spheres of Science
and Industry and Art. Still, I also do not see any reason why the two
tendencies should not work side by side. The health of local organs and
members in the human body is by no means incompatible with the health of
the whole organism, and we may understand the great map of Humanity all
the better for its being differently coloured in different parts.

VIII

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF, WAR AND RECRUITING

_November_, 1914.

I sometimes think the country-folk round about where I live the most
sensible people I know. They say with regard to the War--or said at its
outset: "What are they fighting about? _I_ can't make out, and nobody
seems to know. What I've seen o' the Germans they're a decent enough
folk--much like ourselves. If there's got to be fightin', why don't them
as makes the quarrel go and fight wi' each other? But killing all them
folk that's got no quarrel, and burnin' their houses and farms, and
tramplin' down all that good corn--and all them brave men dead what can
never live again--its scandalous, I say."

This at the outset. But afterwards, when the papers had duly explained
that the Germans were mere barbarians and savages, bent on reducing the
whole world to military slavery, they began to take sides and feel there
was good cause for fighting. Meanwhile almost exactly the same thing was
happening in Germany, where England was being represented as a greedy
and deceitful Power, trying to boss and crush all the other nations.
Thus each nation did what was perhaps, from its own point of view, the
most sensible thing to do--persuaded itself that it was fighting in a
just and heroic cause, that it was a St. George against the Dragon, a
David out to slay Goliath.

The attitude of the peasant, however, or agriculturist, all over the
world, is the same. He does not deal in romantic talk about St. George
and the Dragon. He sees too clearly the downright facts of life. He has
no interest in fighting, and he does not want to fight. Being the one
honest man in the community--the one man who creates, not only his own
food but the food of others besides, and who knows the value of his
work, he perceives without illusion the foolery of War, the hideous
waste of it, the shocking toll of agony and loss which it inflicts--and
if left to himself would as a rule have no hand in it. It is only
occasionally--when ground down beyond endurance by the rent-racking
classes above him, or threatened beyond en