them. The world had become too common-sense to commit
murder on so vast a scale.

Had it? The world in general might have: but Germany had not. The
argument of _The Human Slaughter-House_ proposed by a German in
protest against what he foresaw was surely coming, turned out to be a
bad guess. It made no allowance for what happens when a mad dog starts
running through the world. One may be tender-hearted. One may not like
killing dogs. One may even be an anti-vivisectionist; but when a dog
is mad, the only humanitarian thing to do is to kill it. If you don't,
the women and children pay the penalty.

We have had our illustration in Russia of what occurs when one side
flings away its arms, practising the idealistic reasonings which this
book propounds: the more brutal side conquers. While the Blonde Beast
runs abroad spreading rabies, the only idealist who counts is the
idealist who carries a rifle on his shoulder--the only gospel to which
the world listens is the gospel which saviours are dying for.

The last war! It took us all by surprise. We had believed so utterly
in peace; now we had to prove our faith by being prepared to die for
it. If we did not die, this war would not be the last; it would be
only the preface to the next. To paraphrase the words of Mr. Wells,
"We had been prepared to take life in a certain way and life had taken
us, as it takes every generation, in an entirely different way. We had
been prepared to be altruistic pacifists, and ..."

And here we are, in this year of 1918, engaged upon the bloodiest war
of all time, harnessing the muscle and brain-power of the universe
to one end--that we may contrive new and yet more deadly methods
of butchering our fellow men. The men whom we kill, we do not hate
individually. The men whom we kill, we do not see when they are dead.
We scald them with liquid fire; we stifle them with gas; we drop
volcanoes on them from the clouds; we pull firing-levers three, ten,
even fifteen miles away and hurl them into eternity unconfessed. And
this we do with pity in our hearts, both for them and for ourselves.
And why? Because they have given us no choice. They have promised,
unless we defend ourselves, to snatch our souls from us and fashion
them afresh into souls which shall bear the stamp of their own image.
Of their souls we have seen samples; they date back to the dark
ages--the souls of Cain, Judas and Caesar Borgia were not unlike them.
Of what such souls are capa