lts. This is the course adopted
by the valiant Englishmen of the Independent Labour Party and of the
Union of Democratic Control, and by those fine men of untrammelled mind
Bertrand Russell, E. D. Morel, Norman Angell, Bernard Shaw; this is the
path taken by certain persecuted Germans, too few in number; this is the
path taken by the Italian socialists, by the Russian socialists, by
Gorki, the master of Sorrow and of Pity; and this is the path taken by
certain free Frenchmen.

My own task is different, for it is to remind the hostile brethren of
Europe, not of their worst aspects but of their best, to recall to them
reasons for hoping that there will one day be a wiser and more loving
humanity.

What we now have to contemplate may, indeed, well incline us to despair
of human reason. For those, and they were many, who were blissfully
slumbering upon their faith in progress, a progress from which there was
to be no looking back, the awakening has been rude. Without transition,
such persons have passed from the absurd excesses of slothful optimism
to the vertigo of unplumbed pessimism. They are not used to looking at
life except from behind a parapet. A barrier of comfortable illusions
has hidden from them, hitherto, the chasm above which, clinging to the
face of the precipice, winds the narrow path along which man is
marching. Here and there the wall has crumbled. The footing is
treacherous. But we must pass, nevertheless. We shall pass. Our fathers
had to make their way across many such places. We have been too ready to
forget. Save for a few shocks, the years of our own lives have been
spent in a sheltered age. But in the past, epochs of disturbance have
been commoner than epochs of calm. What is taking place to-day is
horribly abnormal for those alone who were drowsing in the abnormal
peace of a society equally devoid of foresight and of remembrance. Let
us call to mind those whom the past has known. Let us think of Buddha,
the liberator; of the Orphics worshipping Dionysos-Zagreus, god of the
innocent who suffer and will be avenged; of Xenophanes of Elea who had
to witness the devastation of his fatherland by Cyrus; of Zeno tortured;
of Socrates put to death by poison; of Plato dreaming during the rule of
the Thirty Tyrants; of Marcus Aurelius, sustaining the empire whose
decline was at hand. Let us think of those who watched the ruin of the
old world; of the bishop of Hippo dying when his city was about to fall
bef