er and
more enduring than their causes of difference. It would be a happy thing
if the nations of the world made such a community; and the sufferings of
this War have brought them nearer to desiring it. But those who believe
that such a community can be formed to-day or to-morrow are too
sanguine. It must not be forgotten that the very principle of the
League, if its judgements are to take effect, involves a world-war in
cases where a strong minority resists those judgements. Every war would
become a world-war. Perhaps this very fact would prevent wars, but it
cannot be said that experience favours such a conclusion.

There is no escape for us by way of the Gospels. The Gospel precept to
turn the other cheek to the aggressor was not addressed to a meeting of
trustees. Christianity has never shirked war, or even much disliked it.
Where the whole soul is set on things unseen, wounds and death become of
less account. And if the Christians have not helped us to avoid war, how
should the pacifists be of use? Those of them whom I happen to know, or
to have met, have shown themselves, in the relations of civil life, to
be irritable, self-willed, combative creatures, where the average
soldier is calm, unselfish, and placable. There is something incongruous
and absurd in the pacifist of British descent. He has fighting in his
blood, and when his creed, or his nervous sensibility to physical
horrors, denies him the use of fighting, his blood turns sour. He can
argue, and object, and criticize, but he cannot lead. All that he can
offer us in effect is eternal quarrels in place of occasional fights.

No one can do anything to prevent war who does not recognize its
splendour, for it is by its splendour that it keeps its hold on
humanity, and persists. The wickedest and most selfish war in the world
is not fought by wicked and selfish soldiers. The spirit of man is
immense, and for an old memory, a pledged word, a sense of fellowship,
offers this frail and complicated tissue of flesh and blood, which a pin
or a grain of sand will disorder, to be the victim of all the atrocities
that the wit of man can compound out of fire and steel and poison. If
that spirit is to be changed, or directed into new courses, it must be
by one who understands it, and approaches it reverently, with bared
head.

The best hope seems to me to lie in paying chief attention to the
improvement of war rather than to its abolition; to the decencies of the
craf