the Way Out," pp. 34 et seq._

* * * * *

A WAR NOTE FOR DEMOCRATS.

"The truth about the present fighting--well, it cannot be rendered in
words significant enough to shock into understanding the people who are
looking in the newspapers now for stories of heroism, 'brilliant bayonet
charges,' and the rest of the inducements which sell stories of warfare,
but tell us nothing about it. Perhaps, indeed, there are no words for
it. I doubt whether the sincerest artist, finely sensitive, and with the
choicest army of words at his ready and accurate command, could assemble
the case. The mind of a witness in France is not stirred; it is stunned.
One is speechless before the spectacle of men, not fighting in the way
two angry men would fight, but coolly blasting great masses of their
opponents to pieces at long range, and out of sight of each other, till
a region with its wrecked towns and homesteads is littered with human
bowels and fragments. It is possible to value human life too highly,
maybe. But what profit, physical, moral, or economic, can be got from
draining several nations' best male generative force into the clay, I
leave it to worshippers of tribal war-gods of whatever church, and to
the military minds, to explain. But unless the democracies of Europe,
after settling this business, see to securing such a settlement
--whatever the governing classes desire--that this Continental
waste can never occur again, then one would have to admit human nature
is too stupid and base to be troubled over any longer."--_H.M.
Tomlinson, "English Review," December, 1914, p. 75_.

* * * * *

PATRIOTISM!

"It would seem, then, that love of our country can flourish only through
the hatred of other countries, and the massacre of those who sacrifice
themselves in defence of them. There is in this theory a ferocious
absurdity, a Neronian dilettantism which repels me in the very depths of
my being. No! Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and
slay those noble and faithful souls who also love their country, but
rather that I should honour them, and seek to unite myself with them for
our common good....

"You Socialists on both sides claim to be defending liberty against
tyranny--French liberty against the Kaiser, Germany liberty against the
Tsar. Would you defend one despotism against another? _Unite and make
war on both_. There was no reason for war bet