it, and its old vitality struggling
against disease, and its old sanity against insanity. Our Empire is
greater now in spaciousness than ever before, but our strength to hold
it has ebbed low because of much death, and a strain too long endured,
and strangling debts. The workman is tired and has slackened in his
work. In his scheme of life he desires more luxury than our
poverty affords. He wants higher wages, shorter hours, and less
output--reasonable desires in our state before the war, unreasonable now
because the cost of the war has put them beyond human possibility. He
wants low prices with high wages and less work. It is false arithmetic
and its falsity will be proved by a tremendous crash.

Some crash must come, tragic and shocking to our social structure. I
see no escape from that, and only the hope that in that crisis the very
shock of it will restore the mental balance of the nation and that
all classes will combine under leaders of unselfish purpose, and fine
vision, eager for evolution and not revolution, for peace and not for
blood, for Christian charity and not for hatred, for civilization and
not for anarchy, to reshape the conditions of our social life and give
us a new working order, with more equality of labor and reward, duty and
sacrifice, liberty and discipline of the soul, combining the virtue
of patriotism with a generous spirit to other peoples across the old
frontiers of hate. That is the hope but not the certainty.

It is only by that hope that one may look back upon the war with
anything but despair. All the lives of those boys whom I saw go marching
up the roads of France and Flanders to the fields of death, so splendid,
so lovely in their youth, will have been laid down in vain if by their
sacrifice the world is not uplifted to some plane a little higher
than the barbarity which was let loose in Europe. They will have been
betrayed if the agony they suffered is forgotten and "the war to end
war" leads to preparations for new, more monstrous conflict.

Or is war the law of human life? Is there something more powerful than
kaisers and castes which drives masses of men against other masses in
death-struggles which they do not understand? Are we really poor beasts
in the jungle, striving by tooth and claw, high velocity and poison-gas,
for the survival of the fittest in an endless conflict? If that is so,
then God mocks at us. Or, rather, if that is so, there is no God such as
we men may love