom, you smile, and bid him be silent; but if a telegram-maker reports that Count Ignatieff said jestingly that a dragoman in English service ought to be shot, it is proper to massacre armies to wipe that insult out. A merchant who believed about a rival half the rubbish that England has believed for the past fortnight about Russia would be regarded as out of his mind, but the rival being a nation, he who believed most was regarded as necessarily the acutest man. In private life, and as regards individuals, even Dr. Johnson, who loved a good hater, would have asked on what authority statements justifying hatred were made; but in international life any authority is good enough, and a story utterly improbable in itself is swallowed down on the authority of a perfectly anonymous bulletin-maker, who may, for aught that appears, have been paid to invent it, or may be gratifying a sardonic humor at the expense of the credulous, because irritated Englishman. The hatred, in fact, being supposed to be virtuous, is fostered until it becomes a passion, and rejects all control from either reason or experience. Othello's mind about Desdemona was a judicial mind when compared with the mind of a good many Englishmen about Count Ignatieff, and Dissenting ministers are hardly more credulous about General Bex than English Tories about Prince Gortschakoff. And finally, the man who hates a nation, with reason or without, always desires to transmute his hatred into an act. At the exact point where the hater hating an individual usually stops, the hater hating a nation usually boils over. The individual must not only hate very hard but be very bad, who throws vitriol at his foe, but if the foe is a nation, that is the first thing he thinks of. He thinks it actually noble to let loose barbarism at him, and counts up the Kurds or the Arabs he might employ with a glow of gratified pride, in which he perceives no wickedness whatever. Only an oppressive man relies on his wealth to ruin his opponent by taking him from court to court, but if the opponent is a nation, kindly men will wag their purses, and exult in the number of times they can commence a new campaign. Of course, the real origin of all this rancor is ignorance, an inability on the part of the hater to recognize that he is hating persons, and not merely a force like a flood or a stream, which he has to dam up; but that excuse is valid only at the price of the haters reputation for knowledge and discernment. He ought to know what he is hating, ought to attribute sane motives, ought to be self-controlled enough to test evidence and distinguish among informants. That he is not so, that an imaginary story of insult to an envoy can make a nation rush to war, is one of the many evils which attend the progress of the world towards democracy, and one of the many which impose day by day heavier responsibilities on those who guide. We think they are being felt, and that within a few years the statesman who can madly hate a nation will be regarded as society now regards the man who can madly hate an individual, as a little mad, very bad, and dangerous to know. Fifty years hence statesmen will regard nations as leading counsel regard opponents at the bar, as persons they may quarrel with if provoked, and must contend with in business, but for the rest, as human beings exactly in essentials like themselves. Whether average men, however, will attain that amount of wisdom, we doubt. They will hardly in any reasonable time become wiser than the politicians who let loose out of rancor Red Indians on people of their own race, creed, and language, or the peers who to-day would declare war on Russia because they say Russia is ambitious, tricky, and strong.
