d of a people--does it remain the same people?
Does war in its hands remain an instrument that can be justly used? Can it
be waged justly? Can it be won justly? Can it, having been won, make to a
just peace? No! Something happens: there comes a change; war in a people's
mind drives justice out.... Can soldiers fight without "seeing red"--can a
nation? Not when nations have to fight on the tremendous scale of modern
war. Then they are like those monstrous mechanisms of long-range
destructiveness, which we so falsely call "weapons of precision," but
which are in fact so horribly unprecise that, once let loose, we cannot
know what lives of harmlessness, of innocence, of virtue, they are going
to destroy. You find your range, you fix your elevation, you touch a
button: you hear your gun go off. And over there, among the unarmed--the
weak, the defenceless, the infirm--it has done--what? Singled out for
destruction what life or lives; ten, twenty, a hundred?--you do not know.
So with nations, when once they have gone to war; their imprecision
becomes--horrible; though the cause of your war may be just.

(_Tumulty gives a profound nod, paying his chief the compliment of
letting it be seen that he is causing him to think deeply_.)

That's what happened here. Do you remember, did you realise, Tumulty, what
a power my voice was in the world--till we went in?--that, because I had
the power to keep them back from war (for there my constitutional
prerogative was absolute), even my opponents had to give weight to my
words. They were angry, impatient, but they had to obey. And, because they
could not help themselves, they accepted point by point my building up of
the justice of our cause. They didn't care for justice; but I spoke for
the Nation then; and, with justice as my one end, I drove home my point.
And then--we went in. After that, justice became vengeance. When our men
went over the trenches, fighting with short arms, "_Lusitania!_" was
their cry: and they took few prisoners--you know that, Tumulty.

(_Over that point the Ex-President pauses, though Tumulty sees no
special reason why he should pause._)

The _Lusitania_ had been sunk, and still we had not gone to war, and
no crowds came to cry it madly outside the White House as they might have
done--if that was how they felt then. The _Lusitania_ lies at the
bottom of the sea. There are proposals for salving her; but I think that
there she will remain. The salving might tell