et (and
many of them exceedingly lingering and painful) continue at the rate of
rather more than one every second--say 90,000 a day. The worst battles
cannot touch such a wholesale slaughter as this. Life at its normal best
is full of agonizings and endless toil and sufferings; what matters,
what _it is really there for_, is that we should learn to conduct it
with Dignity, Courage, Goodwill--to transmute its dross into gold. If
war _has_ to continue yet for a time, there is still plenty of evidence
to show that we can wrest--even from its horrors and insanities--some
things that are "worth while," and among others the priceless jewel of
human love and helpfulness.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Some people take great pleasure in analysing White Books and Grey
Books and Orange Books and Yellow Books without end, and proving this or
that from them--as of course out of such a mass of material they can
easily do, according to their fancy. But when one remembers that almost
all the documents in these books have been written with a _view_ to
their later publication; and when one remembers also that, however
incompetent diplomatists as a class may be, no one supposes them to be
such fools as to entrust their _most_ important _ententes_ and
understandings with each other to printed records--why, one comes to the
conclusion that the analysis of all these State papers is not a very
profitable occupation.

II

WAR-MADNESS

_September_, 1914.

How mad, how hopelessly mad, it all seems I With fifteen to twenty
million soldiers already mobilized, and more than half that number in
the fighting lines; with engines of appalling destruction by land and
sea, and over the land and under the sea; with Northern France, Belgium,
and parts of Germany, Poland, Russia, Servia, and Austria drenched in
blood; the nations exhausting their human and material resources in
savage conflict--this war, marking the climax, and (let us hope) the
_finale_ of our commercial civilization, is the most monstrous the old
Earth has ever seen. And yet, as in a hundred earlier and lesser wars,
we hardly know the why and wherefore of it. It is like the sorriest
squabbles of children and schoolboys--utterly senseless and unreasoning.
But broken bodies and limbs and broken hearts and an endless river of
blood and suffering are the outcome.

III

THE ROOTS OF THE GREAT WAR[2]

_October_, 1914.

In the present chapter I wish especially to dwell on (1) t