This being the case. the governments of various small states could find in such a situation ample justification for keeping their countries out of the perils and destruction of war. In those countries themselves, however, far-seeing persons began to watch this state of things, with anxiety, realizing that from a psychological point of view neutrality was apt to weaken the moral strength and ility of the nation and their ability to ace the social and political upheavals that were bound to follo some time after the restoration of peace, which, the rightly thought, could only temporarily put an end to conflicts of which the former world war was the first, explosion.
These grave forebodings proved only too true. Many of the former neutrals exhibited the effects of their prolonged neutrality in a tendency to approach the looming political and economic problems in a formalistic jand purely legal way. Or, to express it differently, neutrality as a system formed an obstacle to facing the real issue at stake in any other than an abstract legal way. Convictions, er thusiasm, historical and national aspirations receded into the back-round and only a rigid, preconceived set of rules which sometimes proved a welcome screen to conceal lack of political vision and courage, became very often the guiding prin-lo of neutral statesmanship.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.