ind her out_. But that does not matter. What matters
for us, in our generation, is that we improve our knowledge and use
it to make ourselves _comparatively_ wiser--comparatively, that is,
with our old selves as well as with our enemies. 'Knowledge,' they
say, 'is power'; which, if it mean anything, must mean that A, by
knowing a little more than B, has made himself, to that extent, more
powerful than B.

"Now by saying that the way of all the sciences is one, I mean just
this: that the true process of each is to refer effects to their real
causes, not to false ones, and in the search to separate what is
relevant from what is irrelevant and--so far as we can discover--
quite accidental. For example, when a pestilence such as typhoid
fever broke out in Polpier five or six hundred years ago, your
forefathers attributed it to the wrath of God visiting them for their
sins: and to be sure it is good that men, under calamity, should
reflect on their sins, but only because it is good for them to
reflect on their sins at all times and under any circumstance.
Nowadays you would have your well-water analysed and ask what the
Sanitary Inspector had been about. Or, again, if a fire were to
devastate our little town, we should not smite our breasts in the
manner of those same forefathers, and attribute it to what there is
amongst us of sloth and self-indulgence, to God's wrath upon our
drinking habits or our neglect of Sunday observance: we should trace
it to a foul chimney and translate our discovery into a Bye-law,
maybe into a local Fire Brigade. That is how men improve their
knowledge, and, through their knowledge, their wellbeing--by sifting
out what is relevant.

"Do you suppose that irrelevances account for this war any more than
they account for a fire or a pestilence; or that they will any more
help us to grapple with it? Truly it would seem so," sighed Mr
Hambly. "A great deal of fervid stuff was uttered in England last
Sunday by archbishops, bishops, presidents of this and that Free
Church; and the 'religious newspapers' have been full of these
utterances. God forgive my presumption that, as I walk the streets
of Polpier, I seem to hear all these popular men preaching with
acceptance about nothing in particular!

"They all start by denouncing or deploring Germany's obvious sins:
her exaltation of Might against Right, her lust of world-dominion,
the ruthlessness of her foreign policy, the vainglorious boasting