successful writers on war. They, like Ruskin, made their appeal to that
type of mind which obtains a real satisfaction, a sensuous pleasure, from
contemplating the unseen sufferings of the young and vicarious victim
sobbing, and feeling noble and enduring.

XXIV. The Reward of Virtue

MAY 9, 1919. The Treaty of Peace is published. Compared with what the
innocent in 1915 called the "objects of the War," this treaty is as the
aims of Captain Morgan's ruffians to those of the Twelve Apostles. The
truth is, some time ago the Versailles drama fell to the level of an
overworked newspaper story which shrewd editors saw was past its day.
Those headlines, Humiliate the Hun, Hang the Kaiser, and Make Germany
Pay, had become no more interesting than a copy of last week's _Morning
Mischief_ in a horse-pond. The subject was old and wet. Because five
months ago we thoughtfully elected men of the counting-house to the work
of governing the State, of late we have been too indignant over the cost
and difficulty of living to spare a thought for the beauty of Peace; that
is why we are now examining the clauses of the famous Treaty with about
as much care for what they may mean to us as if they concerned the
movements of the Asteroids. A year ago the German attacks seemed near to
making guns the deciding voice in the affairs of unhappy humanity. On the
chill and overcast spring morning when the Treaty was published, it was
significant that those very few men to whom we could go for courage a
year ago were the only people dismayed by the terms of the Peace Treaty.
And the timid, who once went to those stout hearts for assurance--to
have, as the soldiers used to say, their cold feet massaged--were the
bright and cheerful souls. It was ominous. Yet those careless and happy
hearts are not so trying to me as the amiable but otherwise sensible men
who were sure our statesmen would not betray the dead, and who are
incredulous over the Treaty now they see what it clearly intends to
convey. They cannot believe that the War, which they thought began as a
war of liberation, a struggle of Europe to free itself from the
intolerable bonds of its past, continues in the Peace Treaty as a force
malignantly deflected to the support of the very evils out of which
August, 1914, arose. Then did they imagine the well-meaning leopard would
oblige by changing his spots if spoken to kindly while he was eating the
baby?

XXV. Great Statesmen

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