Excerpt from International Polity Summer School, Old Jordans Hostel, Beaconsfield: Under the Auspices of the Garton Foundation, July 17th to July 27th, 1914 In the first shock of the catastrophe it was felt that to issue as originally intended a report of our discussions would be, to say the least, incongruous. It seemed, more over, as though through the text there must inevitably run, in the light of altered circumstance, a vein of unconscious irony calculated rather to embitter than to reinspire. The first impulse was therefore to abandon the project. I A later perusal of the manuscript sufficed to dispel any such misgivings. In its pages the principles underlying our deliberations at that fateful juncture in the world's history stood out in accentuated relief against the sombre background of the war and assumed a new importance. So far from those principles having suffered eclipse by the passage of events they now stand revealed as the only foundations upon which a stable International Polity can be established and a worthier fabric of human civilisation erected out of the wreckage of war. If here and there a passage rings ironically a thousand others will give new courage for the task to which we have set our hands and will serve to restore faith in the possibility of an eventual community of nations cleansed from the baleful doctrines of antagonism and domination. Thus no apology is needed for issuing a report of discussions that echo from what already seems to be a bygone age. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.