rk to a standard of
inevitable evil instead of to the ideal of life more abundant. I can
answer for at least one person who found the change from the wisdom of
Jesus and St. Francis to the morals of Richard III and the madness of
Don Quixote extremely irksome. But that change had to be made; and we
are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really a
change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy.

Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight,
and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable
loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on
destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind
might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors
away from their natural work for four critical years. Not only were
Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but many of the best
harvests of the survivors had to be sown in the barren soil of the
trenches. And this was no mere British consideration. To the truly
civilized man, to the good European, the slaughter of the German youth
was as disastrous as the slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in
"German losses." They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting in the
death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!

Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel

But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a
frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at bottom
an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths and not stage
ones. Again and again, when an air raider dropped a bomb which tore a
child and its mother limb from limb, the people who saw it, though they
had been reading with great cheerfulness of thousands of such happenings
day after day in their newspapers, suddenly burst into furious
imprecations on "the Huns" as murderers, and shrieked for savage and
satisfying vengeance. At such moments it became clear that the deaths
they had not seen meant no more to them than the mimic death of the
cinema screen. Sometimes it was not necessary that death should be
actually witnessed: it had only to take place under circumstances
of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it home almost as
sensationally and effectively as if it had been actually visible.

For example, in the spring of 1915 there was an appalling slaughter of
our young soldiers at Neuve Chapelle and at the Gallipoli landing. I
will not g