So long as we assume that high motive, a better moral tone is all that is needed in international relations, and that an understanding of these problems will in some wonderful way come of itself, without hard and systematic intellectual effort, we shall make little headway.
Good feeling and kindliness and a ready emotion are among the most precious things in life, but they are qualities possessed by some of the most retrograde nations in the world, because in them they are not coupled with the homely quality of hard work, in which one may include hard thinking. This last is the real price of progress, and we shall make none of worth unless we pay it.
A word or two as to the rôle of "friendship" in international relations. Courtesy and a certain measure of good faith are essential elements wherever civilized men come in direct contact; without them organized society would go to pieces. But these invaluable elements never yet of themselves settled real differences; they merely render the other factors of adjustment possible. Why should one expect courtesy and good-fellowship to settle grave political differences between English and Germans when they altogether fail to settle