composing it.  To make majority-rule possible you must have a community made up of members who are reasonably well informed upon one another’s affairs, and who are bound together by a tie of loyalty stronger and more enduring than their causes of difference.  It would be a happy thing if the nations of the world made such a community; and the sufferings of this War have brought them nearer to desiring it.  But those who believe that such a community can be formed to-day or to-morrow are too sanguine.  It must not be forgotten that the very principle of the League, if its judgements are to take effect, involves a world-war in cases where a strong minority resists those judgements.  Every war would become a world-war.  Perhaps this very fact would prevent wars, but it cannot be said that experience favours such a conclusion.

There is no escape for us by way of the Gospels.  The Gospel precept to turn the other cheek to the aggressor was not addressed to a meeting of trustees.  Christianity has never shirked war, or even much disliked it.  Where the whole soul is set on things unseen, wounds and death become of less account.  And if the Christians have not helped us to avoid war, how should the pacifists be of use?  Those of them whom I happen to know, or to have met, have shown themselves, in the relations of civil life, to be irritable, self-willed, combative creatures, where the average soldier is calm, unselfish, and placable.  There is something incongruous and absurd in the pacifist of British descent.  He has fighting in his blood, and when his creed, or his nervous sensibility to physical horrors, denies him the use of fighting, his blood turns sour.  He can argue, and object, and criticize, but he cannot lead.  All that he can offer us in effect is eternal quarrels in place of occasional fights.

No one can do anything to prevent war who does not recognize its splendour, for it is by its splendour that it keeps its hold on humanity, and persists.  The wickedest and most selfish war in the world is not fought by wicked and selfish soldiers.  The spirit of man is immense, and for an old memory, a pledged word, a sense of fellowship, offers this frail and complicated tissue of flesh and blood, which a pin or a grain of sand will disorder, to be the victim of all the atrocities that the wit of man can compound out of fire and steel and poison.  If that spirit is to be changed, or directed into new courses, it must be by one who understands it, and approaches it reverently, with bared head.

The best hope seems to me to lie in paying chief attention to the improvement of war rather than to its abolition; to the decencies of the craft; to the style rather than the matter.  Style is often more important than matter, and this War would not have been so fierce or so prolonged if it had not become largely a war on a point of style, a war, that is to say, to determine the question how war should be waged.  If the Germans had behaved humanely and considerately to the civil population of Belgium, if they had kept their solemn promise not to use poison-gas, if they had refrained from murder at sea, if their valour had been accompanied by chivalry, the War might now have been ended, perhaps not in their disfavour, for it would not have been felt, as it now is felt, that they must be defeated at no matter how great a cost, or civilization will perish.