e are the reasons we haven't made our democracy
impress the world more.

A democracy is not a quick-trigger war-engine and can't be made
into one. When the quick-trigger engines get to work, they forget
that a democracy does not consider fighting the first duty of man.
You can bend your energies to peaceful pursuits or you can bend
them to war. It's hard to do both at the same time. The Germans are
the only people who have done both at the same time; and even they
didn't get their navy big enough for their needs.

When the infernal thing's over--that'll be a glad day; and the
European world won't really know what it has cost in men and money
and loss of standards till it is over....

Affectionately,

W.H.P.

_To Walter H. Page, Jr._[32].

London, Christmas, 1915.

SIR:

For your first Christmas, I have the honour to send you my most
affectionate greetings; and in wishing you all good health, I take
the liberty humbly to indicate some of the favours of fortune that
I am pleased to think I enjoy in common with you.

_First_--I hear with pleasure that you are quite well content with
yourself--not because of a reasoned conviction of your own worth,
which would be mere vanity and unworthy of you, but by reason of a
philosophical disposition. It is too early for you to bother over
problems of self-improvement--as for me it is too late; wherefore
we are alike in the calm of our self-content. What others may think
or say about us is a subject of the smallest concern to us.
Therefore they generally speak well of us; for there is little
satisfaction in speaking ill of men who care nothing for your
opinion of them. Then, too, we are content to be where we happen to
be--a fact that we did not order in the beginning and need not now
concern ourselves about. Consider the eternal coming and going of
folk. On every road many are travelling one way and an equal number
are travelling the other way. It is obvious that, if they were all
content to remain at the places whence they set forth, the
distribution of the population would be the same. Why therefore
move hither and yon at the cost of much time and labour and money,
since nothing is accomplished thereby? We spare ourselves by being
content to remain where we are. We thereby have