or fall. The State,
organized as absolute power, responsible to no one, with no duties to
its neighbour, and with only nominal duties to a strictly subordinate
God, has challenged the soul of man in its dearest possessions. We
cannot predict the course of military operations; but if we were not
sure of the ultimate issue of this great struggle, we should have no
sufficient motive for continuing to breathe. The State has challenged
the soul of man before now, and has always been defeated. A miserable
remnant of men and women, tied to stakes or starved in dungeons, have
before now shattered what seemed an omnipotent tyranny, because they
stood for the soul and were not prompted by vanity or self-regard. They
had great allies--

'Their friends were exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.'

If we are defeated we shall be defeated not by German strength but by
our own weakness. The worst enemy of the martyr is doubt and the divided
mind, which suggests the question, 'Is it, after all, worth while?' We
must know what we have believed. What do we stand for in this war? It is
only the immovable conviction that we stand for something ultimate and
essential that can help us and carry us through. No war of this kind and
on this scale is good enough to fight unless it is good enough to fail
in. 'The calculation of profit', said Burke,'in all such wars is false.
On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogs-heads of sugar
are purchased at ten thousand times their price. The blood of man should
never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our
family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The
rest is vanity; the rest is crime.'

The question I have asked is a difficult question to answer, or, rather,
the answer is not easy to formulate briefly and clearly. Most of the men
at the front know quite well what they are fighting for; they know that
it is for their country, but that it is also for their kind--for certain
ideals of humanity. We at home know that we are at war for liberty and
humanity. But these words are invoked by different nations in different
senses; the Germans, or at least most of them, have as much liberty as
they desire, and believe that the highest good of humanity is to be
found in the prevalence of their own ideas and of their own type of
government and society. No abstract demonstration can help us. Liberty
is a highly compara