VIII.  Lierre

When, years hence, some historian looks back upon the present war, and from the confusion of its battles tries to frame before his mind a picture of the whole, one grim conclusion will be forced upon his mind.  He will note, perhaps, vast alterations in the map of Europe; he will lament a loss of life such as only the hand of Heaven has dealt before; he will point to the folly of the wealth destroyed.  But beneath all these he will hear one insistent note from which he cannot escape, the deep keynote of the whole, the note on which the war was based, the secret of its ghastly chords, and the foundation of its dark conclusion.  And he will write that in the year 1914 one of the great nations of civilized Europe relapsed into barbarism.

In the large sense a nation becomes civilized as its members recognize the advantages of sinking their personal desires and gain in the general good of the State.  The fact that an individual can read and write and play the piano has nothing at all to do with the degree of his civilization, an elementary axiom of which some of our rulers seem strangely ignorant.  To be of use to the State, and to train others to be of use to the State (and not only of use to themselves), should be, and indeed is, the aim of every truly civilized man.  Unless it be so, his civilization is a mere veneer, ready to wear off at the first rub, and he himself a parasite upon the civilized world.

As time has gone on, the State has laid down certain rules by means of which the men who formed it could serve it better, and these are our laws which we obey not for our own good directly, but for the good of the State.  From the point of view of the plain man in the street, it is all utterly illogical, for it would be logical to go and take from your neighbour whatever you wished, so long as you were strong enough to hold it.  But, let us thank Heaven, no sane man is logical, and only a Professor would dare to make the claim.  It is one of the prerogatives of his office, and should be treated with tolerance.

And as our views of life are small and limited by our surroundings, when States grew large they took from the shoulders of the individual his responsibilities in the great State which the world has now become; and the States of which the world was composed agreed together on certain rules which should control their relations to one another, not for the good of each, but for the good of the greater State of which they were members.  They are not so accurately laid down as the laws of our separate States, but they are broad, general principles for the use of statesmen and not of legalists.  They are the Charter of Civilization among the nations of the world, and the nation which disregards them does so at her peril, and has handed in the abnegation of her position as a civilized State.  Like the laws of each State, they are utterly illogical—­at least, to those who have made up their minds that they are strong enough to hold what they can take from their neighbours.