led to hold their heads high among their European brethren;
for more than any other writer the great Norwegian recluse has stamped
with his seal both the drama and modern thought. The eyes of Young
France turned towards him; the writer of these lines asked counsel of
him.

All the nations are debtors one to another. Let us pool our debts and
our possessions.

If there are any to-day for whom modesty is befitting, it is the
intellectuals. The part they have played in this war has been
abominable, unpardonable. Not merely did they do nothing to lessen the
mutual lack of understanding, to limit the spread of hatred; with rare
exceptions, they did everything in their power to disseminate hatred and
to envenom it. To a considerable extent, this war was their war.
Thousands of brains were poisoned by their murderous ideologies.
Overweeningly self-confident, proud, implacable, they sacrificed
millions of young lives to the triumph of the phantoms of their
imagination. History will not forget.

Gerhard Gran expresses the fear that personal cooperation between
intellectuals of the belligerent lands may prove impossible for many
years. If he is thinking of the generation of those who are over fifty,
of those who stayed at home and waged a war of words in the learned
societies, the universities, and the editorial offices, I fancy that the
Norwegian writer is not mistaken. There is little chance that these
intellectuals will ever join hands. I should say that none of them will
do so, were I not familiar with the brain's astounding faculty for
forgetting, were I not familiar with this pitiful and yet salutary
weakness, by which the mind is not deceived, but which is essential to
its continued existence. But in the present case, oblivion will be
difficult. The intellectuals have burned their boats. At the outset of
the war it was still possible to hope that some of those who had been
carried away by the blind passion of the opening days, would be able
within a few months frankly to admit their mistake. They would not do
so. Not one of them has done so on either side of the frontier. It was
even possible to note that in proportion as the disastrous consequences
to European civilisation became apparent, those whose mission it was to
act as guardians of that civilisation, those upon whose shoulders part
of the responsibility weighed, instead of admitting their mistake, did
all they could to increase their own infatuation. How, then,