up and down the room,
he studiously occupied himself with tuning the instrument, then
strummed a few chords with his fingers.

'Sorry not to fit in with your peace-brother-peace stuff,' said Watson
amiably, strumming a recent rag-time melody with a certain amount of
dexterity, 'but I always played you for a real white man at college.'

'Doug,' said Selwyn, stopping his walk and sitting on the arm of a big
easy-chair, 'if there is a coward in this room, it's you.'

The haunting music of the ukulele was the only response.

'Here you are at Cambridge--an American,' went on Selwyn. 'Just
because the set you know enlists with an accompaniment of
tub-thumping'----

'That isn't the way the English do things,' said Watson without pausing
in his playing.

'My dear fellow,' said Selwyn, 'don't let the pose of modesty fool you
over here. They profess to hold up their hands in horror when we get
hold of megaphones and roar about "The Star-Spangled Banner," but what
of the phrases, "The Empire on which the sun never sets," "What we have
we'll hold," "Mistress of the Seas"? Is there so much difference
between the Kaiser's "_Ich und Gott_" and the Englishman's "God of our
far-flung battle-line"? Jingoism! We're amateurs in America compared
with the British--and you're caught by it all.'

'Nothing of the sort,' said Watson, putting down the ukulele. 'All I
know is that Germany runs amuck and gives a mighty good imitation of
hell let loose. I am not discounting the wonderful bravery of France
and Belgium, but you know that the hope of everything lies right in
this country here. Well, that's good enough for me. I'm a hundred per
cent. American, but right now I'm willing to throw over my citizenship
in the United States and join this Empire that's got the guts to go to
war.'

'Listen, Doug,' said Selwyn, moving over to the younger man and placing
his hands on his shoulders; 'can't you see that Germany is not the
menace? She is only a symptom of it. War, not Germany, is the real
enemy. I admire your pluck: my regret is that you are so blind. The
whole world is turning murder loose; it is prostituting Christian
civilisation to the war-lust--and you imagine that by slaughter Right
may prevail. The tragic fallacy of the ages has been that men, instead
of destroying evil, have destroyed each other. If every criminal in
the world were executed, would crime end? Then, do you think the
annihilation of this or that army w