it is the bellowers and gamblers at home and not the silent trench-fellows of death at the front that exercise most influence on national policy, it is to be feared that the former may prevail. Assuredly protest is a matter of obligation.
This is no argument, or faint-hearted appeal, for a premature or inconclusive peace. Truly the scourge of war is more terrible, more Apocalyptic in its horror, than even the most active imagination could have pictured. When the time comes to write down in every country a plain record of it, with its wounds and weariness, and flesh-stabbing, and bone-pulverising, and lunacies, and rats and lice and maggots, and all the crawling festerment of battle-fields, two landmarks in human progress will be reached. The world will for the first time understand the nobility, beyond all phrase, of soldiers, and it will understand also the foulness, beyond all phrase, of those who compel them into war. In these days God help the militarists! There will be no need to organise a peace movement; it will organise itself in all democratic countries, spontaneous and irresistible as a prime force of nature. It will still be necessary to arm against those who linger in the blood-mists of autocracy, just as civilised men provide against tigers and murderers and syphilis. But God help those who go preaching to mutilated veterans and stricken homes the gospel that war is a normal incident of the intercourse between nations, and an ennobling
