till stands in broken loveliness, and the Tiber still rolls its tawny
waters heavily through Rome; but Rome and Athens are to-day but places
of departed spirits; they are no longer the seats of life, their broken
hearts are petrified. All men may see the ports through which the
blood flowed to the throbbing centre, the traces of the mighty arteries
through which it was driven to the ends of the earth. But the blood is
dried up, the hearts are broken, and though in their stony ruins those
dead world-hearts be grander and more enduring than any which in our
time are whole and beating, yet neither their endurance nor their
grandeur have saved them from man, the destroyer, nor was the beauty
of their thoughts or the thoughtfully-devised machinery of their
civilisation a shield against a few score thousand rough-hammered
blades, wielded by rough-hewn mortals who recked neither of intellect
nor of civilisation, nor yet of beauty, being but very human men, full
of terribly strong and human passions. Look where you will, throughout
the length and breadth of all that was the world five thousand, or five
hundred years ago; everywhere passion has swept thought before it, and
belief, reason. And we, too, with our reason and our thoughts, shall be
swept from existence and the memory of it. Is this the age of reason,
and is this the reign of law? In the midst of this civilisation of ours
three millions of men lie down nightly by their arms, men trained to
handle rifle and sword, taught to destroy and to do nothing else; and
nearly as many more wait but a summons to leave their homes and join the
ranks. And often it is said that we are on the eve of a universal war.
At the command of a few individuals, at the touch of a few wires, more
than five millions of men in the very prime and glory of strength,
armed as men never were armed since time began, will arise and will kill
civilisation and thought, as both the one and the other have been slain
before by fewer hands and less deadly weapons. Is this reason, or is
this law? Passion rules the world, and rules alone. And passion is
neither of the head, nor of the hand, but of the heart. Passion cares
nothing for the mind. Love, hate, ambition, anger, avarice, either
make a slave of intelligence to serve their impulses, or break down its
impotent opposition with the unanswerable argument of brute force, and
tear it to pieces with iron hands.

Love is the first, the greatest, the gentlest, th