razing. No arguments, protests,
proofs, or explanations are of any avail; and those that are advanced
are confused, contradictory, and unconvincing. Just as people quarrel
most violently over Politics and Religion, because, in fact, those are
the two subjects which no one really understands, so they quarrel in
Warfare, not really knowing _why_, but impelled by deep, inscrutable
forces. Spectators even and neutrals, for the same reason, take sides
and range themselves bitterly, if only in argument, against each other.

But Logic and Morals are of no use on these occasions. They are too
thin. They are only threads in a vast fabric. You extract a single
thread from the weaving of a carpet, and note its colour and its
concatenations, but that gives you no faintest idea of the pattern of
the carpet; and then you extract another, and another, but you are no
nearer the design. Logic and morals are similar threads in the great web
of life. You may follow them in various directions, but without
effective result. Life is so much greater than either; and War is a
volcanic manifestation of Life which gives them little or no heed.

There is a madness of nations, as well as of individual people. Every
one who has paid attention to the fluctuations of popular sentiment
knows how strange, how unaccountable, these are. They seem to suggest
the coming to the surface, from time to time, of hidden
waves--groundswells of some deep ocean. The temper, the temperament, the
character, the policy of a whole nation will change, and it is
difficult to see why. Sometimes a passion, a fury, a veritable mania,
quite unlike its ordinary self, will seize it. There is a madness of
peoples, which causes them for a while to hate each other with bitter
hatred, to fight furiously and wound and injure each other; and then lo!
a little while more and they are shaking hands and embracing and
swearing eternal friendship! What does it all mean?

It is all as mad and unreasonable as Love is--and that is saying a good
deal! In love, too, people desire to _hurt_ each other; they do not
hesitate to wound one another--wounding hearts, wounding bodies even,
and hating themselves even while they act so. What does it all mean? Are
they trying the one to reach the other _at all costs_--if not by
embraces, at least by injuries--each longing to make his or her
personality felt, to _impress_ himself or herself upon the other in such
wise as never again to be forgotten. So