as a great light of
brotherhood shining within them, even amid the clouds of race-enmity and
ignorance, and will deny once for all the gospel of world-empire and
conquest which has so long been foisted on them for insidiously selfish
ends.

An empire based on brotherhood--a holy _human_ empire of the World,
including all races and colours in a common unity and equality--yes! But
these shoddy empires based on militarism and commercialism, and built up
in order to secure the unclean ascendancy of two outworn and effete
classes over the rest of mankind--a thousand times no! That
dispensation, thank Heaven! is past. "These fatuous empires with their
parade of power and their absolute lack of any real policy--this British
Lion, this Russian Bear, these German, French, and American
Eagles--these birds and beasts of prey--with their barbaric notions of
Greed and War, their impossible armaments, and their swift financial
ruin impending--will fall and be rent asunder. The hollow masks of them
will perish. And the sooner the better. But underneath surely there will
be rejoicing, for it will be found that so after all the real peoples of
the earth have come one degree nearer together--yes, one degree nearer
together."

FOOTNOTES:

[22] In Servia, for instance, which many folk doubtless regard as a
benighted country, more than four-fifths of the people are peasant
farmers and cultivate lands belonging to their own families. "These
holdings cannot be sold or mortgaged entire; the law forbids the
alienation for debt of a peasant's cottage, his garden or courtyard, his
plough, the last few acres of his land, and the cattle necessary for
working his farm." [Encycl. Brit.] In 1910 there were altogether _five
hundred_ agricultural co-operative societies in Servia.

IX

CONSCRIPTION

_December_, 1914.

While protesting, as I have already done, against forced military
service, it must still be admitted that the argument in favour of it
retains a certain validity: to the extent, namely, that every one owes a
duty of some kind to his own people, that it is mean to accept all the
advantages of citizenship--security, protection, settled conditions of
life, and so forth--and still to refuse to make sacrifice for one's
country in a time of distress or danger. It is difficult of course for
any one to trace all the threads and fibres which have worked themselves
into his life from his own homeland--as it is difficult for a child