he attack on the police station at Epsom, the destruction
of the town hall at Luton, revealed a brutality of passion, a murderous
instinct, which have been manifested again and again in other riots and
street rows and solitary crimes. Those last are the worst because they
are not inspired by a sense of injustice, however false, or any mob
passion, but by homicidal mania and secret lust. The many murders of
young women, the outrages upon little girls, the violent robberies
that have happened since the demobilizing of the armies have appalled
decent--minded people. They cannot understand the cause of this epidemic
after a period when there was less crime than usual.

The cause is easy to understand. It is caused by the discipline and
training of modern warfare. Our armies, as all armies, established an
intensive culture of brutality. They were schools of slaughter. It
was the duty of officers like Col. Ronald Campbell--"O.C. Bayonets" (a
delightful man)--to inspire blood-lust in the brains of gentle boys
who instinctively disliked butcher's work. By an ingenious system
of psychology he played upon their nature, calling out the primitive
barbarism which has been overlaid by civilized restraints, liberating
the brute which has been long chained up by law and the social code of
gentle life, but lurks always in the secret lairs of the human heart.
It is difficult when the brute has been unchained, for the purpose of
killing Germans, to get it into the collar again with a cry of, "Down,
dog, down!" Generals, as I have told, were against the "soft stuff"
preached by parsons, who were not quite militarized, though army
chaplains. They demanded the gospel of hate, not that of love. But
hate, when it dominates the psychology of men, is not restricted to one
objective, such as a body of men behind barbed wire. It is a spreading
poison. It envenoms the whole mind. Like jealousy.

It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

Our men, living in holes in the earth like ape-men, were taught the
ancient code of the jungle law, to track down human beasts in No Man's
Land, to jump upon their bodies in the trenches, to kill quickly,
silently, in a raid, to drop a hand-grenade down a dugout crowded with
men, blowing their bodies to bits, to lie patiently for hours in a
shell-hole for a sniping shot at any head which showed, to bludgeon
their enemy to death or spit him on a bit of steel, to get at his throat
if need b