universe, blood and fire and clouds and an eternal crash, rolling
ruin enveloping all things--well, all that's come. There are,
perhaps, ten million men dead of this war and, perhaps, one hundred
million persons to whom death would be a blessing. Add to these as
many millions more whose views of life are so distorted that blank
idiocy would be a better mental outlook, and you'll get a hint (and
only a hint) of what the continent has already become--a bankrupt
slaughter-house inhabited by unmated women. We have talked of
"problems" in our day. We never had a problem; for the worst task
we ever saw was a mere blithe pastime compared with what these
women and the few men that will remain here must face. The hills
about Verdun are not blown to pieces worse than the whole social
structure and intellectual and spiritual life of Europe. I wonder
that anybody is sane.

Now we have swung into a period and a state of mind wherein all
this seems normal. A lady said to me at a dinner party (think of a
dinner party at all!), "Oh, how I shall miss the war when it ends!
Life without it will surely be dull and tame. What can we talk
about? Will the old subjects ever interest us again?" I said,
"Let's you and me try and see." So we talked about books--not war
books--old country houses that we both knew, gardens and gold and
what not; and in fifteen minutes we swung back to the war before we
were aware.

I get out of it, as the days rush by, certain fundamental
convictions, which seem to me not only true--true beyond any
possible cavil--truer than any other political things are true--and
far more important than any other contemporary facts whatsoever in
any branch of endeavour, but better worth while than anything else
that men now living may try to further:

1. The cure for democracy is more democracy. The danger to the
world lies in autocrats and autocracies and privileged classes; and
these things have everywhere been dangerous and always will be.
There's no security in any part of the world where people cannot
think of a government without a king, and there never will be. You
cannot conceive of a democracy that will unprovoked set out on a
career of conquest. If all our religious missionary zeal and cash
could be turned into convincing Europe of this simp