_But your Junkers, your Imperial court, your foolish vicious
Princes; what were such dreams to them?... With an envious
satisfaction they hurled all the accomplishment of Germany into the
fires of war...._

Section 8

_Your boy, as no doubt you know, dreamt constantly of such a world
peace as this that I foreshadow; he was more generous than his
country. He could envisage war and hostility only as
misunderstanding. He thought that a world that could explain itself
clearly would surely be at peace. He was scheming always therefore
for the perfection and propagation of Esperanto or Ido, or some such
universal link. My youngster too was full of a kindred and yet
larger dream, the dream of human science, which knows neither king
nor country nor race_....

_These boys, these hopes, this war has killed_....

That fragment ended so. Mr. Britling ceased to read for a time. "But has
it killed them?" he whispered....

"If you had lived, my dear, you and your England would have talked with
a younger Germany--better than I can ever do...."

He turned the pages back, and read here and there with an accumulating
discontent.

Section 9

"Dissertations," said Mr. Britling.

Never had it been so plain to Mr. Britling that he was a weak, silly,
ill-informed and hasty-minded writer, and never had he felt so
invincible a conviction that the Spirit of God was in him, and that it
fell to him to take some part in the establishment of a new order of
living upon the earth; it might be the most trivial part by the scale of
the task, but for him it was to be now his supreme concern. And it was
an almost intolerable grief to him that his services should be, for all
his desire, so poor in quality, so weak in conception. Always he seemed
to be on the verge of some illuminating and beautiful statement of his
cause; always he was finding his writing inadequate, a thin treachery to
the impulse of his heart, always he was finding his effort weak and
ineffective. In this instance, at the outset he seemed to see with a
golden clearness the message of brotherhood, or forgiveness, of a common
call. To whom could such a message be better addressed than to those
sorrowing parents; from whom could it come with a better effect than
from himself? And now he read what he had made of this message. It
seemed to his jaded mind a pitifully jaded effort. It had no light, it
had no depth. It was